Quick answer: In Kamal Kumar Badriprasad Bajoria and Another v. Bimal Kumar Badriprasad Bajoria and Another, decided on 24 August 2026, a single Judge of the Bombay High Court dismissed a defendant’s application under Order VII Rule 11(d) of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 to reject a partition plaint as barred by limitation. The properties in suit — commercial and residential premises in Mumbai and one property in Kolkata — had been purchased from the parties’ business income, not inherited, so the Court held that the twelve-year limitation applicable to joint family property under Article 110 of the Limitation Act, 1963 did not, prima facie, apply; the residuary three-year period under Article 113 governed instead. Because the plaint pleaded a sequence of incidents from 2009-10 through 2015 rather than a single clean date of exclusion, the Court held it could not say at the demurrer stage that the suit, filed in 2016, was time-barred, and left the question of exactly when the plaintiffs’ right to sue accrued to be decided after evidence. In a connected application, the Court also declined to let the plaintiffs drop the Kolkata property from the suit once the defendants had voluntarily submitted to the Bombay court’s territorial jurisdiction over it.
1. Introduction
Few disputes are as procedurally awkward as a partition suit filed years after a family or business relationship has broken down. By the time co-owners stop speaking to each other or accuse each other of theft, a defendant’s most attractive first move is often not to fight the merits but to argue that the plaintiff waited too long — that the suit is barred by limitation and should be thrown out before a single witness is examined. Kamal Kumar Bajoria v. Bimal Kumar Bajoria, decided by the Bombay High Court on 24 August 2026, is a compact illustration of how that argument is actually tested, and of a distinction that is easy to state but harder to apply correctly: the difference, for limitation purposes, between property held as an inheritance within a joint Hindu family and property that two or more people simply happen to co-own because they bought it together.
The case arose from a business and family split between two brothers, Kamal Kumar Badriprasad Bajoria and Bimal Kumar Badriprasad Bajoria, who had jointly acquired several commercial and residential premises in Mumbai, and one property in Kolkata, from the income of a business they ran together. When the relationship soured, Kamal Kumar and his co-plaintiff sued for partition; Bimal Kumar and his co-defendant responded with an application to reject the plaint outright as time-barred. Justice S.M. Modak, sitting in the Ordinary Original Civil Jurisdiction of the Bombay High Court, dismissed that application, and in a connected order also resolved a dispute over whether the suit could proceed to partition the Kolkata property despite an initial objection to the Bombay court’s territorial reach.
This article summarises the facts, then examines the legal reasoning in four parts: the Order VII Rule 11(d) test; the Article 110/Article 113 distinction and why it mattered; the “right to sue accrues” doctrine and the related ouster/exclusion distinction; and the territorial jurisdiction question over the Kolkata property. It closes with the judgment’s practical implications and a short conclusion.
2. Case summary and background
Kamal Kumar Badriprasad Bajoria and a co-plaintiff filed Suit No. 245 of 2017 in the Bombay High Court’s original side against Bimal Kumar Badriprasad Bajoria and a co-defendant, seeking partition by metes and bounds of commercial and residential premises in Mumbai — held individually and jointly by the parties — together with one property in Kolkata, all purchased from the income of a business the parties ran together. The plaint’s narrative began with an averment that “in the year 2009-10 differences arose” between the parties, during which the defendants made “all possible attempts” to throw the plaintiffs out of the business and the joint properties. It went on to plead an attempted amicable settlement around September 2013, including an exchanged draft family settlement from which the plaintiffs said they withdrew because the defendants tried to overpower them, and then a series of specific incidents between March 2013 and June 2015 — a police complaint over a broken lock at a business unit, the arrest of a defendant on the strength of CCTV footage, a threat made at office premises, a complaint of an attempted forced entry into the plaintiffs’ home, and a complaint of an unauthorised transfer of Rs 11 lakh from a plaintiff’s bank account. The suit was filed on 13 July 2016.
The defendants moved Notice of Motion No. 1 of 2019 under Order VII Rule 11(d) of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, which permits a court to reject a plaint outright, without trial, where the suit appears from its own averments to be barred by any law. Their argument: if the alleged attempt to oust the plaintiffs occurred in 2009-10, and the ordinary period of limitation for such a suit is three years, a suit filed in 2016 was hopelessly late. The plaintiffs replied that the 2009-10 episode was only an “attempt,” that the plaint had to be read as a whole rather than isolated at its first paragraph, and that a different, longer limitation period — for suits concerning joint family property — applied instead.
