Definitions — Land, Holder, Bhumiswami, Bhumidhari (Section 2)

The whole architecture of the MP Land Revenue Code, 1959 rests on a handful of defined terms in Section 2 and a single radical proposition in Section 57: every acre of Madhya Pradesh belongs to the State, and every cultivator merely holds it. To read the Code accurately you must keep four ideas distinct — what counts as “land”, what it means to be a “holder”, who is a “tenure-holder” or bhumiswami, and why the old bhumidhari class no longer survives. Get these definitions wrong and every later chapter — record-of-rights, mutation, partition, succession — collapses. This article fixes the vocabulary against the bare provisions and the leading authorities.

The premise: State ownership of all land (Section 57)

Section 2’s definitions only make sense once you grasp Section 57. It declares that all lands in Madhya Pradesh — including standing and flowing water, mines, quarries, minerals and forests reserved or not, and all rights in the sub-soil of any land — are the property of the State Government, subject to a proviso saving rights subsisting at the Code’s commencement on 2 October 1959. The consequence is structural: nobody “owns” land in the absolute Western sense. What a cultivator enjoys is a statutory tenure held from the State. This is precisely why the Code never uses the word “owner” for an agriculturist and instead builds every right around the verb “to hold” and the status of “tenure-holder”. It also explains the Code’s sweep over minerals and water: because the sub-soil and flowing water vest in the State, a bhumiswami’s surface tenure does not by itself carry away the minerals beneath, which remain Government property unless separately granted. The historical reason for so emphatic a declaration — the simultaneous abolition of intermediary proprietors across five merged regions — is traced in Introduction, history and object. Read Section 57 and Section 2 together and the message is plain: the State is the paramount proprietor, and every defined status in the Code measures a person’s relationship to land the State already owns.

"Land" — Section 2(k)

Section 2(k) defines land as “a portion of the earth’s surface whether or not under water; and, where land is referred to in this Code, it shall be deemed to include all things attached to or permanently fastened to any thing attached to such land.” Two limbs matter. First, the surface need not be dry — tanks, river-beds and submerged plots are land. Second, the doctrine of fixtures is imported: a building, a well, a permanently embedded structure becomes part of the land for the Code’s purposes. The corollary, drawn from the general law of immovable property, is that standing timber, growing crops and grass are treated separately and are not “land” in this sense — a distinction the courts have repeatedly drawn when classifying property as movable or immovable, as in Baijnath v. Ramadhar. The expansive definition feeds directly into how a survey number, plot number and holding are demarcated in revenue survey and settlement.

How land is measured: survey number, plot number, holding

Land is administered not as abstract acreage but as numbered units. Section 2(x) defines a survey number as a portion of land in a non-urban area formed into or recognised as such at the last revenue survey, separately entered in the land records under an indicative number — including the khasra number. Section 2(q) gives the urban analogue, the plot number, recognised under Section 93. A sub-division of a survey number (Section 2(w)) is a separately-entered portion subordinate to the parent number. Crucially, Section 2(i) defines a holding as “a parcel of land separately assessed to land revenue and held under one tenure”, and, where a tenant is concerned, a parcel held from a bhumiswami under one lease. The holding — not the man — is the unit of assessment, which is why every entry in the record of rights is organised around it.

Occupied vs unoccupied land — Section 2(z-3)

The Code does not separately define “occupied land”; it defines its residue. Under Section 2(z-3), unoccupied land is “the land in a village other than the abadi or service land, or the land held by a bhumiswami, a tenant or a Government lessee.” By subtraction, occupied land is land held by one of those three holders, together with the abadi — the area reserved for the residence of the village inhabitants under Section 2(a) — and service land. This residual technique matters for the State’s power to allot, lease and regularise vacant village land: anything not lawfully held falls into the unoccupied pool at the State’s disposal, reinforcing the Section 57 premise that the State is the ultimate proprietor and the cultivator merely a holder. The same drafting choice also fixes the boundary of the village itself, because Section 2(z-5) defines a village as any tract recognised or declared as such before the Code, or hereafter recognised at a revenue survey or notified by the State. Practically, unoccupied land is the reservoir from which fresh bhumiswami allotments and Government leases are carved, which is why disputes over whether a parcel was “held” at a given date so often decide title.

What it means to be a "holder"

A point that trips candidates: Section 2 contains no stand-alone clause defining “holder” in the abstract. Instead the Code defines categories of person by reference to how they hold — the bhumiswami (tenure-holder), the tenant, and the Government lessee. Reading the cognate land-revenue codes (the Bombay and Maharashtra Codes, which use materially identical drafting) confirms the settled sense: to hold land is to be lawfully in possession of it, whether that possession is actual or constructive. The Code crystallises this into three named statuses. Section 2(z) defines a tenure-holder as “a person who holds land from the State Government and who is or is deemed to be bhumiswami under the provisions of this Code.” Section 2(y) defines a tenant as a person holding land from a bhumiswami as an occupancy tenant under Chapter XIV. Section 2(h) defines a Government lessee as a person holding land from the State Government under Section 181. Possession alone is not enough; the holding must be referable to one of these statutory pegs, a theme developed in categories of tenants.

