The Myth of the Reasonable Man: Reconsidering the “Reasonable Man” standard in Indian Criminal Law

Introduction: The case of the Enraged man.

Imagine there exists a man named Kishore, a simple, hardworking and honest farmer residing in a rural Indian Village. He has a wife and two children, all of whom he cherishes very much, however his marriage has been strained due to his dubious assumptions of his wife’s infidelity. One summer afternoon, he returns home only to find his wife in close proximity to a man, Tushar, who was his longtime enemy. In a frenzy of anger, doubt and feelings of betrayal, Kishore grabbed a sickle and struck Tushar in his abdomen twice, causing death on the spot. He was arrested for murder under section 300 of the Indian Penal Code, IPC, (section 101 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhitan, BNS). The question here is:

Would a reasonable man of Kishore’s class, in his circumstance, considering his social and emotional background, have been so provoked as to lose self-control and land such a fatal blow?

This is almost precisely the fact pattern the Supreme Court confronted in K.M. Nanavati v. State of Maharashtra, AIR 1962 SC 605, the founding Indian authority on provocation. There, the Court held that the test of grave and sudden provocation is whether a reasonable man, belonging to the same class of society as the accused, placed in the situation in which the accused was placed, would be so provoked as to lose his self-control. That “class of society” qualifier is written into Exception 1 to Section 300 of the IPC itself, carried forward into Exception 1 to Section 101 of the BNS, which means Indian law has never applied a wholly undifferentiated reasonable man to provocation. The sharper question this piece asks, then, is not whether context matters at all, but how much of it the law is willing to absorb, and for which defense.

The Reasonable Man is a Privileged Man.

The "Reasonable Man" standard assumes a person with no prior history of abuse, judging the threat based only on the immediate moment. It looks for an "imminent" threat that a bystander would recognize. Further, it is argued by the supporters of this critique that the reasonable man standard is historically masculine. The standard fails to incorporate the ‘battered woman syndrome’ which is a critical aspect in self defense cases. A woman who suffers from battered woman syndrome (BWS) lives in a constant state of fear and imminent danger, where violence is cyclical. She may interpret a non-threatening action as a certain prelude to fatal assault, all based on her past experiences. Further, she may also act when the ‘batterer’ is incapacitated momentarily or is asleep, not because the danger is imminent to a third party, but because that is her only window to escape and save herself, without facing an overwhelming counter- attack.

Today, such a situation is not only applicable to BWS, but also to cases of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). To counter this critique, individuals have and may say that any reasonable person will leave such a toxic environment or relationship, however, cases of longstanding abuse which result in such mental disorders often involve a phenomenon - “learned helplessness”, where the victim starts believing that escape is impossible. They are often afraid to involve authorities either because they have no faith in them or because they believe that involving authorities will only escalate the violence and abuse they are facing. Albeit it is true that the act of self defense may seem excessive or disproportionate to a third person, for the victim it is the only way to secure their escape. Therefore, the reasonable person standard, though not entirely invalid, should be accommodative of these intricacies.

Some common law courts have taken steps to close this gap. Since State v. Kelly, 478 A.2d 364 (N.J. 1984), American courts have increasingly admitted expert testimony on BWS to explain why the accused’s perceptions and actions were reasonable for a person with her background, knowledge, and experience, and English courts moved in a similar direction following R v. Ahluwalia [1992] 4 All ER 889. Indian courts have not yet built a comparable body of jurisprudence: private defense pleas involving long-term abuse are still argued largely within the ordinary imminence requirement, without a settled framework for admitting psychological expert evidence on BWS or PTSD. That absence, more than any doctrinal hostility to context, is the real gap this piece is pointing at.

This evolution does not abandon the objective standard entirely, but rather contextualizes it. It asks: "Was the woman's belief in the necessity of her actions reasonable, given her situation and history of abuse?" instead of the purely abstract question. The goal is to ensure the law treats similarly situated people in a similar way, recognizing that a survivor of long-term abuse is not similarly situated to the abstract ‘Average Man’.

The Need for Subjective Context:

The most compelling modern critique of the ‘reasonable man standard’ is the failure to move beyond the abstract person to the specific circumstances of the case, particularly when these circumstances involve the accused person’s unique psychological state and history. Some common law jurisdictions have legislated this shift rather than leaving it to case law: the United Kingdom’s Coroners and Justice Act, 2009 abolished provocation and replaced it with a ‘loss of control’ defense that expressly directs courts to consider the defendant’s circumstances, and Canada’s 2013 reform of the Criminal Code’s self-defense provisions folded the accused’s personal history and perception of the threat into a single contextual test. India has made no equivalent legislative move; the BNS retains the same ‘class of society’ language its predecessor used, without extending it to psychological or trauma-based context.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, the legal system’s continuous debate over the reasonable man is a pursuit of universal fairness. By acknowledging the learned helplessness and the profound impact of trauma and social implications of the same on human behavior, the law tries to ensure that it “treats similarly situated people in a similar way”, and thereby making the reasonable man standard less about “who the reasonable man is” and more about whether the accused’s actions were comprehensible after considering his trauma, past and extraordinary set of circumstances.

Concretely, this means the BNS and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam should follow the UK and Canadian examples and expressly permit psychological expert evidence — on BWS, PTSD, or comparable trauma responses — to be led in provocation and private defense pleas, rather thanleaving judges to infer context from bare facts alone. The obvious objection is that this could excuse genuinely disproportionate violence; the answer is that expert evidence would inform the reasonable man test, not replace it, in the same way the “class of society” qualifier already informs it under Nanavati without dissolving the standard altogether.

The challenge remains to balance this contextualization with the necessity of holding individuals accountable.