JUDGMENT

1. [After setting out facts as stated above the judgment proceeded:]

2. We do not propose to decide the question of law. We find that the defence has failed to prove that the mortgagors were in fact minors at the date of the mortgage. There is no doubt a considerable mass of evidence tending to show minority, but when it is analysed there is nothing which appears" to be really trustworthy, while there are certain facts which go to show that it is actually false. When a deed is executed by a person who alleges himself to be a major at the time of execution, a heavy burden rests upon him, or his representatives, when they set up the defence of minority. It is not enough that they leave the matter in doubt. They must satisfy the Court beyond reasonable doubt that the minority is a fact. (See Raja of Deo v. Abdullah A.I.R. 1918 P.C. 35.

3. [The judgment then discussed the evidence relating to minority and proceeded:]

4. From the shifting sand of the allegations and transactions of the parents, we turn with relief to a piece of solid evidence consisting of the endorsement made by the Sub-Registrar on the deed in suit at the time of registration. Both executants were present. The endorsement runs:

Nawab Ali Ahmad Khan stated his age to be 21 years. In my opinion he is more than 18 years old and was found major in every way.

5. Now according to the dates given in the application this young man was then 15 years and 4 months. It appears to us impossible that this should have been his real age. He himself asserted to the Sub-Registrar that he was twenty-one. The Sub-Registrar doubted whether he was so much, and not knowing of the Judge's certificate, he addressed his mind to the question whether he was eighteen or over, and on this point he felt no doubt, and he recorded that in his opinion he was more than eighteen years old. That the Sub-Registrar should have formed such an opinion if the real age is 15 years and 4 months is impossible. On the strength of this evidence, therefore, we must reject the exact date given in the application for guardianship with regard to Ali Ahmad and once we have done this, the evidence on which the defendants rely falls to pieces like a house of cards, for if Ali Ahmad was in fact three or four years older than his father represented him to be, then Baqar Ali Khan is older still, and the age of the daughter Askari Begam, who is represented as two years younger than Ali Ahmad, comes to agree very well with her father-in-law's evidence.

6. Mohammad Jafar Hussain Khan is a respectable witness. He is the father-in-law of Askari Begam, sister of the two mortgagors. He has given the date of his son's marriage both as November, 1905, and November, 1903. It is, however, common ground of the parties that the true date is 12th November, 1903. If the dates in the certificate of guardianship are correct, Askari Begam was then nine and a half. This is an unusually early age for a Muhammadan girl of good position to marry, but the matter does not stop here. This witness says that Askari Begam contracted the marriage for herself, being of the age of discretion. The witness says that he was told at that time that she was fifteen. He did not himself see her until she came to his house after marriage, but then she appeared to him to be about fourteen or fifteen years of age, and about a year and a half after she gave birth to a child. Now this evidence appears to us particularly weighty, because it is evidence not merely of an opinion formed of the age and perhaps dimly recollected after so many years; on the contrary it is evidence of a transaction which could not have taken place if the child had been only nine years old. No doubt there is authority for the proposition that Shia Law regards nine as the age of puberty, but there is no authority for saying that any one regards nine as the age of discretion, or that a girl of nine would ever be allowed to contract herself in marriage. It has been suggested that th