The minor first respondent filed an application under Order 33, rule 1 of the Civil Procedure Code, for leave to sue the petitioners who were respondents 1 and 2 in that petition and others, for partition and separate possession of his one-third share in the properties mentioned in the schedules attached to the petition. His father who is the first petitioner here objected to the grant of leave on the ground inter alia that the value of the suit properties is more than Rs. 3,000 and if the petition was to be admitted and registered as a suit, the subject-matter of the suit would be beyond the limits of the pecuniary jurisdiction of the Court of the District Munsiff of Ariyalur. The objection was overruled by the District Munsiff. This civil revision petition is against that order. The learned District Munsiff relying upon a Bench decision of the Allahabad High Court reported in Nur Muhammad v. Maulvi Jamil Ahmad 1 was of the opinion that the question of jurisdiction could not be considered at that stage as the petition could not be returned for presentation to the proper Court in the event of its being found that the subject-matter of the suit was beyond its pecuniary jurisdiction.

The question involved in this revision petition is whether when a petition is presented under Order 33, rule 1, for leave to sue in forma pauperis and an objection as to pecuniary jurisdiction is raised in limine, the Court can go into that question and if it finds that it has no pecuniary jurisdiction over the matter, can the application be returned for presentation to the proper Court. The matter is not free from difficulty and there is, as far as I have been able to examine, no direct authority bearing upon this specific question at issue except the decision of the Allahabad High Court cited above. Before examining the decisions cited before me, I may refer to the language of rule 5 of Order 33, which provides that a Court shall reject an application for permission to sue as a pauper where, "the allegations do not show a cause of action," The corresponding clause of the old section ran thus:

"That his allegations do not show a right to sue in such Court."

The expression "cause of action" was substituted for the words "right to sue in such Court" to give effect to a number of decisions of various Courts which held that the clause even as it then stood did not limit the Court to an enquiry whether the right to sue arose within the jurisdiction, but that it had a more extended meaning and that the Court was competent to ascertain if the application showed a good subsisting cause of action capable of enforcement in Court and calling for an answer. It was even held upon the language employed in the old sub-section that questions of limitation could be gone into at that stage as also a question whether the suit contract was void as being immoral and opposed to public policy. It is clear therefore that the amended clause whose object was to adopt the extended interpretation placed by Courts thereupon was intended to have a wider application than the old clause which was ex facie confined to the plea relating to the jurisdiction of the Court. In other words even under the narrower expression used in the old clause, it was open to the Court to reject an application for permission where the allegations did not show that the right to sue arose within the jurisdiction, whether territorial or pecuniary of that Court. It is thus perfectly clear that an enquiry as to jurisdiction is well within the province of the Court which has to deal with an application under Order 33, rule 1. The difficulty arises not so much on account of the competency of the Court in an application for leave to sue in forma pauperis to go into the question of its jurisdiction to entertain the application but as to the precise order which can be passed upon the application in the event of its being found on enquiry that the subject-matter of the suit was beyond the limits of its p