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Judgment
This is a suit to enforce the award of an arbitrator. What happened was that there was a dispute which ended in a criminal case, the dispute
being about the dams alleged to have been put up on the defendants'' land which caused the flooding of the plaintiff''s land. The father and sons
were parties to the agreement, but the reference to the arbitrator was made by the father alone. The question is, whether this is binding on the sons
or whether, as they now wish, they should be allowed to re-open this probably trivial dispute.
There is no direct authority on the point. The cases relied on by the learned Subordinate Judge, viz., Jagan Nath v. Mannu Lal 16 A. 231 :
A.W.N. (1894) 60 : 8 Ind. Dec. 150 and we may add another case Pitam Singh v. Ujagar Singh 1 A.P 651 : 1 Ind. Dec. 454 and Chinna
Poochiammal v. Ganga Naicker 9 M.L.J. 34 and Balaji v. Nana 27 B.K 287 : 5 Bom. L.R. 95 sometimes speak of the authority of the manager
and sometimes of the authority of the father to bind the other members of the family by an act, such as submission to arbitration. They do not show
whether the principle is to be applied to members of the family other than minors, and we think it looks in some of the cases as if the members who
were held to be bound were in fact minors. But the language used is perfectly general and the proposition in its widest sense is accepted in the text
books of authority such as Mayne, and Banerji on the Law of Arbitration in India. ""We, therefore, come to the conclusion that it must be regarded
on the authority of these cases as a principle, that where the manager of a family refers a dispute to arbitration in good faith and the Circumstances
are such that there is no collusion, the result of the submission will be binding on the other members of the family.
The appeal is dismissed with costs.