KUMARISETTI SURYAPRAKASA RAO Vs. KUMARISETTI VENKATA LAKSHMIDEVI

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This is an appeal against the judgment of our learned brother, Sanjeeva Row Nayudu, J., under Clause 15 of the Letters Patent.

(2.) The appellant is the husband and the respondent is his wife. The marriage between them took place on 26/02/1948. At that time, the respondent was a minor being about fourteen or fifteen years old, while the appellant was about twenty four years old. After the marriage, the respondent lived with her husband, the appellant, at Kakinada, Masulipatam etc., in which places he was working as a Sub-Inspector of Excise.On 5/03/1949, the respondents father took the respondent from her husands house with the latters consent to Tirupathi. After they performed the pilgrimage to Tirupathi, the respondent did not rejoin her husband. Instead, acrimonious correspondence followed subsequently between the respondents father and the appellant in regard to jewels presented to the respondent by the appellant and rendition of accounts of the income derived from the properties gifted to the respondent by her father.Throughout the correspondence from March 194 9/10/1949, while the appellant was insisting upon his wife being sent back with the jewels which he presented to her at the time of the marriage and the submission of a correct and proper account by the father of the income from the lands and the house which he gifted to the respondent, the respondents father was asserting that his daughter was being illtreated in his house, that the jewels were taken away from her at the time when she was taken to Tirupathi and that the appellant, the husband, should change his attitude towards his wife and create conditions in his home favourable for a happy life for both of them. The charges and counter-charges made by the appellant and his father-in-law were denied in the letters written by the one to the other.We may refer to the last letter written by the father-in-law to the appellant on 26/02/1950, Ex. B.6. It was there recited, inter alia, that the respondents father had clearly written to the addressee (the appellant) that the girl (respondent) was desirous of living with him provided he also desired such a thing and made it possible and that the very fact that the husband required his wife to go to him with the jewels of which he and his mother had already deprived her only showed his insincerity. The father-in-law also charged the son-in-law with his strange attitude in that he required his wife to give in writing as to whether she desired to live with him or not.

(3.) There was no reply to this and nothing further seems to have been done till 1951 when it is said that, at the request of the respondents father, D.W. 3, a retired Government servant, intervened to induce the appellant to take back his wife. But nothing seems to have come out of it and the respondent filed a suit for maintenance from her husband alleging cruelty and forcible deprivation of her jewels etc.