JUDGMENT

KRISHNA IYER, J.:—This appeal, by special leave, from the judgment of a Single Judge of the Calcutta High Court raises a single legal issue with human overtones. The State of West Bengal is the appellant at this the forth and final deck of the judicial pyramid; having won the case as the 5th defendant at the earlier stages of the litigation but lost in the High Court. The question, shortly put, is whether the vesting of estates in the State under Sections 3, 4 and 5 of the West Bengal Estates Acquisition Act, 1953 (West Bengal Act 1 of 1954) (abbreviated for reference hereinafter as the Act) extinguishes the right of cattle grazing enjoyed by villagers in the grasslands of such estates on the ground that such right amounts to incimbrance within Section 2 (h) of the Act.

The facts:

2. An estate in villagers Vadurepati Madhabpur in the district of Hooghly was among those vested in the State on a notification under Section 4 of the Act, free from all encumbrances as provided in Sections 4 and 5. The plaintiffs - respondents are some of the denizens of the said village and, in this representative action, claim that the agrarian community there have always enjoyed the right of pasturage over the suit estate and pray for the relief of injunction restraining the 5th defendant-appellant from interfering with the excercise of the right to graze, as enjoyed before. The State, however, denies the survival of such a right even if it did exist on the score that the fatal impact of Section 5 has terminated all incumbrances on the estate and the right to graze cattle belonging to the villagers is but an incumbrance as defined in Section 2(h) of the Act. Thus the bone of contention between the parties is whether the collective claim of the villagers to graze their cattle on an estate vested in the State under the Act falls within the definition of incumbrance. If it does, the suit deserves to be dismissed but, if it does not, High Courts view is correct and the case has to be sent back for consideration on the merits. We may mention, for completeness sake, that defendants 1 to 4 are persons in whom the estate has been allegedly settled by the State, although this position is not clear or perhaps is denied by the State itself.

3. The issue, in a nut-shell, is as to what is an incumbrance. But this question, in the light of the definition which we will presently reproduce resolves itself into two issues which will be self-evident as we read the provision :

"2. In this Act unless there is anything repugnant in the subject or context,-

x x x x x x

(h) incumbrance in relation to estates and rights of intermediaries therein does not include the rights of a raiyat or of an under-raiyat or of a non-agricultural tenant, but shall, except in the case of land allowed to be retained by an intermediary under the provisions of Section 6, include all rights or interests of whatever nature, belonging to intermediaries or other persons, which relate to lands comprised in estates or to the produce thereof."

And so the two gut questions are :

(i) whether a right to graze cattle in the estate of another falls within the sweep of the comprehensive expression "all rights or interests of whatever nature; and

(ii) whether the members of a village as a collective, though fluctuating body, are covered by the words intermediaries or other persons.

4. While the two Courts at the ground and first-floor level decided the two points abovementioned in favour of the State, the High Court, after a long and discursive discussion, the labyrinthine course of which need not be traversed by us, reached the conclusion that the right in question was a public right belonging to an unspecified and varying group - not a specific private interest vesting in specified persons - and therefore left untouched by Section 2 (h). Is that view sustainable on a correct construction of the provision?

5. Putting a literal and teleological construction on the definition of incumbrance we have hardly