“I am unable to accept this argument. The object of issuing a summons is to inform the party, against whom a suit has been instituted, of the fact that there is a suit against him, and if he so chooses, he may come and defend it. If that be the object of a summons, and if, for no fault of his own, a defendant was never put in a position to know that a suit had been instituted against him, whatever steps may have been taken for serving the summons on him, these steps can never be accepted as amounting to “due service”. When an order for substituted service is made by a court, on the representation of a plaintiff, only one side is present before the court and it acts on the representation of one party. Obviously it should be open to the defendant when he appears, to show that the method employed was not calculated to effect the purpose which the court had in view, namely, informing the defendant of the institution of the suit. If this is so, the court has to consider, in view of all the circumstances of the case, for example, the place where the defendant was when the summons was issued to him, where and how the summons was served, and so on, in order to see whether there was due service. For example, if a man has gone to Burma to earn a living and he has relations at home with whom he is in constant touch, and the summons is served on the defendant by affixation of a copy of it on the outer door of his house, it may be open to the court to infer that the service was good, it being expected that the defendant's close relations, living jointly with him in the same house, would inform him of the case. Again, where it is found that the defendant knew that a suit was likely to come and, in order that a summons may not be served on him, he leaves the place, it may be open to the court to hold that there was due service by substitution. On the other hand, if the defendant went, say, to Burma to earn a living and left no one at home, which remained vacant, and at the instance of the plaintiff a substituted service was ordered by publication of the fact of the institution of the suit in a paper published, say, at Aligarh, where the suit was instituted, the court would be in a position to hold that there was no due service.