In a separate but related application, Interim Application No. 2725 of 2026, the plaintiffs sought leave to amend the plaint to drop their claim to the Kolkata property, on the footing that the Bombay High Court lacked territorial jurisdiction to partition property situated outside Maharashtra. The defendants opposed this too, but on instructions their counsel told the Court that the defendants were prepared to waive any objection to the Bombay court’s territorial jurisdiction over the Kolkata property, effectively consenting to have that property partitioned in the same suit.
The Court disposed of both applications on 24 August 2026: it dismissed the limitation application, holding that it could not conclude at this threshold stage that the suit was time-barred, and it also declined to allow the plaintiffs to excise the Kolkata property from the suit, holding that the defendants’ waiver of the territorial objection meant the property could and should remain within the scope of the partition suit.
3. Legal analysis
3.1 The standard on an Order VII Rule 11(d) application
An application under Order VII Rule 11(d) of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 to reject a plaint as barred by law is decided on the plaint’s own averments and any documents filed with it — the Court does not look to the written statement, and does not weigh disputed facts as a trial court would after evidence. The threshold is deliberately high: a plaint can be thrown out at this stage only where the bar to the suit is apparent on the plaint’s own showing, leaving no room for a triable question. The Court in Bajoria applied this settled standard by working through every material averment in the plaint — not merely its opening paragraph — before reaching its conclusion, and it expressly declined to resolve the underlying limitation question definitively, holding instead that the point should be decided “at the time of the trial” once the defendants’ written statement was on record and evidence had been led.
This is worth underscoring for practitioners on both sides of such an application. A defendant hoping to have a stale claim rejected at the earliest possible stage must show that the plaint’s narrative itself, taken at face value, fixes a single, unambiguous date from which limitation ran out before suit; if the plaint instead describes an evolving sequence of events whose legal significance is genuinely contestable, the Rule 11(d) route will usually fail, and the defendant is left to prove the limitation defence at trial.
3.2 Article 110 versus Article 113: why the character of the property mattered
The heart of the dispute was which article of the Schedule to the Limitation Act, 1963 supplied the applicable period. Article 110 governs suits for possession of immovable property based on an allegation of exclusion from a share, and by its terms applies to joint family property — the defendants’ counsel argued it applies “only when the case is put up to that effect,” and that property is “joint family property” only when inherited from an earlier generation. Article 113 is the residuary provision applicable where no other Article prescribes a period, carrying a three-year limitation running from when “the right to sue accrues.”
On the facts pleaded, the Bombay properties and the Kolkata property had all been purchased by the plaintiff and the principal defendant from their business income — not inherited from a common ancestor. The Court’s prima facie view was accordingly that the parties were, at most, co-owners rather than members of a joint Hindu family holding ancestral property, so Article 110’s regime did not apply and the residuary three-year period under Article 113 governed instead. This is not a minor technical distinction: the older authority the Court cited, Krishna Pillai Rajasekharan Nair v. Padmanabha Pillai, (2004) 12 SCC 754, confirms that even the residuary Article’s 1908 predecessor ran from when the plaintiff’s right to partition was “denied” — but the label a court applies to the property determines which line of authority, and in some contexts which limitation period, is the relevant one. Counsel for the plaintiffs also invoked Vidya Devi v. Prem Prakash, (1995) 4 SCC 496, where a suit for partition of a co-bhumidhari holding under the Delhi Land Reforms Act was held not subject to any limitation period at all, since that special Act’s own schedule prescribed none — a reminder to check whether a general Limitation Act article applies at all before assuming a three-year clock runs on land held under a special tenurial statute.
3.3 “When the right to sue accrues”: Shakti Bhog and the significance of the missing word “first”
The most doctrinally useful portion of the judgment is its treatment of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shakti Bhog Food Industries Ltd. v. Central Bank of India, 2020 (17) SCC 260, quoted at length. That case construed “when the right to sue accrues” in Article 113 by contrasting it with Articles 58, 59 and 104, each of which fixes limitation from when the right to sue “first” accrues, or when the relevant fact is “first” known. The Supreme Court held the deliberate absence of “first” in Article 113 significant: because the residuary Article does not tie limitation to a single triggering event, the period may run from the last of a series of events giving rise to the cause of action, particularly in continuing wrongs, rather than freezing at the earliest date a plaintiff could conceivably have sued.
Applied to the Bajoria plaint, this reasoning gave the plaintiffs real room. Even if the 2009-10 episode described in the opening paragraph of the plaint could be characterised as an “attempt” at ouster, the plaint went on to describe a chain of further, more concrete incidents through 2013 to 2015 — police complaints, an arrest, a threatened confrontation, and an alleged unauthorised transfer of funds — any of which might mark the point at which the plaintiffs’ right to sue in fact, and finally, accrued. Because Article 113 does not require the court to anchor limitation to the earliest conceivable incident, the Court held it could not say, on the plaint alone, that the clock necessarily started in 2009-10 rather than at some later point in the 2013-2015 sequence.
