The main legal point established in the judgment is that the plaintiff's documents, whether sued upon or relied upon as evidence, are subject to inspection by the defendants, and the lower court has the discretion to allow inspection before the defendants file their written statements.

Curgenven, J.

1. These five Civil Revision Petitions are preferred against an order of the Subordinate Judge of Devakottah passed under Order 11, Rule 18 (1), Civil Procedure Code and allowing the respondents, who are defendants in O.S. No. 109 of 1930 on his file, inspection of the documents contained in a list attached to the plaint. The substantial questions which I have to decide are, firstly, whether the Court could pass such an order in respect of these documents and, secondly, whether it was justified in allowing inspection before the defendants had filed their written statements.

2. A plaintiffs documents are of two kinds, differentiated by Order 7, Rule 14 into (1) those which he sues upon, and (2) those which he relies upon as evidence in support of his claim. The order requires him to produce class (1) with his plaint and to enter class (2) in a list to be added or annexed to the plaint. Under Rule 15 of Order 11 a party may at any time give notice to any other party in whose pleadings or affidavits reference is made to any document to produce such document for the inspection of the party giving such notice. An attempt has been made to contend that this rule only refers to documents of the former class, those on which the plaintiff sues, and not to documents relied on as evidence in support of his claim. It appears to me that this contention must fail because, in the first place, since the plaintiff has to produce documents upon which he sues at the time when he presents his plaint and has to deliver them or copies of them with the plaint, no necessity could arise to call upon him to give inspection of such documents. If a party wants to inspect the documents or copies of the documents filed with the plaint, provision is made for his doing so at the Court by Rule 63 of the Civil Rules of Practice. Further, if the right to inspection were limited to documents sued upon, the rule would have been framed in a different language. It is then argued that documents entered in a list attached to the plaint do not come within the description in Rule 15 of Order 11 of documents to which reference is made in the pleadings. This position too, I think, is untenable. The method which the Code prescribed of specifying the documents relied on in the plaint is to enter them in a list to be added or annexed to the plaint, and to hold that inspection could not be granted because these documents are mentioned in a list and not in the body of the plaint would be to render the rules relating to inspection futile. The only reasonable way of reading Order 7, Rule 14 with Order 11, Rule 15 is to hold that the expression "referred to" is equivalent to "entered in the list". It seems to me that for this purpose the list must be deemed to be part of the plaint, as for instance would be a schedule of property, It is to be noted that Rule 14 of Order 7 is headed "Documents relied on in plaint" which goes in support of this view. It is probable enough, as has been suggested, that one at least of the reasons for requiring the plaintiff to furnish a list of his documents with the plaint is to enable a defendant to apply for their inspection. I ram unable to agree with Chandmull Goneshmull v. Dhanraj Ganapatroy (1919) 24 C.W.N. 302, where a learned Judge of the Calcutta High Court has expressed a contrary opinion. I think that the learned Subordinate Judge has decided this point correctly.

3. It is then said that he has conceded inspection to the defendants as a matter of right, whereas Rule 18(1) of Order 11 invests him with a discretion which he should have used in order to refuse the request. It is not very clear from the terms of the Lower Courts order what amount of discretion it believed itself to possess. After adverting to a conflict in the Indian decisions the learned Subordinate Judge decides to follow the English law on the subject which he says allows the defendant "as a matter of course" to inspect the documents referred to by the p