The main legal point established in the judgment is the interpretation of coercion and undue influence under the Indian Contract Act, and the application of these principles to the submission to arbitration and the validity of the award.

Arthur Strachey, C.J.

1. This is an appeal from a decree passed in accordance with an award which was ordered to be filed under Section 526 of the Code of Civil Procedure. Having regard to the construction which has been placed upon the last paragraph of Section 522, with which Section 526 must be read, the only ground upon which such an appeal will lie is that there has been no award in law or in fact on which a decree could legally be passed. The only grounds upon which the award was contested in the Court below and in this Court are--(1) that by reason of coercion or undue influence exercised on the mind of the appellant there was no valid submission to arbitration; and (2) that there was no award in the sense of a judicial determination by the arbitrators of the matters submitted, but the arbitrators merely accepted a settlement of those matters by other persons, and mechanically signed an award which was put before them for their signature.

2. Now as regards the first point, no question of coercion properly so-called arises in this case. Coercion is defined in Section 15 of the Indian Contract Act. It is clear that coercion as thus defined implies a committing or threatening to commit some act which is contrary to law. No such act is alleged to have been committed or threatened in the present case. Therefore coercion may be put out of the question altogether. The question of undue influence requires further consideration. We must apply the definition of undue influence contained in Section 16 of the Contract Act, as it stood before its amendment by Section 2 of Act No. VI of 1899. The only part of Section 16 which has been suggested as applicable here is the second clause, which provides that undue influence is said to be employed "when a person whose mind is enfeebled by old age, illness, or mental or bodily distress, is so treated as to make him consent to that to which, but for such treatment, he would not have consented, although such treatment may not amount to coercion." If the appellant's consent to the submission was caused by undue influence as thus defined, the contract was voidable at his option under Section 19. Now the circumstances under which the submission was entered into were these. There had been certain dealings between the appellant Gobardhan Das and one Gopal Das, the son of the plaintiff-respondent Jai Kishen Das. Gopal Das was a young man of twenty-two. The appellant was his cousin. It appears that the appellant got Gopal Das to execute a deed of sale of Gopal Das' share in certain ancestral property. There were two deeds, one was taken in the name of Gobind Das, a relative of the appellant, and after that there was a further deed executed by Govind Das in the appellant's favour. On the 26th November 1896, a complaint was filed before a Magistrate by Gopal Das against Gobardhan Das, in which he charged the appellants with offences of criminal breach of trust and cheating under the Indian Penal Code in connection with the execution of the deeds, and on the following day, the 27th, the Court directed that the case should be sent to the police for investigation. While it was still under investigation the submission now in question was executed on the 4th December 1896. The submission is signed by Jai Kishen Das and the appellant Gobardhan Das. It recites a dispute between the executants; it states that "the parties are ready to have recourse to the Civil and Criminal Courts," and that therefore, at the request of some of the relatives of the parties, in order to settle the matter, they appoint certain persons as arbitrators, and declare that they will accept whatever award the arbitrators may honestly make with respect to the dispute relating to the sale deeds. On the next day, that is, the 5th December, the complainant Gopal Das presented an application to the Magistrate, in which, referring to his complaint, he stated that he could not adduce evidence in the case, and, as the police had not as yet tak