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Issues: (i) Whether the High Court could reappreciate evidence in second appeal and interfere with concurrent findings of fact without recording perversity; (ii) Whether children born from a relationship where one party had a subsisting marriage could inherit ancestral coparcenary property.
Issue (i): Whether the High Court could reappreciate evidence in second appeal and interfere with concurrent findings of fact without recording perversity.
Analysis: In second appeal, interference with findings of fact is confined to substantial questions of law. Reappreciation of evidence as though in first appeal is impermissible unless the findings of the courts below are shown to be perverse. A finding is perverse when it is based on no evidence, ignores relevant material, relies on inadmissible material, or is such that no reasonable person could have reached it. The concurrent findings that the woman was already married and that no presumption of marriage with the deceased man could arise were based on evidence and had not been shown to be perverse, while the High Court reversed them without properly addressing the evidence accepted by the courts below.
Conclusion: The High Court's interference in second appeal was not justified and its contrary finding was liable to be set aside.
Issue (ii): Whether children born from a relationship where one party had a subsisting marriage could inherit ancestral coparcenary property.
Analysis: Section 16 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 legitimises children of void or voidable marriages, but the statutory fiction is confined by subsection (3) to the property of the parents. It does not confer inheritance rights in the property of other relations, including ancestral coparcenary property. Section 112 of the Evidence Act, 1872 also raises a presumption of legitimacy of a child, rebuttable only by proof of non-access. In the absence of pleading or proof that the property was self-acquired, the claim to ancestral coparcenary property could not succeed. A live-in relationship, where one party is already married, does not enlarge inheritance rights beyond the statutory limit.
Conclusion: The children were not entitled to inherit the ancestral coparcenary property, and the claim to such property failed.
Final Conclusion: The appeal succeeded, the High Court's judgment was set aside, and the appellants retained relief against the claim to the suit property, while the purchaser was left to pursue such remedies as may be available in law against his vendors.
Ratio Decidendi: In second appeal, concurrent findings of fact can be disturbed only on proof of perversity, and Section 16 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 legitimises children of void or voidable marriages only for succession to the property of their parents, not to ancestral coparcenary property or the property of other relatives.
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