GUR NARAYAN Vs. SHEOLAL SINGH

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THIS consolidated appeal from a judgment and four decrees of the High Court of Calcutta arises out of four suits brought by the plaintiffs in June 1906 in the Court of the First Subordinate Judge of Gaya. The object of the suits was to obtain possession of certain specific landed properties which originally belonged to one Ram Dyal Singh, who died so long ago as 1845. These four actions were separately decreed by the Subordinate Judge. On the defendants' appeals the High Court dismissed two of the suits, and in the two others varied the first Court's decrees. The plaintiffs preferred four appeals to their Lordships Board which were subsequently consolidated. After the appeals were filed two of the suits were compromised. The present appeal is thus confined to the two decrees of the High Court in suits 99 and 101 of 1906, respectively. A short statement of the facts relating to this family will explain the nature of this litigation.

(2.) RAM Dyal had left him surviving a widow named Birja Kunwar and two married daughters named respectively Sham Sundar Koer and Maha Sundar Koer.It is stated that before his death he had made an oral disposition by which he had devised the bulk of his property to his two grandsons, one named Ajodhya, the son of Sham Sundar, and the other Sheo Charan, the son of Maha Sundar, subject to a life interest in his widow Birja Kunwar.

(3.) MAHA Sundar died on the 15th June, 1891, when the succession opened to Sheo Charan's agnatic relations. The plaintiffs claim to have derived title under assignments from the reversioners, and their case is that the alienations made by Maha Sundar in her lifetime in favour of the defendants or their predecessors are invalid, as they were not made for purposes which make them binding on the reversioners. And they accordingly seek to recover possession of the villages purported to have been sold by her to the defendants or their predecessors in title. They in their written statements in the two suits raised a number of objections which, in the course of the trial, resolved themselves into the three main points which their Lordships have to determine on this appeal. The relative position of the parties and the nature of these objections will appear from the following pedigree: