Vidhara

The Indian Contract Act, 1872

§57Reciprocal promise to do things legal, and also other things illegal

Where persons reciprocally promise, firstly, to do certain things which are legal, and, secondly, under specified circumstances, to do certain other things which are illegal, the first set of promises is a contract, but the second is a void agreement. Illustration A and B agree that A shall sell B a house for 10,000 rupees, but that, if B uses it as a gambling house, he shall pay A 50,000 rupees for it. The first set of reciprocal promises, namely, to sell the house and to pay 10,000 rupees for it, is a contract. The second set is for an unlawful object, namely, that B may use the house as a gambling house, and is a void agreement.

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Official text: India Code (official)

Official India Code text: The Indian Contract Act, 1872 (9 of 1872), English PDF (bitstream 123456789/2187/2/A187209.pdf, 568,075 bytes) fetched directly from indiacode.nic.in (Akamai edge, DNS via dns.google) on 2026-07-16. Extracted via pdftotext 26.07 -bbox and @nexlex/ingest inline parser. Automated parse; footnotes/amendment history excluded; illustrations restored via illustration-aware re-extraction on 2026-07-19; spot-verified; full clause-level proofread pending. Sections 2-3 repaired 2026-07-25 by re-extraction from the same source PDF (568,075 bytes, sha256 d756d45a…): a page-10 footnote block had been absorbed into s.2, splitting definitions (b)-(j) into s.3 and leaving s.3's own provision missing (D-027).

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