3.4 Ouster, exclusion, and the “mixed question of fact and law”
A recurring theme in the authorities is the distinction between ouster and mere exclusion, pressed by the defendants’ counsel through the old Calcutta decision in Chandra Kishore Chakravarty v. Biseswar Par, XXXII Calcutta Weekly Notes 291 (1927): to exclude, that judgment held, is to “keep out,” while to oust is to “put out” of possession — denying a co-owner’s claim versus physically dispossessing them. The defendants argued that even taking 2009-10 as the operative event, the plaintiffs still needed to plead continuing exclusion from that date, relying on the Bombay High Court’s own Dattatraya Digambar Panchwadkar v. Prabhakar Ramkrishna Panchwadkar, (1963) SCC OnLine Bom 104, and on Ashabai v. Madhusudan, 2017 (5) Mh.L.J., on whether a second partition suit survives dismissal of an earlier one.
The plaintiffs relied instead on the Supreme Court’s decision in Daya Singh v. Gurdev Singh, (2010) 2 SCC 194, for the proposition that whether a particular event actually gives rise to the pleaded cause of action is itself “a mixed question of fact and law, depending on the response of the respondents.” The Bombay High Court accepted that framing: whether the 2009-10 episode alone started time running, or whether it needed reading together with the later incidents culminating in a “clear and unequivocal” denial of rights, could not be resolved from the plaint in isolation. The Court also rejected the suggestion, made by reference to M/s Sree Surya Developers and Promoters v. N. Sailesh Prasad, (2022) 5 SCC 736, that the plaintiffs’ pleading amounted to “clever drafting” manufacturing an illusion of timeliness; it found no such illusion, only a genuinely contestable sequence of events.
3.5 Territorial jurisdiction and the limits of a plaintiff’s control over the suit
The second, shorter part of the judgment addressed the plaintiffs’ application to drop the Kolkata property from the suit on the footing that the Bombay High Court had no territorial jurisdiction over it. Defendants’ counsel initially invoked Section 21 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, which requires an objection to the place of suing to be raised at the earliest opportunity — a rule explained in Sneh Lata Goel v. Pushplata, (2019) 3 SCC 594 — and then, on instructions, went further: the defendants were content to submit to the Bombay court’s jurisdiction over the Kolkata property outright.
The Court held that this changed the calculus. The premise of the plaintiffs’ application was that the Court lacked jurisdiction over the Kolkata property and should therefore let them withdraw that part of their own claim; but once the defendants had voluntarily waived any objection, there was no jurisdictional obstacle left for the plaintiffs to work around. The Court declined to allow the amendment, holding instead that the suit would proceed to partition the Kolkata property along with the Mumbai properties. A plaintiff’s ability to reshape a suit by dropping an inconvenient claim is not unconditional: a defendant’s consent to jurisdiction can foreclose a plaintiff’s own attempt to narrow the relief sought, at least where the amendment would otherwise fragment a single family dispute into suits across two states.
4. Practical significance
For drafting partition suits, the judgment is a reminder that pleaded chronology matters as much as the underlying facts. A plaintiff who opens the plaint with a single, dated allegation of exclusion or ouster invites exactly the limitation challenge raised here; pleading the full sequence of events — attempted settlement, subsequent acts of dispossession or denial, and the final, unequivocal act that crystallised the dispute — gives a court considering an Order VII Rule 11(d) application room to hold that limitation cannot be resolved without evidence. Counsel should identify and plead clearly the latest event capable of constituting the accrual of the cause of action, rather than relying on the earliest one and hoping it survives scrutiny.
For clients advising co-owners on how title is structured, the judgment underlines a distinction with real consequences: property purchased jointly by family members from business income is treated, for limitation purposes, as ordinary co-ownership rather than joint Hindu family property, even where the co-owners are close relatives running a shared business. Families intending their jointly acquired assets to carry joint-family-property status — with the different limitation and succession consequences that follow — should document that intention at the time of acquisition, rather than leaving a court to infer the character of the holding years later from the bare fact of a joint purchase.
For defendants contemplating an Order VII Rule 11(d) application in a family property dispute, the judgment cautions against over-reliance on a plaintiff’s opening paragraph. Courts read the plaint as a whole, and where later paragraphs describe conduct continuing well beyond the first alleged incident, an application built solely on the earliest date is unlikely to succeed; the more realistic strategy is usually to reserve the limitation defence for trial, where the court can weigh the plaintiff’s account against contemporaneous documents and the defendant’s own evidence.
