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"According to the Mitakshara law as applied in all the states, no coparcener can dispose of his undivided interest in coparcenery property by gift. Such transaction being void altogether there is no estoppel or other kind of personal bar which precludes the donor from asserting his right to recover the transferred property."

(III) 1980 MADRAS LAW JOURNAL REPORTS 507  DURAI ALIAS KARUNANIDHI V. D. DEVARAJALU NAIDU AND 10 OTHERS, an excerpt from it would run thus:

"9. However, a Hindu father or other managing member has no power to make a gift except within reasonable limits of ancestral immovable properties and that too only for pious purposes. According to the Mithakshara law, as applied in all the States, no coparcener can dispose of his undivided interest in coiparcenary property by gift. Such transaction being void altogether there is no estoppel or other kind of personal bar which precludes the donor from asserting his right to recover the transferred property. He may, however, make a gift of his own interest with the consent of the other coparceners. (see paragraph 258 of Mulla's Hindu Law 14th edition). In Ratnasabapathi Pillai and another v. Saraswathi Anmmal', a Bench of the court went into this problem and in the course of the judgment referred to a decision of Venkatappa v. Raghavayya. In the last mentioned case, a gift deed was executed by the plaintiff for himself and on behalf of his minor son in favour of a stranger, conveying an item of joint family property. The plaintiff thereafter instituted a suit contending that the deed of gift was void and praying for a declaration that it was not valid in law and enforceable. Raghava Rao J., who decided the case in this Court, referred to the earlier decisions on the subject, and observed that the well recognised common law maxim that a man shall not derogate from his own grant had no application to a case in which the personal law of the parties rendered altogether void a grant by him which must, therefore, be treated in the eye of the law as altogether non est, and there being no rights created by a void transaction of that kind, there was no estoppel or any other kind of personal bar akin thereto, which precluded the plaintiff from asserting his right to recover. An exception to this proposition was, however, pointed out at page 462 of the report Ratnasabapathy Pillai and another v. Saraswathi Ammal, as follows: