The court established that a gift made by a guardian for a minor owner of properties must be validated only if it is made for purposes binding upon the minor, and there must be special circumstances to support the validity of the gift.

King, J.

1. The subject-matter of this appeal is a deed of gift executed in April, 1929. The donor is the plaintiff who was then a minor represented by his mother Lakshmi. The donee is the aunt of the plaintiff, Palani Ammal, who had been married in 1906. This appeal arises from a suit by the plaintiff to cancel the gift deed. The suit has been decreed by the learned Subordinate Judge of Coimbatore and the donee, the first defendant, has appealed.

2. The case of the appellant as disclosed in the pleadings was that when she was married in 1906, the property which is the subject matter of the gift deed amounting to four acres of wet land was actually given to her by her father Peria Sennimalai. However, no formal deed of conveyance was executed. Subsequently, Peria Sennimalai died and in the period between 1916 and 1929, all her three brothers successively died. The last brother who survived was the father of the plaintiff, Kuttia, who died on the 17th April, 1929, just four days before the gift deed was executed by his widow. It was the case therefore of the first defendant that the execution of this deed by Lakshmi in 1929 was the carrying out of a purpose which had been suspended for all the 23 years which had elapsed since the appellant had been married.

3. Evidence was let in to prove the connection between the gift and the marriage in two ways. It was first contended that the first defendant had been put in actual possession of the property in 1906 and had remained in possession ever since. It was conceded by the learned Advocate-General, who appeared for her in this appeal that he could not rely upon this evidence, which was rejected by the learned Subordinate judge. Secondly, it was urged that in 1923 a document was taken by the appellant from her two surviving brothers, the plaintiffs father and Marappa, - in which they promised to execute a deed of conveyance in respect of this property to her. That letter recites the fact that there had been an actual gift at the time of the marriage and that it had been their intention to execute the conveyance ever since. This Ex. I contains admittedly the signatures of the two brothers and this point is very strongly stressed for the appellant. For the respondent, it is urged that the appellant or her advisers must have somehow got hold of a blank sheet of paper which had been previously signed by her two brotheis. This is no doubt a stereotyped explanation, when signatures are discovered by parties in inconvenient places, but the learned Subordinate Judge has discussed the recitals of Ex. I and compared them with the recitals of the conveyance itself and the proposed conveyance Ex. II which was, according to the appellant, intended to have been executed by plaintiffs father himself but which he was unable to execute because death supervened.

4. It is significant that in Ex. III and also in Ex. II nothing said about any gut having been made at the time of marriage The reason for gift is simply put as follows, that the appellants father had expressed his wishes to his son Kuttia that the property should be given to the appellant. Kuttia, therefore, in Ex. II is represented as desirous of carrying out his fathers wishes and II could not be completed, it is stated in Ex. III that his widow Laks out the wishes both of her husband and her father-in-law in this. There is no reference in either of these two documents to the actual gift of the property and its actual possession by the appellant, which makes the nececity for a conveyance deed merely the confirmation of a transaction already carried out in all other respects. There is no reference in either Ex. II or Ex. III to the existence of Ex. I. This fact perhaps may not be of very great importance, but it seems to us certain that if the present case of the defendant which is outlined in Ex. I is true, in taking Ex. III it would have been recited that a gift had been made at the time of the marriage and that she had been in possess