For litigants with property spread across more than one state, the judgment shows that territorial jurisdiction objections under Section 21 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 are waivable, and that a defendant’s waiver can bind the shape of the suit going forward — a plaintiff cannot necessarily retreat from an out-of-state property once the opposing side has agreed to litigate it in the chosen forum. Clients anticipating partition litigation across states should weigh, at the outset, whether consolidating all properties into a single suit is preferable to fragmenting the dispute across courts.
5. Conclusion
Bajoria v. Bajoria does not announce a new rule of property law; it is a careful application of settled limitation and pleading principles to a familiar fact pattern — a family business that fractures, leaving co-owned property in dispute years later. Its value lies in the clarity of that application: distinguishing joint family property from ordinary co-ownership for limitation purposes, explaining why Article 113’s silence on which triggering event counts gives a plaintiff room to point to the last in a series of incidents rather than the first, and reaffirming that a plaint’s own narrative — read as a whole rather than dissected at its opening line — will usually defeat an attempt to have a partition suit thrown out before trial. For practitioners handling the partition of jointly acquired, rather than inherited, family property, it is a useful, current illustration of how much can turn on whether a plaint tells its story as a single dated event or as an unfolding sequence.
Citations and sources
Primary source
- Kamal Kumar Badriprasad Bajoria and Another v. Bimal Kumar Badriprasad Bajoria and Another, Bombay High Court, Ordinary Original Civil Jurisdiction, Notice of Motion No. 1 of 2019 and Interim Application No. 2725 of 2026, in Suit No. 245 of 2017, Coram: S.M. Modak, J., decided 24 August 2026. Full text retrieved from Indian Kanoon: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/73708364/ (accessed 26 August 2026).
Authorities cited in the judgment
- Krishna Pillai Rajasekharan Nair (Dead) by LRs v. Padmanabha Pillai (Dead) by LRs and Others, (2004) 12 SCC 754 (limitation for partition suits under the residuary article).
- Syed Shah Ghulam Ghouse Mohiuddin and Others v. Syed Shah Ahmed Mohiuddin Kamisul Quadri (Died) and Others, (1971) 1 SCC 597 (cause of action for partition as a perpetually recurring one).
- Dattatraya Digambar Panchwadkar and Others v. Prabhakar Ramkrishna Panchwadkar and Another, (1963) SCC OnLine Bom 104 (continuation of joint family status absent ouster).
- Chandra Kishore Chakravarty v. Biseswar Par and Another, XXXII Calcutta Weekly Notes 291, Appeal No. 489 of 1925, decided 28 July 1927 (distinction between exclusion and ouster).
- Ashabai wd/o Rambhau Awachat and Others v. Madhusudan s/o Rajaram Chourasia, 2017 (5) Mh.L.J. (maintainability of a second partition suit after dismissal of the first).
- Vidya Devi alias Vidya Vati (Dead) by LRs v. Prem Prakash and Others, (1995) 4 SCC 496 (absence of a prescribed limitation period for partition of a co-bhumidhari holding under the Delhi Land Reforms Act).
- Daya Singh and Another v. Gurdev Singh (Dead) by LRs and Others, (2010) 2 SCC 194 (whether a pleaded event gives rise to the cause of action is a mixed question of fact and law).
- Shakti Bhog Food Industries Ltd. v. Central Bank of India, 2020 (17) SCC 260 (interpretation of “when the right to sue accrues” under Article 113 of the Limitation Act, 1963, contrasted with Articles 58, 59 and 104).
- M/s Sree Surya Developers and Promoters v. N. Sailesh Prasad and Others, (2022) 5 SCC 736 (clever drafting cannot manufacture a cause of action to defeat a limitation bar).
- Sneh Lata Goel v. Pushplata and Others, (2019) 3 SCC 594 (objection to territorial jurisdiction under Section 21 CPC must ordinarily be raised at the earliest opportunity, and may be waived).
Legislation
- Limitation Act, 1963 — Article 110 (suits for possession of immovable property based on exclusion from a joint family property); Article 113 (residuary article; three years from when the right to sue accrues); Article 120 of the Limitation Act, 1908 (predecessor residuary article, six years).
- Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 — Order VII Rule 11(d) (rejection of plaint where the suit is barred by law); Order II Rule 2 (bar to splitting claims); Order XXIII Rule 1(3) (leave to withdraw with liberty to file afresh); Section 21 (objections to place of suing).
This article is not legal advice and does not create an attorney–client relationship. Readers should verify the certified copy of the judgment and any subsequent clarificatory orders before relying on it, and consult a qualified advocate on the facts of their matter.