Legal position regarding succession to ancestral property if different in the territory of Pondicherry.

1. This second appeal is from Pondicherry. It raises a question as to how the law of intestate succession operates in the. territory of Pondicherry, when a Hindu father dies possessed of ancestral property and leaves both male and female issue.

2. In this case, one Arumugha of Pondicherry had two sons and two daughters. He died in 1966, possessed of an item of ancestral immovable property. After his death, one of his daughters, Muniammal, purported to sell an one-fourth share in that property to one Manicka. The sale was effected apparently under the impression that Muniammal was entitled under the law to one-fourth share as one of her father's four children. The sale was in the year 1968. While so, Arumugha's elder son, Subramanian, executed a sale of the very same property in the next year 1969, to one Ramalinga. He purported to sell the property, as kartha of the family and for necessity.

3. In 1972, Manicka brought a suit in the Additional District Munsif's Court, Pondicherry for partition and separate possession of one-fourth share in the property, as purchaser from Muniammal. In that suit, he impleaded his vendor Muniammal and also the other heirs of Arumugham. He also impleaded, as the fifth defendant in the suit Ramalinga, who had purchased the suit property from Subramania.

4. Opposition to the partition suit came mainly from the fifth defendant Ramalinga. He urged that the plaintiff's vendor Muniammal had no saleable interest in the suit property, nor even to one-fourth share therein. He relied on the circumstance that the suit property was ancestral in character, and contended that since Arumugha had died while remaining joint with his sons, the rule of survivorship operated and the property devolved only on his sons, to the entire exclusion of his two daughters, Muniammal and another.

5. The learned District Munsif accepted the 5th defendant's contention, and dismissed the plaintiff's suit. He held that Muniammal did not inherit any interest in the suit property as heir of the deceased Arumugha and the property being ancestral property, passed in its entirety to Arumugha's two sons by survivorship.

6. On appeal by the plaintiff, the learned District Judge took a different view of the law. He said that Mitakshara, as applied in Pondicherry did not recognize a coparcenary system between a father and his sons during his lifetime and the father was the absolute and sole owner of all property, whether ancestral or personally acquired. The learned Judge accordingly ruled out the application of the Mitakshara doctrine of survivorship to the present case. He then applied the rules of succession under the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, to hold that the suit property devolved on the death of Arumugha to his two sons and two daughters in four equal shares.

7. In this second appeal filed by the fifth defendant, Mr. N. S. Raghavan, his learned counsel, canvassed the correctness of the learned District Judge's understanding of the law as applied in Pondicherry both before and after the Hindu Succession Act, 1956.

8. It may be observed by way of preface, that wherever Mitakshara law was being administered in this country according to its ancient texts, succession to ancestral or coparcenary property was by survivorship and not by inheritance. The rule was general in its application, and brooked no exception. It applied, for instance, whether the deceased died leaving undivided brothers or died leaving undivided sons. The rule of survivorship operate in both the cases. The particular reason why, even in the latter kind of case the rule governed the devolution was because the sons had a right by birth in the ancestral property even during their father's lifetime. In the territory of Pondicherry, however, the legal position was quite different for a pretty long time. The textual Hindu law had yielded to a local variation, wrought, it would seem, by custom and usage. The position which obtained in Pondicherry was summed up by the Fre