MOHAMMAD AZIM KHAN Vs. RAJA SAADAT ALI KHAN

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THIS appeal is brought from two decrees of December 22, 1930, made in the exercise of the Original jurisdiction conferred upon the Chief Court of Oudh by Section 7 of the Oudh Courts Act, 1925, an Act of the local legislature of the United Prolviinces of Agra and Oudh, By these decrees Nanavutty J. , as trial Judge, after a protracted hearing, dismissed two suits (numbered respectively 11 and 12 of 1928), which had been instituted on November 2, 1928. The two suits were tried together, and one judgment was given covering the issues in both. They came on for hearing on July 15, 1929. Evidence both oral and documentary was adduced in great quantity ; the hearing continued until August 2, 1929, when the case was postponed until February 13, 1930 ; thereafter the case was heard on a number of dates in February, March and April of that year. Sixteen issues in one case and fourteen in the other had been framed, and in a lengthy judgment the learned Judge considered and decided a number of important and difficult questions both of fact and of law.

(2.) SUIT No.11 was brought by sixteen persons, now appellants, and may be summarily described as brought to establish the right of plaintiff No.1 to the taluqdari estate of Nanpara, and the rights of some or all of the plaintiffs to certain non-talukdari propertyvillages, houses and moveablesin succession to Raja Mohammad Siddique Khan, who had died on December 30, 1907 (and who is herein referred to as the late Raja ). Defendant No.1 in that suit (now respondent No.1) was Raja Saadat Ali Khan; he was a son of the late Raja's sister, but he claimed to have been adopted by one of the late Raja's widows, Saltanat Begum, under the Oudh Estates Act (I of 1869) arid in accordance with the provisions of the late Raja's will, whereby he left successive life estates and power of adoption to each of his four widows in a certain order. In November, 1925, the Court of Wards had given possession of the Nanpara estate to this defendant. Defendant No.2, Mumtaz Ali Khan (who died in 1934 while these suits were pending), was Raja of Utraula (another taluqdari estate); he had married Mohammad Kaniz Begum, sister to the late Raja of Nanpara, and on her death in 1919 had come into) possession of some of the suit properties under a compromise made in 1910 which need not here be detailed. Defendant No.3 was Rani Qarnar Zamani Begum, who had been the first of five ladies whom the late Raja of Nanpara had married and who had been given a certain interest in his estate for her life by the compromise already mentioned.

(3.) IT is not necessary to set out in any fuller detail the circumstances or subject-matter of the litigation in order to make clear that it covered a wide area of disputed fact, and that unless the plaintiffs' claims could be dismissed on facts in limine, they involved a number of important legal questions both as regards the application to Muslims of the right of adoption conferred by the Oudh Estates, Act and other aspects of the law and custom of succession.