Balasubrahmanyan, J. - (1.) The question that arises in this second appeal involves the interpretation and application of Sec. 20(1) of the Pondicherry Civil Courts Act, 1966.
(2.) Appellant Temple sued the Respondent for declaration possession and mesne profits in regard to a place of land in Uppalam, in Pondicherry Territory. The suit was filed in 1956 in the Courts of First Instance at Pondicherry. The Court dismissed the suit on merits on 10th October l958 upholding he Defendant's plea of adverse possession. While dismissing the suit the Court of First Instance expressly declared that the decree was not subject to appeal.
(3.) This last direction of the Court was in accordance with the law and procedure as it subsisted in Pondicherry at the time. According to a Law passed in 1838, laid down under articles 454 and 455 of the French Civil Code, any Court of First Instance hearing a suit involving immovable property valued at 1,500 francs or bearing a yearly income of less than 60 francs shall determine the suit in a summary manner as a Court of last resort. The implication is that no appeal would lie against the decree in any such suit. The suit filed by the Desamuthu Mariamman Temple in the Court of First Instance was admittedly a suit which was governed by this law. Indeed, the Appellant Temple itself subscribed in the plaint its consent to the finality of the decree even while instituting the suit. Nevertheless, when the decree went against it, the Temple preferred an appeal to a Court of appeal called the Tribunal Superior d'Appel. If this Court of appeal had gone into the maintainability of the Temple appeal then and there, there is no doubt it would have dismissed the appeal as incompetent, and, if it had done so, such a dismissal would have been quite in accordance with the law that prevailed then in Pondicherry. But the Tribunal Superior d'Appel did not do so, and kept the appeal pending in its file. During such tendency, Parliament passed. The Pondicherry Civil Courts Act, 1966. The Act came into force on 5th September, 1968. Under that Act, the Tribunal Superior d'Appel became the District Court, Pondicherry, and it look over all the matters pending before the Tribunal Superior d'Appel, including the Appellant Temple's appeal. The appeal then came up for hearing in the District Court, before the Additional District Judge, at the hearing, the Respondent questioned the competence of the appeal saying that no appeal lay against the decree of the Court of First Instance in this case. The learned District Judge upheld this objection and dismissed the appeal in liming.;