DR. AMBEDKAR AND THE HINDU CODE BILL 261
as they were codifying the law, it is desirable not to allow any room for customs to grow, because the effect of customs being permitted would be to eat into
the Code and make the Code after certain time null and void. Therefore, the Select Committee decided that if anybody wants to adopt under this Code, nobody can make any adoption except in accordance with the provisions of
this Code, and Dattaka shall be the only form and no other.
Then, Sir, we come to the question of the right of the adopted boy to
divest the persons in whom property has been invested before the adoption takes place. As every member of this House, who is aware of the provisions of the Hindu Law, will know, under the existing Hindu law, it is permissible
to a boy who has been adopted, no matter at what stage he has been adopted— he may have been adopted forty years after the death of the father—time makes no change at all in his rights—to file a suit to set aside any alienation
or transfer of property made by the widow who has adopted him. Any amount of litigation goes on on this particular point. In fact, if anyone were to examine the total amount of litigation among the Hindus on the various points of Hindu
law, I am sure they will find that litigation on the question of divesting the property by the adopted boy would be the largest volume. It is therefore desirable that this matter should be settled once and for all. The Rau
committee adopted the procedure of dividing adoption into two categories— adoption made three years before the death of the father and the coming into operation of the Code: and adoption made after the Code. They laid down that
a boy, if he was adopted three years before the death of the adoptive father would be entitled to the original rights which an adopted son had under the Hindu Code. But if he were adopted three years after he would not
be entitled to set aside alienation.
The second thing that happened as a result of adoption under the
Hindu Law was that he completely divested the widowed mother who made the adoption, with the result that the entire corpus of the property passed into the hands of the adopted boy, who, in a certain sense
was a stranger, and notwithstanding the notional change that he entered into the family of the adopted father, he practically continued his affiliations with the members of the natural family. The result was
that after the adoption had taken place, instead of the adopting mother getting any kind of security for hereself as a result of adoption which a natural mother would get from a natural son, she found that this
new adopted boy ran away with the property and left the mother with