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.
In so far as the present case was concerned, the 1863 register prepared by the then Inam Commissioner G.N. Taylor did not mention the exact extent of land gifted to the temple. Such absence of details gains significance in the light of the fact that Meenakshi Sundareswarar Devasthanam was one of the seven temples to which Viralipatti village had been granted as Devadayam and those temples were collectively identified as Hafta Devasthanam, the Bench said.
Further, the Madura Country Manual compiled by J.H. Nelson in 1868 states that Revenue Board member Hudgson had toured the entire Madura province and come up with an exhaustive report according to which only 45.93 acres of land in Viralipatti village had been classified as Inam land. A combined reading of the manual and the Inam Fair Register entries make it clear that a substantial portion of land was virgin and not brought under cultivation, the Bench added.
Authoring the verdict, Justice Jayachandran also wrote that it was “the British government, eager to earn revenue, which was under the pursuit of encouraging ryots to carry on plantation activity in the area and same had been reflected in the Madura Country Manual. J.H. Nelson, had also observed in the manual that indiscriminating felling of trees by encroachers for cultivating plantain, which was very popular in that area, had to be regulated.”
Therefore, in the light of these facts and in the absence of any concrete evidence in its favour, the Devasthanam could not claim that the entire village had been given as Devadayam to it. “Neither the temple which has laid the suit through its Executive Officer nor the members of the farmers association have come out with a clear case about the exact extent of land that they hold. For the said vagueness itself, their suits were liable to be dismissed,” the Bench concluded.
