P. Kumarakurubaran v. P. Narayanan
Background
The appellant claimed he was assigned a vacant site in 1974, built a house on it, and later gave his father a power of attorney limited to construction-related work. He alleged his father exceeded that authority by executing a 1988 sale deed transferring the property to a granddaughter (Defendant No. 1), who later passed it on by a settlement deed and then a general power of attorney to other family members. The appellant said he only learned of these transactions around 2011, complained to the police, and filed a civil suit in 2014 seeking a declaration of ownership and to nullify the deeds. The defendants sought rejection of the plaint as time-barred; the trial court refused, but the Madras High Court, in revision, allowed the plaint's rejection on the ground that the suit was filed too late.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court held that under Article 59 of the Limitation Act, the three-year limitation period for cancelling an instrument runs from when the plaintiff acquired knowledge of the relevant facts, not automatically from the date of the document's registration. Since the appellant had specifically pleaded a particular date of knowledge (and had taken prompt steps like filing a police complaint and objecting to the property's registration once he learned of the transactions), whether he actually knew earlier was a disputed, mixed question of fact and law that could only be resolved through a full trial with evidence, not decided summarily at the threshold under Order VII Rule 11 CPC. The High Court's revisional order rejecting the plaint was set aside, and the trial court's order (allowing the case to proceed to trial) was restored.
Lesson Learnt
When a lawsuit's timeliness depends on exactly when the plaintiff found out about a disputed transaction, courts generally cannot throw out the case at the very start: that factual question about "date of knowledge" must ordinarily be tested through evidence and a full trial, not decided on the pleadings alone.