Judgement

The principal question involved in this appeal was as to the law which governed the succession to the property of the late Matthew Abraham, a Protestant native of India, resident in the Madras Presidency, and who died intestate in the year 1842. The ancestors of Matthew Abraham for several generations had been Christians; and Matthew Abraham, who had been baptised in infancy in the Roman Catholic faith, but afterwards became a convert to the Protestant religion, married a European wife in the year 1820, and with her and the children of the marriage conformed in all respects to the language, dress, manners, and habits of English persons up to the time of his death. The Sudder Court at Madras held that the property should be distributed in accordance with the Hindoo law.

The circumstances of the case were as follows—

In the year 1812, Matthew Abraham, then a youth, was residing at Bellary with his father; and was at that time receiving religious instruction from a Protestant Missionary, having become a convert from the Roman Catholic to the Protestant religion. The Respondent, another son of Matthew Abrahams father, was born in the year 1813. About the year 1815, Mathew Abr