Rajasthan High Court
Modi, J.
Champa Lal - Appellant
Versus
Salig Ram - Respondents
D.B. Civil Regular First Appeal No. 58 of 1955
Decided On : March 17, 1961
2. The plaintiffs case, briefly put, was that on the 25th January, 1947, the defendant had borrowed a sum of Rs. 10,000/- from the former and had executed a receipt Ex. 1 for it on the same date and that he had also executed a promissory note on that very date in favour of the plaintiff. It was also alleged that the defendant had agreed to pay interest at the rate of 6%, per annum on the principal sum aforesaid. It was further alleged that the defendant had paid a sum of Rs. 2750/- as interest for he period from the 25th January 1947 to the 25th August, 1951, which fact had been acknowledged by him in his letter dated the 20th September, 1961, Ex. 7. The case of the plaintiff further was that in the meantime he had many a time pressed the defendant to repay the loan as a result or which the latter sent the plaintiff a number of letters, which are Exs. 2 to 6, and are respectively dated as the 13th January, 1948, 19th October, 1949, 5th December, 1949. 30th January, 1950, and 16th September, 1950, wherein he begged for extension of time to repay the loan owing to straitened circumstances. Eventually, the plaintiff instituted the present suit on the 15th March, 1954, in the court of the Senior Civil Judge, Merta, for the recovery of Rs. 10,000/- as principal and Rs. 1550/- as interest upto the date of suit, the total being Rs. 11,550/-. The plaintiff claimed that the suit was within limitation on account of the acknowledgments of the debt contained in the various letters referred to above.
3. The defendant resisted the suit. He flatly denied that he had ever borrowed the sum of Rs. 10,000/- from the plaintiff or had executed a receipt for it or had executed a promissory note in lieu of that. No question therefore arose of agreeing today any interest. He further contended that the promissory-note was inadmissible in evidence, being improperly stamped. Pleas of limitation and jurisdiction were also raised, and it was suggested that th| plaintiff had manufactured this false claim against the defendant as there was bad blood between them on account of some election, the particulars of which were not mentioned in the written statement.
4. The trial court held that the promissory-note was short stamped, and, therefore, was not admissible in evidence, and no suit could be based on it. Even so, it found that the plaintiffs version that the defendant had borrowed a sum of Rs. 10,000/- from the former and had executed a receipt for the same was fully established. It also found that the payment by the defendant of the sum of Rs. 2750/- as interest for the period extending from the 25th January, 1947 to the 25th January, 1951, was established. Its findings on the questions of limitation and jurisdiction were in favour of the plaintiff, and as a result of these findings it decreed the plaintiffs suit for Rs. 11550/- principal and interest together with pendente lite and future interest at the rate of six per cent per annum from the date of the suit until realisation. Aggrieved by this judgment, the defendant came up in appeal to this Court.
5. We shall deal with the various contentions raised by learned counsel for the defendant in the order in which they were raised before us.
6. In the first place, it was contended that the trial courts finding that it had jurisdiction to try the suit because the defendant resided within its territorial jurisdiction and that the cause of action arose in Ladnun, a town within the jurisdiction of that court was entirely erroneous because there was no evidence whatsoever on the record to that effect. In support of this contention, we were taken by learned counsel for the defendant into the entire evidence led by the plaintiff, and his criticism appears to us to be correct so far as it gose. In reply learned counsel for the plaintiff d
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