Interpretation of Inam grants and rights under Madras Estates Land Act, specifically the distinction between Melvaram and Kudivaram rights and their impact on the classification of land as an estate.

Sadasiva Aiyar, J.

1. Plaintiff is the appellant. He is an Inamdar of a village called Billapadu. the Inam grant having been made so long ago as 1748, That village was then a Mouje village, that is, a village in which there were peasant proprietors owning cultivable lands even then. The suit relates to 60 acres out of the 300 acres in that village. For the purposes of this case, it must be taken that these 60 acres were lying as immemorial waste at the time of the Inam grant to plaintiffs ancestors. It is further found by the Lower Appellate Court that these lands were afterwards given by the Inamdar for cultivation from time to time to different sets of tenants without occupancy right. Paragraph 7 of the plaint says " In Fasli 1317 the plaintiff changed the tenant who was in possession prior to that time and leased the schedule mentioned lands to the defendants for only a year. " Treating the one years tenancy as having expired on the 1st of April 1908 the suit was brought to eject the defendants in the District Munsifs Court of Gudivada.

2. The preliminary contention raised by the defendants was that as the plaintiffs inam was an estate falling under Section 3 Clause 2(d) of the Madras Estates Land Act, the Civil Court had no jurisdiction to entertain a suit for the ejectment of defendants from the plaint lands which are ryoti lands in the inam estate. The plaintiffs reply to this contention of the defendants seems to be that the inam itself is not an " estate" under the Estates Land Act, and even if the inam is an estate, these 60 acres either never formed part of the estate or had ceased to form part of the estate and hence the jurisdiction of the civil courts had not been taken away.

3. It has been held in numerous cases that, when a whole village is granted to a non-resident Brahmin as Inam, the presumption is that the grant is only the grant of the melvaram right. The grant of the melvaram right means that the grantee is to receive the melvaram revenue from the peasant proprietors who are already in the enjoyment of the cultivated lands in the village and that, as regards the waste lands in the village, he is entitled to create further melvaram revenue for himself by letting them to cultivating tenants. The District Munsif gave a decree for the plaintiffs in this case, but the District Judge on appeal held that the civil courts jurisdiction was ousted as the plaint lands were part of an " estate " and that the lands have continued to be ryoti lands in the estate, the platntiffs ancestor (the grantee) not having been a holder of the kudivaram at the time of the grant of the melvaram to him. I think that the learned District Judge was right in his conclusions, and that his order directing the plaint to be presented to the Revenue Court is correct.

4. The appellants learned advocate relied upon the observations found in Lakshminarasimha Rao v. Sitaramaswami (1910) 20 M.L.J. 290 and some similar observations in later cases. I dont think these cases go beyond this point, namely, that if it is proved that at the time of the grant of a whole village in inam all the lands in that village were lying waste or if it is proved that at the time of the grant of certain defined extent of lands in a village, (such a grant being called a minor inam grant), that extent of lands so granted as minor inam was lying waste, the grant might be deemed in either case to be not of the melvaram alone in such waste lands but of the kudivaram also. In such a case, of course, even the whole village so granted will not fall under the definition of " Estate" in Section 3, Clause 2(d), because that section relates to cases where the grant was of the melvaram alone. Where the entire lands themselves in the village, as they were lying waste, were granted in inam, it cannot, of course, be said to be a grant of the melwaram alone. But the present case is not such a case. Here the only thing admitted by the defendants is that about 20 per cent of the lan