YESHVADABAI Vs. JANARDHAN RAGHUNATH WARIK

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The plaintiff is the wife of the defendant and she sues him to recover maintenance and also possession of certain stridhan ornaments or the value thereof. In the plaint one of the prayers is that the payment of such sum as the Court may fix for her maintenance may be secured by a charge on the defendant's interest in certain immoveable property in Bombay. The property admittedly is an ancestral house which now has come to the defendant and his brothers. But, on the other hand, the main facts which have given rise to this suit did not take place within the local limits of the ordinary original jurisdiction of this Court. The defendant, during the time material to the questions that arise in this suit, had his residence at Igatpuri, where be was employed in railway service, and he has deposed that he did not come to Bombay to live there permanently until after he left the railway service on June 15, 1922. He admits that he is now living in the ancestral house already referred to, but says that he did not do so before November 1922. The suit was filed on March 30, 1922; and in the absence of any evidence to contradict the defendant I am constrained to hold that at the date of the institution of the suit the defendant did not dwell in Bombay, within the meaning of Clause 12 of the Letters Patent.

(2.) The question of jurisdiction has been raised at the time of framing issues in this suit, and I have allowed the defendant to amend his written statement by inserting a new para 10A on this point of jurisdiction. Accordingly the issue, whether the Court has jurisdiction to try this suit, is one that must first be decided.

(3.) The cruelty relied upon by the plaintiff, the driving her out of the defendant's house, and other circumstances, on which her H claim to maintenance is based, all appear to have happened out, side Bombay, and therefore it cannot be said that any part of the cause of action has arisen within the local limits of the ordinary original jurisdiction of this Court, unless the fact that the defendant owns this property, which it is sought to charge with the maintenance which may be decreed, is one that forma part of the cause of action. A cause of action as defined in Read V/s. Brown (1888) 22 Q.B.D. 128,133-a definition generally followed-means "every fact which it would be necessary to prove, if traversed, in order to enable a plaintiff to sustain his action." Taking that definition more or less literally, it might be said that, in so far as it was necessary for the plaintiff to prove the fact that the defendant had this house in Bombay in order to support her right to the judgment of the Court that the maintenance awarded her should be charged on that particular property ; therefore part of the cause of action did in fact arise in Bombay. But I do not myself think that that would really be a sound view, It has been held by the Privy Council in Chand Kour V/s. Partab Singh (1888) I.L.R. 16 Cal. 98,102,p.c, that the cause of action "has no relation whatever to the defiance which may be set up by the defendant, nor does it depend upon the character of the relief prayed for by the plaintiff. It refers entirely to the grounds set forth in the plaint as the cause of action, or, in other words, to the media upon which the plaintiff asks the Court to arrive at a conclusion in his favour." The grounds upon which the plaintiff prays for relief in the way of awarding her maintenance are quite independent of the subsidiary fact that the defendant has this house in Bombay which can be charged with the amount of maintenance, and I think that that mere fact does not suffice to make part of the cause of action arise within the local limits of this Court's jurisdiction.