Judgment

KRISHNA IYER, J.:- The dispute is short, the points of law few, the evidence largely made up of admissions, and so the judgment permits of brevity. A vignette of the facts is all that is therefore necessary.

2. This appeal arises out of a suit for partition where the narrow area of conflict in this Court is confined to two items claimed by the plaintiffs but disallowed by the High Court. The first two of the three points formulated for determination by the High Court reflect the controversy raised before us and may be excerpted:

1. Whether the said shop-room at the extreme north west corner of plot No. 1238 belongs exclusively to the defendants first party;

2. Whether the entire properties mentioned in Schedule C to the plaint are joint family properties liable to partition, and......

3. Point No. 2 relates to three items in Schedule C to the plaint which were covered by four usufructuary mortgages, Exs. B-1 to B-4. The case of the first (contesting) defendant, who is the first respondent before us now, is that these items of property exclusively belonged to him. The Trial Court has accepted this case and the High Court has affirmed this finding. The foundation for these concurrent findings is the admissions made by the first plaintiff and the eighth defendant, the father of the plaintiff, in depositions in an earlier suit, Title Suit No. 61 of 1945, as well as similar admissions made in the written statement filed in that suit by the present eighth defendant (who was first defendant there) together with the present plaintiffs, two of whom were majors at that time. The inference fluently drawn by the courts below from these admissions is that the said property belongs to the first defendant.

4. Some challenge has been made in this Court about the propriety of relying on these admissions but we will deal with it a little later. Suffice it to say for the present that admissions are usually telling against the maker unless reasonable explained and no acceptable ground to extricate the appellants from the effect of their own earlier statements has been made out. Be that as it may, concurrent conclusions from the two judicial tiers ordinarily find this Court s doors closed unless substantial reasons to the contrary exist. Having heard arguments at length we are disposed to agree with the High Court on the issue of the properties items 1 to 3 in Schedule C to the plaint.

5. The other short dispute relates to a shop-room at the north-west corner of plot No. 1238. Here again the admissions of the eighth defendant and the plaintiffs, already referred to before, stand in the way of the plaintiffs success. While the trial court partially upheld the possession of the first defendant of this shop-building it did not go the whole hog in upholding his right. The learned Judges of the High Court held that the same admissions which had been relied upon by the trial court for holding in favour of the first defendant s title to the mortgaged lands covered by Exs. B-1 to B-4 operated against the plaintiffs regarding the shop-building also. There is no doubt that if the admissions - Ex. G (the deposition of the present first plaintiff in Title Suit No. 61 of 1945), Ex. G2 (the deposition in the same suit by the present eighth defendant), and Ex. H (the written statement filed by these parties in the earlier suit) - are reliable, the plaintiffs case is damaged by their own admissions. The High Court has taken this view and concluded:

"On the strength of the written statement and the other statements aforesaid, there is no escape from the conclusion that this disputed shop-room was allotted to defendant No. 1 in the partition that took place in 1938."

6. Counsel for the appellants strenuously urged that the fatal admissions used against him have prejudiced him for many reasons. He contended that, for one thing, these statements were vague and therefore insufficient to justify a clear verdict against his client. For another, he argued, the case of