AMBALAVANA PANDNRA SANNADHI AVERGAL Vs. SREEMINAKSHY SUNDARESWARAL DEVASTANAM, THROUGH ITS MANAGER PSANANTHANARAYANA AIYAR

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This is a suit brought by the Pandara Sannadhi of the Tiruvaduthurai Mutt against the Manager of the Madura temple, and the temple Committee of the Madura District to recover possession with mesne profits of four villages as Hukdar or Trustee of the Thanappa Mudaly Kattalai or endowment for the performance of certain ceremonies in the Madura temple, and for an injunction restraining the defendants from interfering with him in the discharge of his duties. The District Judge has found that he has not shown that he was ever entitled to possession and also that his suit is barred. With the latter conclusion I agree, but as the case may not stop hare, and has been very fully argued, I propose to state my reasons for differing from the conclusions at which the District Judge has arrived on the facts. It may well be that in the opinion of those best qualified to Judge the Manager appointed by the temple committee would be a much more satisfactory trustee of the endowment than the plaintiff but this of course is not a matter which can affect our judgment as to the effect of the evidence. The judgment of the District Judge contains an elaborate examination of the voluminous documentary evidence in the case, but fails altogether in my opinion to recognise the strength of the plaintiff s case upon facts which are either admitted or proved beyond reasonable doubt. It is not disputed that the endowment of the four suit villages, and another which has ceased to belong to it, was founded by one Thanappa Mudaly whose name it bears long before Madura came under the Government of the East India Company at the beginning of the nineteenth century. According to the tradition he was a minister of the ruling Nayak at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It is also not disputed that the donors of endowments such as this for temple purposes were in the habit of appointing separate trustees, or that many such endowments in different temples in Southern India were entrusted to the predecessors of the plaintiff Pandarasannadhi and were managed by him through the Agency of Thambirans, as his ascetic followers are called, who resided in mutts belonging to him in the neighbour hood of the temples in question. He has been compared in one of the cases to a Bishop, but his position more resembles that of an abbot of a monastery with dependant priories or mutts in different parts of India, many of them in charge of a single ascetic or Thambiran.

(2.) There is one such mutt at Madura which bears an inscription shewing that it was presented to the mutt by Chockalinga Mudaliar son of Koneriappa Mudaly son of Thanappa Mudaly, or by all three persons as the words son of are not in the original. This shows that the Pandarasannadhis were the gurus or religious superiors of the family and makes it exceedingly likely that the founder or his heirs should have entrusted this endowment according to a very usual practice to the care of the Pandarasannadhi, more especially as during the time of the Nayaks there does not seem to have been any temple trustee and the general management of the temple seems to have been in the hands of the Government itself.

(3.) Down to the present time a Thambiran appointed by the plaintiff and residing at the mutt performs the duties of Vicharanai or manager of the Kattalai as regards the ceremonial observances, and it is not disputed that his office is vested in the plaintiff and discharged on his behalf by one of the Thambirans. There is no reason for doubting that his possession of this office goes back far beyond the introduction of the Company s Government either to the time of the founder or of his grandson who built the mutt, and the fact that in the accounts at the beginning of last century H series the word Vicharanai is used in connection with the management of the property of the endowment as well as the ceremonies, suggests that both were in the hands of the Thambiran as agent of the Pandarasannadhi. All that is in question in the present suit is his right to possession of the four suit villages which admittedly originally formed part of the endowment and were attached under the Mahomedan Government and retained under attachment under the Company s rule. His case is that they were in his possession when first attached and that whilst under attachment they were held on his behalf, and there are strong grounds for thinking this was the case down to 1849 when the company handed them over to the temple authorities. There are other villages and lands belonging to the endowment which were not attached and which continue in the plaintiff s possession down to the present day. None of these villages or lands are shown to have been acquired subsequently to the introduction of the Company s rule, and the most reasonable explanation to my mind appears to be that they were additions to the original endowment of five villages made from time to time to the Pandarasannadhi for the purposes of the Thanappa Mudaly Kattalai of which he was the trustee. One of these villages is entered in the inam Register as Koneriappa Moodaly Kattalai which would point to its having been given by Thanappa Mudaly s son who bore that name (Exhibit A.J.) The District Judge is largely influenced by the fact that these lands and villages have always been in the possession of the plaintiff, whereas the suit villages have never been in his possession since the introduction of the Company s Government in 1801. A simple explanation of this is that those other villages and lands escaped attachment under the Mahomedan Government, whereas the suit villages did not.