CHARLOTTE SKINNER Vs. ROBERT SKINNER

JUDGEMENT

(1.) STUART Skinner, otherwise known as Nawab Mirza, was, on May 3, 1855, married to the respondent, who was the daughter of one Martin Blake of the Bengal Civil Service by a Mahomedan woman, Choti Begum. The ceremony was performed in the Protestant church at Meerut by the Rev. J.E. Wharton Rotton, the resident chaplain. It appears that the spouses were originally adherents of the Mahomedan faith; and that, in order to validate the marriage which they contemplated, they had previously become professing Christians, the respondent having been baptized at Delhi on April 18, 1855, and Stuart Skinner, at Meerut, on his marriage day. Some time after the marriage, but not later than the commencement of the Mutiny in 1857, both spouses reverted to their original creed; and, although they did not cohabit after the year 1859, they both continued in the practice and profession of the Mahomedan faith Until the death of Stuart Skinner, which took place at Delhi on January 29, 1886.

(2.) AFTER their Christian marriage the spouses went through the form of marriage a second time, according to Mahomedan law. The precise date of the ceremony is not satisfactorily fixed by the evidence; but it must have been shortly after the time when they reverted to Mahomedanism. In the year 1859, in consequence of domestic unpleasantness, occasioned by the circumstance that Stuart Skinner suspected his wife of having illicit intercourse with one Abdul Wahid, it is a fact proved beyond dispute that the respondent left his house and never returned to it. She stayed at first with her mother, and subsequently went to live with her alleged paramour, Abdul Wahid, to whom she bore several children. Before -their separation two children, a son and a daughter, whose legitimacy is not impeached, had been born of the marriage between her and Stuart Skinner, both of whom survived their father.

(3.) THIS suit was commenced in May, 1888, sixteen months after the death of Stuart Skinner, by Charlotte Blake, alias Badshah Begum. In her plaint Badshah Begum set forth their Christian marriage, and also alleged that "shortly after the said marriage the plaintiff and Nawab Mirza were again married at Delhi according to Muhammadan law, as Sunnis, and the plaintiff's dower was fixed at Rs. 50,000." She further averred that she and the deceased "lived together as husband and wife according to Muhammadan creed." Her claim was alternative, being for one-third of the deceased's estate according to the English law of inheritance, or otherwise for Rs. 50,000 as dower and one-eighth of the remaining estate according to Mahomedan law. The parties called by her as defendants were the two children bom by her to the deceased during their cohabitation, and the six appellants, whom she described as being "looked upon as the heirs of Nawab Mirza, and entitled to succeed to the estate left by him." The plaintiff at the beginning of the litigation disputed that there had been any marriage between the deceased and Sophia Skinner, and the legitimacy of their offspring; but that contention was ultimately abandoned. By order of the District Judge of Delhi, before whom the action depended, Sophia Skinner was added as a defendant.