Lord Normand.-

The suit in which this appeal arises was begun in June 1938, in the Court of the Subordinate Judge in Delhi by the respondent, Nanak Chand, with whom his two sons were associated as plaintiffs, against his father, the appellant. The respondent claimed that the family was a joint Hindu family governed by the Benares School of the Mitakshara, and prayed for a partition, of a cycle business carried on at Delhi and Bombay, as he alleged, as a joint family business. He said in his plaint that the appellant had turned him out of the business in September 1936, and had not allowed him since then to take any part in it.

[2] There is now no question that the family was a joint Hindu family. The respondent, who was born in 1891 and married in 1912, resided in the appellant's house till 1917 according to the finding, now acquiesced in, of the Subordinate Judge. A younger son, Raghu Nath Prasad, had always had his home in the appellant's house save when he was attending to the Bombay branch of the cycle business, and all his living expenses have been defrayed by the appellant. Considerable sums of money were spent on the celebration of the marriages of members of the family, the respondent's marriage in 1912, the marriages of two of his daughters in 1931 and 1935 and of two of the daughters of the younger son in 1933 and 1937. These sums and other sums expended on the family and its members were derived from the profits of the disputed business but that was the only considerable source of the income and fortune of the members of the family and the circumstance has at most an indefinite and slight bearing on the question whether the cycle business was the separate property of the appellant or part of the assets of the joint family.

[3] That is now the only question to be decided. On it the learned Subordinate Judge found in favour of the appellant and dismissed the suit, but the High Court has reversed his judgment and after finding that the cycle business was a joint family concern has granted decree for joint possession.

[4] It is common ground that the appellant inherited nothing and that there was no nucleus of ancestral property from which the cycle business could have been developed. It is also common ground that the cycle, business was originally financed from the accumulated profits of a cloth, tailoring and drapery business also carried on in Delhi. The respondent claims that he was associated with the appellant in the cloth business from its commencement in the year 1904 and that he was also associated with the appellant in the cycle business from its modest origin as a repair shop about 1915 till he was turned out in the days of its prosperity in 1936. The appellant's case on the other hand is that he alone was concerned in the cloth business, which he built up from a humble beginning as a hawker of cloth, and that the respondent was in no way concerned with the cloth business at any stage of its development, but was while it lasted engaged in sundry ventures of his own as a tailor in Delhi. It is also the appellant's case that the respondent after the failure of another separate venture as a partner in an ironmonger's business in 1919 - 22, became a salaried employee in a position of no responsibility in the appellant's cycle business in 1923, and that he left it in 1925 to become a partner in a rival cycle business, but that on the termination of this partnership in the same year he returned to the appellant's cycle business, again as a salaried employee. The respondent, it should be added, answers to this that the alleged separate business ventures and partnerships in which he engaged were all of them off - shoots or extensions of the joint family business.

5 There is no issue of law to be decided, and both parties were content to put the question between them thus:-has it been shown by the respondent that he was associated in the business, started by the appellant's initiative and carried on mainly or wholly under