Venue of trial of offence.

This petition raises a question relating to jurisdiction of the First Additional First Class Magistrate of Trichinopoly to try an offence under section 4 of Madras Act VI of 1949 said to have been committed at Trivandrum. The complainant is the first wife of the first accused, the fourth accused being his second wife while accused 2 and 3 are his paternal uncle and aunt respectively. The first wife filed a complaint in the Court of the First Additional First Class Magistrate alleging that the first accused married her on 25th May, 1942, that he subsequently abandoned her and married the fourth accused who belongs to Travancore State, at Trivandrum on 30th June, 1949, and thereby committed an offence under section 4 of the said Act and that the second and third accused abetted the first and fourth accused in the commission of the said offence.

The petitioners herein raised an objection before the trial Magistrate that he had no jurisdiction to try the case as the offence of bigamy is alleged to have been committed at Trivandrum. This objection was overruled by the trial Magistrate on the ground that the case falls within the exception to the general rule that every offence shall ordinarily be enquired into and tried by the Court within the local limits of whose jurisdiction it was committed. Section 4 of Act VI of 1949 reads thus:

“Notwithstanding any rule of law, custom or usage to the contrary, any marriage solemnised after the commencement of this Act between a man and woman either of whom has a spouse living at the time of such solemnisation shall be void, whether the marriage is solemnised within or outside the Province of Madras.”

This section declares the second marriage of a man or woman either of whose spouse is living at the time of the second marriage void. But it does not provide for the venue of the trial of the offence committed thereunder nor is there any other provision in the Act which deals with the jurisdiction of Courts to try offences committed under the Act. We have therefore to turn to the provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code for this purpose.

The relevant provisions of the Code which deal with the jurisdiction of Courts to try offences are contained in Chapter XV of the Code. Section 177 of the Code provides that:

“every offence shall ordinarily be inquired into and tried by a Court within the local limits of whose jurisdiction it was committed”.

The only other section relevant for the purpose of this case is section 188 which is in the following words:

“When a subject of an Indian State commits an offence at any place without and beyond the limits of India or........ provided that (notwithstanding anything in any of the preceding sections of this Chapter) no charge as to any such offence shall be inquired into in India unless the Political Agent, if there is one, for the territory in which the offence is alleged to have been committed, certifies that, in his opinion, the charge ought to be inquired into in India; and, where there is no Political Agent, the sanction of the (appropriate Government) shall be required.”

Obviously this section has no application to the case under reference because it is not the case of the prosecution that the requisite certificate under this proviso has been obtained for inquiring into the offence at a place other than the one where the offence was committed.

So I have to consider only the applicability of section 177 of the Code to this case. The only question that falls to be decided is whether the expression“ordinarily be inquired into” implies that under certain extraordinary circumstances the Court has jurisdiction to try offences which are not committed within its cognizance.

This expression has been the subject of several judicial decisions both of this Court and of the other High Courts. In Mst. Bhagwatia v. King-Emperor1, the accused was committed to sessions to take his trial for an offence under section 494 in respect of a marriage that took place outside the t