MANOHAR GANESH TAMBEKAR Vs. LAKHMIRAM GOVINDRAM

JUDGEMENT

(1.) At an early stage of the hearing of the present case we ruled that the defendants, the shevaks of the temple at Dakor, could not be allowed now to put in as evidence the account books which they had in the Court of first instance refused to produce. After succeeding in his resistance to the production of documents, a party cannot be allowed, when the hearing has been finished and when his adversary has perhaps been driven to establishing his case on a quite different footing, to turn round and request that the document may be admitted. The precedents cited do not warrant such an indulgence, and it would certainly tend to the encouragement of chicanery and the defeat of justice.

(2.) The plaintiffs come forward in the present case in the character of relators as persons interested in the religious foundation of the temple of Dakor dedicated to the deity called Shri Ranchhod Raiji. As persons interested in the maintenance of the institution and the due celebration of the worship, they pray that the Court will make the defendants, as recipients of the offerings at the idol's shrine, accountable, as trustees, for the right disposal of the property thus acquired. The income of the temple having, as they say, largely increased, and being wrongly or unduly appropriated by the defendants, called generally the shevaks (or ministers), to their personal purposes, they pray for the appointment of a receiver for the exaction from the defendants of accounts of their management, for the delivery up by them of all property appertaining to the temple, for an inquiry into their conduct as ministers of the idol, and for the construction of a scheme of future management.

(3.) The defendants take the position that they, as a body, are the owners, for all secular purposes, of the idol, whom, in the spiritual sense, they serve. The offerings made at the shrine, the cattle, and even the land presented by devotees are, they assert, their property free from any secular obligation, as none has ever in practice or in the intention of the donors been annexed to the gifts by which religious merit was sought and gained. They hold the property thus acquired, and have for centuries held it, as a sort of sacred guild, with hereditary succession to the several members. It is not held on any trust for the support of ceremonies or with any obligation annexed to it that can be enforced in a secular Court. The duty of providing a regular worship for the deity is of a purely moral kind, which they discharge merely to satisfy their consciences, one the nature and limits of which have never been settled otherwise than by their own will and judgment.