GOMATHI AMMAL Vs. S. ARUNACHALAM AND ORS.

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THE appellant Gomathi Ammal is the sister of Arunachalam and Sethuramalingam, the respondents 1 and 2. She filed a suit in O.S. No. 68 of 2007 for the relief of partition and separate possession of her share in the suit properties, claiming that she was entitled to 1/3 share. The appellant herein/plaintiff based her claim on the basis of the following pleadings made in her plaint: The suit properties were purchased by their father late Sankara Pattar and he died in the year 1953 leaving behind him his widow Maragathammal, daughter Gomathiammal (appellant herein/plaintiff) and sons viz., Arunachalam and Sethuramalingam, the respondents herein/defendants. All the four persons jointly enjoyed the properties left by late Sankara Pattar. While so, in the year 2004, Maragathammal, mother of the parties to the appeal died intestate, leaving behind the appellant and respondents as her legal representatives. After the death of their mother, the appellant and respondents 1 and 2 enjoyed the suit properties without partition. The circumstances that arose subsequently made the appellant to seek for the division of the properties and for giving her share to her. But the request was not heeded to by the respondents. Hence she was forced to approach this Court with the plaint for the relief of partition and separate possession.

(2.) IN the plaint, the appellant herein/plaintiff claimed that she was entitled to 1/3 share in the suit properties.

(3.) THE learned Trial Judge (Subordinate Judge, Sankaran Kovil), after trial, decreed the suit as prayed for and granted a preliminary decree directing division of the suit properties into three equal shares and allotment of one such share to the appellant/plaintiff. As against the preliminary decree dated 30.1.2009 passed by the Trial Court in O.S. No. 68 of 2007, the respondents herein/defendants preferred an appeal before the Principal District Judge, Tirunelveli (the lower Appellate Judge) in A.S. No. 25 of 2009. The learned Principal District Judge, Tirunelveli, after hearing the appeal, referring to the amendments made to the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 (both State and Central) and holding that the benefits of those amendments would not be available to the appellant herein/plaintiff and holding further that the appellant herein/plaintiff miserably failed to prove that the suit properties were the self -acquisitions of Sankara Pattar, allowed the appeal, set aside the decree passed by the Trial Court and dismissed the original suit filed by the appellant herein.