1923 (6) TMI 1

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..... date fixed, earlier or later, they would be able to clear off more encumbrances or fewer. Now, to ascertain the date at which a particular holding first began, to be held as a definite holding, is essentially a question of fact, and must depend on evidence. That evidence may be, and naturally, documentary, but the documents admitted in evidence upon, that question are really historical materials, and although they have to be construed, and if possible understood, they are not to be treated as involving issues of law merely because they have to be Construed. It is not as though they were being construed as instruments of title, or were contracts or Statutes, or otherwise the direct foundation of rights. 3. The Subordinate Judge who tried .....

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..... could sufficiently in for from the contents of the ruffinama and from some previous documents of earlier date. He came to the conclusion that there was at that time a dispute, the gist of which was, whether the tenant was right in claiming that all the land of which he was in possession was held on ghatwali tenure, or whether the zamindar was right in contending that but a small portion at that land was held on ghatwali tenure and the rest was really mal land. This is the dispute which was compromised in the ruffinama; and the conclusion which the District Judge, agreeing therein with the Subordinate Judge, arrived at was that upon that occasion the parties solved this dispute by deciding that the amount of ghatwali land was less than it wa .....

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..... h Court upon it. The suggestion is that it can be made to appear clearly from the construction of the documents prior to the ruffinama that the present tenure can be dated earlier than the 6th March 1884. That appears to their lordships to be nothing but a contention that a different conclusion of fact might have been drawn from those documents. 6. The other way of putting the matter is to say that on the construction of the ruffinama itself, it negatives the view taken that this under-tenure was first created at that date. Their Lordships do not wish to be understood as agreeing with that view of the contents of the ruffinama, but again the construction of it is merely the weighing of a particular piece of evidence expressed in that par .....

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