PEAREY LAL Vs. NANAK CHAND

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THE suit in which this appeal arises was begun in June, 1938, in the Court of the Subordinate Judge in Delhi by the respondent, Nanak Chand, with whom his two sons were associated as plaintiffs, against his father, the appellant. THE respondent claimed that the family was a joint Hindu family governed by the Benares School of the Mitakshara, and prayed for a partition of a cycle business carried on at Delhi and Bombay, as he alleged, as a joint family business. : He said in his plaint that the appellant had turned him out of the business in September, 1936, and had not allowed him since then to take any part in it.

(2.) THERE is now no question that the family was a joint Hindu family.

(3.) IT is common ground that the appellant inherited nothing and that there was no nucleus of ancestral property from which the cycle business could have been developed. IT is also common ground that the cycle business was originally financed from the accumulated profits of a cloth, tailoring and drapery business also carried on in Delhi. The respondent claims that he was associated with the appellant in the cloth business from its commencement in the year 1904 and that he was also associated with the appellant in the cycle business from its modest origin as a repair shop about 1915 till he was turned out in the days of its prosperity in 1936. The appellant's case on the other hand is that he alone was concerned in the cloth business, which he built up from a humble beginning as a hawker of cloth, and that the respondent was in no way concerned with the cloth business at any stage of its development, but was while it lasted engaged in sundry ventures-of his own as a tailor in Delhi. IT is also the appellant's case that the respondent after the failure of another separate venture as a partner in an ironmonger's business in 1919-22, became a salaried employee in a position of no responsibility in the, appellant's cycle business in 1923, and that he left it in 1925 to become a partner in a rival cycle business, but that on the termination of this partnership in the same year he returned to the appellant's cycle business, again as a salaried employee. The respondent, it should be added, answers to this that the alleged separate business ventures and partnerships in which he engaged were all of them off-shoots or extensions of the joint family business