Purushothaman Nambudiri vs The State Of Kerala on 5 December, 1961
3. The argument before us has proceeded, on all hands, on the footing that before the issue of what is known as the Royal Proclamation of 1040 M. E. by the Maharaia of Travancore, the holders of pandarapattam lands--what the term means is lands held on pandarapattam and what is really material is the nature of the holding--were mere tenants at will having no proprietary rights whatsoever in the land, the full proprietary rights
vesting in the Sirkar or the Government as distinguished from the Maharaia in
his personal capacity. (This is quite in keeping with what is stated in paragraph 9 of the Settlement Proclamation of 1061 M. E., namely, that those lands were originally the absolute property of Government, the tenants being mere tenants at will, but that, by the Royal Proclamation of 1040, Government generously waived all right to those lands and declared them to be the private, heritable, saleable, property of the holders. But it is not quite in keeping with the observations of Rajagopala Ayyangar J. in Purushothaman v. State of Kerala, AIR 1962 SC 694 at p. 714, where, as a matter of construction of the Proclamation of 1040, his Lordship said that the Proclamation speaks of the re-linquishment or withdrawal of the right of the State and not of the conferment of a right on the ryot so as to render the ryot a grantee from the State, just in line with the Hindu Law theory of the proprietorship of the soil vesting in the occupant-cultivator). We are of the view that if, as held in 1962 Ker LT 913 = (AIR 1963 Ker 86 FB), the lands in question are not caught by the body of the definition as answering the local equivalent of the expression, "estate", they can hardly escape the claws of Clause (ii) of the inclusive limb of the definition as lands held under ryotwari settlement.