Acquisitions made by a junior member or manager if self-acquired.

I have had the advantage of perusal of the judgment of my learned brother, in which he has dealt elaborately and fully with the main issues of fact that arise for our determination in these appeals. I am in entire agreement with his conclusions; that being the case, I felt somewhat hesitant to write a separate, concurring judgment. That hesitancy was reinforced by the consciousness that, though the case does involve the application of several principles of Hindu Law, to the facts, those principles themselves are well-settled, and enunciated in decisions that are now classic. Nor does the application of the principles to the facts of the case, involve any novel departure in any respect. Nevertheless, I propose, in a brief compass, to survey the principles of Hindu Law, that impinge on the facts and circumstances of this case. There are at least one or two refinements that render this expedient. I must make it clear, however, that I am not traversing the facts and evidence again, independently nor dealing with every aspect of the probabilities; my learned brother has discussed them so fully, that I shall assume the background, in addition to my own observations.

It is important, at the outset, to stress the general picture that emerges from the facts of the record. This is that of a very affluent family of Malabar, conducting indigenous banking as its main business or kulachara, and possessed of very considerable income, both from agricultural lands and the family avocation. There was a steady flow of money to each of the branches that constituted the main family and that was true not merely of the branch of Samu Pattar, which included Narayana Iyer and his brothers, but equally true of the restricted family of Narayana Iyer and his sons. Narayana Iyer was handling the family business de facto, and was in a situation to utilise the moneys that flowed into his hands from joint family resources even before he became the de jure manager. As my learned brother has pointed out it is very important, however, that these different periods should be distinguished from each other, and particularly, that a distintion should be drawn between the previous periods and the last period, after Narayana Iyer had purported to effect not merely a severance in status, but an actual partition between himself and his sons. This situation is complicated by the fact that Narayana Iyer was employed as an official in a bank, rising from a relatively subordinate capacity with a small salary, to a position of trust at the end, with quite respectable emoluments. An added factor of complication is that he is supposed to have stood, perhaps unofficially as some kind of guarantor in respect of the constituents whom he introduced to the Imperial Bank: according to the oral evidence that situation enabled him to amass large perquisites, which might have been a kind of illegal gratification, but which, according to the appellants, formed the primary source of the acquisitions claimed by him as his self-acquisition, which are the crux of the controversy in these appeals. But one undeniable circumstance is that there was a considerable nucleus of joint family estate, that an appreciable income from this nuclues passed through the hands of Narayana Iyer even when he was a junior member, and subsequently when a manager, and that there was certainly ‘blending ‘, in the sense that it does not in the least appear that Narayana Iyer segregated the joint family moneys over which he had control, or did not utilise them as freely as his own resources, in acquiring the properties that mainly concern us.

With this picture in view, I shall proceed to discussion of the principles of Hindu Law, in certain aspects, that arise for application to the issues of fact in the present case.

When the learned Text-book Writers of the past, like Sir Thomas Strange and Mayne, began their treatises of Hindu Law, they must have been oppressed by the necessity to find Engl