DR. AMBEDKAR AND THE HINDU CODE BILL 265
Then I come to the question of the joint family. It has been said that the provisions contained in the Bill as it has emerged from the Select Committee
contained provisions relating to joint family which are absolutely new. I would like to take this occasion to repudiate that suggestion. No change has been
done by the Select Committee. The provisions of the Mitakshara joint family were originally contained in the Bill as drafted by the Rau Committee and it was placed before this House on the 9th August, which the House accepted
and sent to the Select Committee. ( Honourable Members: 9th April) Therefore my first submission is that no new change has been made by this Select
Committee. All that the Select Committee has done is to add two new clauses— clause No. 88 and clause No. 89. Clause 88 deals with the doctrine of what is called pious obligations. Clause 89 deals with the liability of the joint family
to pay joint family debts. It was unnecessary to include these clauses, because once you break up coparcenary property it is not necessary to make any express
provision with regard to the doctrine of pious obligation, because the doctrine of pious obligation is necessary where there is survivorship property : because by survivorship where A takes the property of B and the property of B is
encumbered with debts, no special doctrine is necessary to impose an obligation upon B; because in hereditament which a person gets, he takes both the profit
and the burden of it. But in view of the theory of the Mitakshara that every coparcener gets the property by survivorship, which does not belong to the deceased, the Patna high Court, if I may say so, as well as the Bombay High
Court Bar pressed upon us very strongly that it was very desirable that these two things which were implicit, so to say, in the Mitakshara doctrine of
joint family, shall be stated expressly in the Code, so that when the question of judicial interpretation arises there may be no occasion for any kind of dispute, doubt or controversy. As one of the objects of the code was to make
the law clear not merely to the lawyers but to the ordinary citizens and as it is a suggestion which came from such a weighty authority as the
Patna High Court and the Bombay High Court Bar, we thought it desirable to introduce these two things, namely no obligation to pay debts on the original ground of pious obligation and the liability to pay primary debts
which belong to the family. Besides that there has been no change at all. If my friends have some doubt still on the subject that we have made
fundamental changes in regard to the joint family of the mitakshara,