Chota Lal Sahu vs Gumani Chaudhury

Bucknill, J.—This is an application in civil revisional jurisdiction. The application is made under the following circumstances; The applicant was plaintiff in a suit, which he brought on a promissory note to recover from the defendant a small sum of money. The suit came before the Munsif of Darbhanga sitting as a Small Cause Court Judge; and when the plaintiff endeavoured to prove his case by the production of this promissory note, it was found that the promissory note was not stamped and could not be received in evidence. No other argument or matter appears to have been addressed to the Munsif so far as we can ascertain from the record) and the Munsif held on the 25th February 1925 that as the plaintiff had failed to prove his promissory note upon which he had brought his suit the plaintiff''s suit must fail and must accordingly be dismissed with costs.

Now the matter has come before me in revision and the suggestion is that the suit might have been maintainable as one for simple money lent. It is perfectly clear from the plaint in the suit and from the plaintiff''s own petition to this Court that the loan transaction and the promissory note constituted one and the same transaction and were actually contemporaneous. It is also perfectly clear that the suit was based upon the promissory note alone and upon no suggestion that it was maintainable with out the promissory note or that it was a case founded upon a claim merely for money lent. If the suit is founded on an instrument and that instrument cannot be proved it appears to me that it is clear that the suit fails. The learned Counsel who has appeared for the respondent here has drawn my attention to a case which appears to be strongly in point: Chiappa Pillai v. M.R. Muthuraman Chetiar (1911) 9 MLT 281.

In that case, which was decided by Benson and Sundara Aiyar, JJ., it was clearly laid down there that where a loan and the execution of a promissory note are contemporaneous and constitute one transaction, a suit based on the original consideration, if the promissory note is inadmissible for insufficiency of stamp is not maintainable. This would tend to show that in the present case if the execution of the promissory note and the loan transaction were, as indeed is admitted, contemporaneous and as appears to be clearly the case one transaction, it would have been impossible for the plaintiff to have attempted to submerge his promissory note and to bring a claim solely upon the consideration of money lent. For this reason I am satisfied that, as the plaintiff founded and brought his suit on his promissory note, and as he failed to prove it, his case was rightly declared to fail and in consequence that the Munsif was right in dismissing his case.

I do not therefore see that it is possible for me to interfere in this master in revision, and the application is dismissed with costs.