BHASKAR GOPAL Vs. PADMAN HIRA CHOWDHARI

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The suit in which this appeal arises was brought in ejectment, and the plaintiff made title on a registered sale-deed executed to him in 1910 by the widow and daughters of Rama, the original owner of the property. The defendants resisted the suit on the ground that they were tenants of Rama prior to the year 1909 and that in the year 1909 the property was sold to them for Rs. 50 by Rama s widow. Admittedly this sale deed was not registered, but the defendants contention was that no registration was necessary, since the value of the property was under Rs. 100. The lower appellate Court has decided in the plaintiff s favour, relying upon the case of Sibendrapada Banerjee v. Secretary of State for India in Council (1907) 34 Cal. 207 where a certain parcel of land, having been transferred to the Public Works Department for a sum less than Rs. 100 without any registered instrument, the Secretary of State for India in Council sued the defendants to recover possession of the land, and, upon objection taken that the plaintiff acquired no title to the property inasmuch as the transfer upon which he relied contravened Section 54 of the Transfer of Property Act, the Court held that since the transfer was not made by registered instrument and since the plaintiff had been in prior occupation, there could not be said to have been any delivery of possession within the meaning of Section 54 of the Transfer of Property Act, and the plaintiff consequently acquired no title by the transfer. No specific reasons are, however, given by the learned Judges for this decision which I have some difficulty in following. It is not, however, necessary for me further to consider the authority of this case, because on another ground, I think that the defendants- appellants must fail.

(2.) Section 54 of the Transfer of Property Act provides that, in the case of tangible immoveable property of a value less than Rs. 100, transfer by way of sale may be made either by a registered instrument or by delivery of the property. But the section draws a sharp distinction between tangible immoveable property and a reversion or other intangible thing. The defendants contend that the thing sold to them was the tangible house, which indeed purported to be the object of the sale. But it is clear that the vendor could not sell any higher interest than she possessed, and as at the date of the sale she had transferred possession to the defendants who were in possession as her tenants, I am of opinion that the only interest which remained in the vendor was the reversion within the meaning of that term as used in Section 54. That, so far as I am aware, is the only interest in the property which remains with a landlord after he has leased the immoveable property to tenants and has made over possession to them. The word is used in this sense in Woodfall s Law of Landlord and Tenant and also in Lord Halsbury s Laws of England, Vol. XVIII, paragraph 766 under the title "Landlord and Tenant." This use is in conformity with the definition contained in Stroud s Judicial Dictionary where a "reversion" is described as "the undisposed of interest in land which reverts to the grantor after the exhaustion of the particular estates,--e.g., for years, for life, or in tail,--which he may have created."

(3.) I think, therefore, that in this case as the sale was in law a sale of a reversion, it could, under Section 54 of the Transfer of Property Act, be effected only by a registered instrument. That being so, there was no legal sale to the defendants and the lower Court was right in decreeing the plaintiff s suit.