Period of limitation for filing suit.

This is a Civil Revision Petition filed against the decree and judgment of the learned Small Cause Judge of Tanjore in S.C.No.1177 of 1949.

The facts are.-The plaintiff, R. Subramania Ayyar, was appointed as clerk of the defendant Ahilyamba Chatram Devasthanam, in 1927. It is evident from Exhibit A-1 that as security for the proper fulfilment of his duties as a clerk under the defendant Devasthanam, the plaintiff deposited as security on three occasions amounts aggregating to Rs.200. The receipts for these payments are Exhibits A-2 to A-4. The plaintiff left the service of the Devasthanam in 1930. He gave a registered notice on 15th January, 1947, for return of the amount deposited. The Devasthanam did not comply with the demand. Hence the suit in the lower Court.

The controversy in the lower Court and here is whether Article 120 or Article 145 of the Limitation Act applies to the same. If the former is the case, the suit is barred by time and if the latter is the case the suit is within time.

A suit to recover a sum of money deposited as security for proper performance of the duties of an office and from which the employer was entitled to deduct all sums not accounted for by the employee, comes under Article 120 of the Limitation Act. But authority is not wanting for the view that the amount is also a deposit which comes under Article 145 of the Limitation Act. The decisions of the Madras High Court were not always uniform. In Narayanaswamy v. Aiyaswamy1where A gave B twenty loose rubies in order that B might give them to a goldsmith and have them made into a jewel and on the failure of B to do so, A sued him for the rubies or their value, it was held by Mr. Justice Sadasiva Ayyar that the transaction was a mandatum and not a deposit in the legal sense as the moveable property bailed was not itself to be returned in the condition in which it would naturally remain at the time of the return (along with any natural accretions, if any such accretions happened to be added) but the defendant promised to have some work performed in connection with the rubies and to deliver a jewel into which the said rubies had to be worked. In Balakrishnudu v. Narayanaswami Chetty2it was held by Wallis, J., that the word ‘deposit’ in the article must be taken to mean the sort of bailment known to lawyers under that name in the Roman Law of bailments which was accepted by Bracton and afterwords by Lord Holt in Coggs v. Bernard3. He further observed as follows:

“This depositum is a bailment of a specific thing to be kept for the bailor and returned when wanted as opposed to commodatum where a specific thing as a horse or a watch is lent to the bailee to be used by him and then returned ; and both are contrasted with mutum where corn, wine ,or money or other things are given to be used and other things of the same nature and quality are to be returned instead. In my opinion there is no ground for holding that in the Acts of 1859 and 1871 the word ‘deposit’ in the sections and articles already referred to included so called deposits of money or other things which were not intended to be kept but to be used, and there is nothing in the Acts of 1877 and 1908 to show that any different construction should now be put on articles 133 and 145.

The framers of those Acts were lawyers and must be taken to have used the term deposit in the ordinary legal sense. This conclusion is not, I think, in any way affected by the fact that in 1877 the Legislature introduced a new article 60 which speaks of ‘money deposited under an agreement that it shall be payable on demand’, thus using the word ‘deposit’ not in its legal but in its popular sense.”

The decision of Wallis, J. was affirmed on appeal in Balakrishnudu v. Narayanaswami Chetty4and Sir Arnold White, C.J. entirely concurred in the reasons stated by Wallis, J. A contrary view has however been taken in Kishtappa Chetty v. Lakshmi Ammal5, namely that the word ‘deposit’ in the article has not been used in the