The Meenakshi Sundareswarar Devasthanam in Madurai has lost a case claiming title over 3,009.84 acres of land at Viralipatti village on the foothills of Sirumalai. The Madras High Court has refused to rely upon a Year 1863 report of the Inam Commissioner for declaring the entire land to be Devadayam (gifted to God) by the erstwhile ruler Tirumalai Nayakkar and upheld the declaration of the property as a reserve forest by the State government in 1977.
Justices G. Jayachandran and K.K. Ramakrishnan allowed an appeal suit filed by the State government, through the Collector and the Chief Conservator of Forests, in 2008 and set aside an order passed by an Additional District Court on March 12, 2008 in favour of the Meenakshi Sundareswarar Devasthanam and Sirumalai Thenmalai Malaithotta Vivasayigal Sangam, an association of farmers to whom the lands had been reportedly leased out.
The temple had contended that the entire extent of 3,009.84 acres were Inam lands and therefore they ought not to have been included in the reserve forest notification issued in 1977 and confirmed in 1995. The judges agreed that the Inam Fair Register entries have high evidentiary value and they could not be disregarded. However, such entries in the register must be accepted in conjunction with other documents as held by the Supreme Court, they said.
