PASUPULETI KRISHNAMURTHI Vs. ANNADASU BAPANAYYA AND ORS.

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THESE two L.P. Appeals have been preferred against the Judgment of Umamaheswaram, J., in two Second Appeals S.A. No. 2517 of 1952 and S.A. No. 804 of 1953 affirming the decision of the Courts below decreeing the suit. The first defendant is the appellant in one of the appeals and the second defendant, the State of Andhra, represented by the Collector of Guntur, is the appellant in the other, though the contentions of the parties in both the appeals are the same. The plaintiffs sued as representing the inhabitants of Erikalapudi, a hamlet of Gudivada village, for a declaration that an assignment of 3 acres 60 cents of poramboke land in D. No. 493 by the second defendant (now the State of Andhra) in favour of the first defendant, a "political sufferer", does not affect the rights of the plaintiffs to use the land as a Mandabayalu for their cattle, for threshing corn, boiling and drying turmeric and as a playground for school boys and for an injunction restraining the defendants from interfering with the exercise of these rights. In the plaint the rights claimed by the plaintiffs were ascribed to a lost grant, prescription or custom. Their case was that D. No. 493 originally formed part of the Gramakantam of the hamlet of Pasupuletivaripalem, that owing to a cyclone that occurred about 85 years ago the villagers left the hamlet and settled in the adjoining hamlet of Erikalapudi, that after their migration the land comprised in D. No. 493 was used by the villagers as Mandabayulu and for other communal purposes, that the Government had recognised such user by recording the land as Mandabayulu or cattle stand poramboke in the revenue register in 1914 and that it was not now open, to the Government to assign the land to the first defendant in derogation of the rights over the land acquired by the villagers of Erikalapudi.

(2.) THE only two questions that were argued and that fell to be determined in the Second Appeals were thus formulated by the learned Judge:

(3.) THE learned Judge came to the conclusion that the plaintiffs had proved a customary right to use the land "for the several communal purposes set out in the plaint" - -though it is clear that the right could not have been exercised before 1873. In Lakshmidar Misra. v. Ranglal : ILR 29 Pat 1: (AIR 1950 PC 56) (A), the Judicial Committee dealing with a customary right of cremation on a particular land in a village observed: