The main legal point established in the judgment is the interpretation of 'actual possession' under Section 145 of the Criminal Procedure Code and its application in disputes over land.

Pandrang Row, J.

1. These revision cases arise out of an order passed by the Joint Magistrate of Narsapur Division on the 17th June, 1937, under Section 145 of the Criminal Procedure Code, regarding a dispute about a large extent of land which was till recently jungle or waste but has since been included in an irrigation project and has consequently increased in value. The dispute was between the Zamindar of Gazzavaram and Kalipatnam Estates and Mr. Addepalli Venkataraman, the first respondent in the Court below, who describes himself as a Barrister of the Inns of Court at Dublin and an Advocate of this Court and others who claim under the first respondent. The first respondent himself claimed the land in dispute under a document which according to him is a perpetual lease executed in his favour by the petitioner Zamindar in 1923. The Magistrate found that actual possession was with the petitioner, and passed orders declaring that the petitioner is in possession and forbidding all disturbance of such possession by the other party. The first respondent is the petitioner in Criminal Revision Case No. 383 of 1937 and the third respondent who claims under him as a tenant is the petitioner in Criminal Revision Case No. 382 of 1937. The Criminal Miscellaneous Petition is by the first respondent objecting to certain remarks made against him in the order of the Magistrate and praying that they should be expunged.

2. The only point which has been pressed in the revision petition is that the Magistrate acted irregularly and in fact, in disregard of the law, in not allowing the first respondent to adduce all the evidence which he wanted to adduce in support of his claim. The third respondent also raises the same point though it is not his case that he was not permitted to adduce all the evidence which he wanted to adduce; in other respects, there is no attack on the Magistrates jurisdiction or on the procedure followed by him during the enquiry. The learned Magistrate after examining the first respondent found that the first respondent was admittedly not in possession of the land in dispute and therefore did not allow him to adduce any further evidence and thereby protract the enquiry needlessly. If, as a matter of fact, the first respondent was admittedly not in possession of the land in dispute or any portion thereof, it cannot be said that the refusal to take further evidence on his behalf has resulted in any failure of justice, because, when the claimant himself has admittedly no case, any number of witnesses cannot improve upon it. It is however argued by Mr. Grant that the admission made by the first respondent has been misunderstood by the learned Magistrate, and that this mis-understanding also shared by the first respondent himself when he made the admission; in other words, according to Mr. Grant, when the first respondent admitted that he was not in possession for some time before the preliminary order of the Magistrate, what he meant was that he was not himself in actual physical possession and that he did not intend to abandon his claim to actual possession based on the actual possession which, according to him, was with his tenants. Whether such ignorance of law on the part of the first respondent, who is a Barrister-at law, can be said to be excusable is doubtful. The evidence of the first respondent shows that a good portion of the land had been sold by him, and he could not have reasonably believed that the possession of his vendee was his possession even in the eye of the law. I think, however, that the first respondent really meant only to admit that he had no actual possession of the land in dispute, and that he did not intend to give up or abandon the claims of those who claimed under him. But that does not mean that he had any real claim to actual possession himself. The words "actual possession" found in Section 145 of the Criminal Procedure Code have been considered in several cases and one of such cases is Agn