The Officiating Chief Justice.-

These Letters Patent Appeals arise out of a decision of Shahabuddin, J., in a batch of second appeals concerning a number of plots situated in a large block of village site claimed to be the property of the minor plaintiff. The appellants are the defendants. One Sivanupandia Thevar, who died in 1897 was the owner of an estate known as “the Pannai estate” which is alleged to comprise amongst other things the western portion of S.No. 340, which is part of the village site or gramanatham. He left three daughters, Muthammal, who died in 1924, Ponnammal who seems to have died before 1909 and Madipillai Ammal who died in 1928. Ponnammal had a daughter who also died long ago leaving a son Murugiah Thevar. In 1927, there was a partition of the estate between Madipillai Ammal, Sangathal, the daughter of the deceased Muthammal, and Murugiah, the grandson of the deceased Ponnammal. By the partition arrangement the property with which we are now concerned was handed over to Murugiah Thevar. A curious factor in this case is that it was the practice of the ladies who enjoyed this estate to give it on lease to a lessee called the kattukuthagaidar who will be referred to hereafter as the intermediate lessee. He paid a lump sum rent both for the privilege of cultivating the cultivable lands and also for the privilege of collecting the rents from the various house sites comprised in the village site number. But the occupants of these house sites were given leases in the name of one or more of the actual proprietors so that they were not sub-lessees of the intermediate lessee who collected the rents. After this partition arrangement had been made, the surviving daughter of Sivanupandia Thevar, Madipillai Ammal adopted her daughter’s son, the plaintiff, who was then a young child and after making this adoption she died sometime in 1928.

The legal position at the time of her death was that the property with which we are now concerned was held by Murugiah under a partition arrangement which was good so long as Madipillai Ammal was alive but would not bind the plaintiff as the reversioner of the estate of his adopted mother’s father. It was however sometime before the plaintiff’s protectors realised the necessity for taking action. Eventually the District Court appointed a guardian for the minor plaintiff and in 1932 a suit was filed against Murugiah and Sangathal, the daughter of the eldest sister Muthammal, claiming recovery of the estate. In this suit, the tenants of the house sites were not impleaded as parties, but the intermediate lessee was. The suit was decreed in 1935.

The facts vary slightly with reference to each of the properties covered by these various suits; but we do not think it necessary to set forth those details which have been fully stated in the judgment of the first appellate Court. It is sufficient to say that in all the appeals there was some sort of a document of lease from an estate; but in two of the cases these leases were unregistered and in two other cases the leases were actually given in the time of Murugiah after the death of the plaintiff’s adopted mother. But it would appear that all the properties with which we are concerned were originally held by somebody or other (not always a relative of the defendant concerned) under a tenancy created by the proprietor of the Pannai estate at some time before the trouble arose. Most of the registered leases expired long ago. It also seems to be established that Murugiah was in actual possession of the landlord’s interest with reference to all these plots since the partition in 1927 even after the death of Madipillai Ammal in 1928, and that the intermediate lessee went on collecting the rents without recognising the plaintiff as the real owner of the estate. The rents seem to have been paid in nearly every case up to 1932, when the litigation started. There is no positive evidence that the intermediate lessee was recognising Murugiah as his lessor

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