PAVADAI PATHAN Vs. RAMASWAMI CHETTY

JUDGEMENT

(1.) I feel no doubt that the Subordinate Judge was right in treating a lease of lands for growing casuarina trees to be used for fuel as a lease for agricultural purposes within the meaning of Section 117 of the Transfer of Property Act.

(2.) With due deference while accepting that the case was rightly decided, I am unable to follow the opinion of Bhashyam Aiyangar J. in Murugesa Chetti V/s. Chinnathambi Goundan (1901) I.L.R. 24 Mad. 421 that the word "agricultural" in its more general sense comprehends the raising of vegetables, fruits and other garden products as food for man and beast, if the learned Judge intended thereby to limit it to the raising of food products. For to so restrict the word would be to exclude flower, indigo, cotton, jute, flax, tobacco and other such cultivation. For the purpose of that particular case, which related to a lease of betel gardens, considering the policy of favouring agriculture, upon finding that they produced a form of food, the connection between agriculture and the production of food may have seemed important, but such a limitation is not supported by the definition of agriculture in the Oxford Dictionary which is "the science and art of cultivating the soil, tillage, husbandry, farming (in the widest sense)". This dictionary notes that a meaning restricted to tillage is rare. In Bouvier's Law Dictionary "agriculture" is the cultivation of soil for food products or any other useful or valuable growths of the field or gardlen.

(3.) Anderson's Dictionary of Law quoted by the learned Judge is not available, for verifying whether the growing of other than food crops was intended by the author to be excluded.