Section 157 — only one class of tenure-holder

The defining reform of the 1959 Code is in Section 157: “There shall be only one class of tenure-holders of land held from the State to be known as bhumiswami.” Before the Code, the newly-formed State of Madhya Pradesh — constituted in 1956 by amalgamating the former Mahakoshal, Madhya Bharat, Bhopal, Vindhya Pradesh and Sironj areas — inherited a patchwork of tenures, each region carrying its own vocabulary of pakka tenants, muafidars, inamdars, occupants, pattedars, khatedars and grove-holders. Section 157 abolishes that diversity at a stroke for land held from the State, leaving a single, uniform tenure. This is the conceptual core of the subject and the point examiners test most often: where the older laws spoke of proprietors, sub-proprietors, intermediaries and several graded tenants, the 1959 Code recognises exactly one tenure-holder — the bhumiswami — holding directly from the State, with occupancy tenants holding under him and Government lessees holding on lease. The word “only” in Section 157 is deliberate and operative: it leaves no room for a parallel inferior tenure such as bhumidhari to coexist.

"Bhumiswami" — Section 158

Section 158 populates the single class. It provides that every person who, at the commencement of the Code, belonged to specified pre-existing classes “shall be called a bhumiswami”, mapping the old regional tenures onto the new uniform one: in the Mahakoshal region, persons holding bhumiswami or bhumidhari rights under the M.P. Land Revenue Code, 1954; in Madhya Bharat, pakka tenants, muafidars, inamdars and concessional holders; in Bhopal, occupants under the 1932 Act; in Vindhya Pradesh, pachhpan-paintalis tenants, pattedar tenants, grove-holders, tank-holders and certain gair-haqdar tenants; and in Sironj, khatedar tenants and grove-holders. Later sub-sections extend bhumiswami status to ex-rulers holding land by covenant and to persons subsequently allotted land in bhumiswami right by the State. The bhumiswami is, in substance, the proprietor-cultivator of the Code — not a mere lessee of Government, but a holder with a heritable, transferable title, as the courts have emphasised.

The content of bhumiswami rights (Sections 164, 165, 168)

The bhumiswami’s interest is substantive. Section 164 makes it heritable, devolving on death by inheritance, survivorship or bequest according to the personal law of the holder. Section 165 makes it transferable — a bhumiswami may sell, gift, mortgage or lease — subject to important statutory restrictions, including the bar on transfers by members of Scheduled Tribes to non-tribals without Collector’s sanction, and limits on leasing (ordinarily not more than the prescribed period). Section 168 regulates leases and prevents disguised permanent alienations. The Supreme Court in Bajaya v. Gopikabai (AIR 1978 SC 793; (1978) 2 SCC 542) treated bhumiswami land as ordinary heritable property to which the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 applied, holding that the tenure was not a “tenancy” saved from the Act by Section 4(2), and that a sister’s daughter as a Class-II heir took precedence over remote agnates. The case confirms that the bhumiswami holds a real proprietary interest, not a precarious tenancy at the State’s will.

"Bhumidhari" — a class abolished by the 1959 Code

The topic asks for bhumidhari, and the candidate must give the precise answer: the 1959 Code recognises no bhumidhari tenure. Under the repealed M.P. Land Revenue Code, 1954, the Mahakoshal region had two classes of tenure-holder — bhumiswami (the superior, proprietary tenure) and bhumidhari (a lesser, occupancy-type tenure). When the 1959 Code came into force, Section 157’s “only one class” mandate merged both. Section 158 expressly provides that a person who held bhumiswami or bhumidhari rights under the 1954 Code in Mahakoshal “shall be called a bhumiswami” — the former bhumidhar was thus promoted into the unified, superior bhumiswami tenure. So “bhumidhari” survives only as a historical and comparative term: it is the pre-1959 lesser tenure that the Code consciously eliminated. (Aspirants should note the contrast with U.P., where bhumidhari remains a living, distinct tenure under the U.P. Zamindari Abolition and Land Reforms Act — a frequent trap in objective papers.)

Bhumiswami as "tenure-holder": Nahar Hirasingh

The equation of bhumiswami with the statutory “tenure-holder” of Section 2(z) was settled by the Full Bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court in Nahar Hirasingh v. Mst. Dukalhin (AIR 1974 MP 141). By a majority the Court held that a bhumiswami is a tenure-holder, and that succession to bhumiswami land is governed by the holder’s personal law — here the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 — rather than by any special line of devolution carved out of land-revenue law that would offend Section 4 of that Act. The decision, later vindicated by the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Bajaya v. Gopikabai, cemented the modern understanding: the bhumiswami’s tenure is heritable property held from the State, and the labels “tenure-holder” and “bhumiswami” are, for the 1959 Code, one and the same status.

The other holders: tenant and Government lessee

Two holders sit outside the bhumiswami class. The tenant (Section 2(y)) holds under a bhumiswami as an occupancy tenant governed by Chapter XIV; he does not hold from the State and is therefore not a tenure-holder, though the Code confers substantial occupancy rights on him and Section 188 fixes the rent payable to his bhumiswami. The Government lessee (Section 2(h)) holds land directly from the State under Section 181 — typically unoccupied or specially-reserved land let on lease — and his rights are creatures of the lease, weaker and more precarious than a bhumiswami’s; Section 2(t), the definition of “rents”, expressly distinguishes what an occupancy tenant or lessee pays his bhumiswami from what a Government lessee pays the Government. A fourth status sits below all of these: the landless person of Section 2(l) — a bona fide agriculturist holding no land or less than the prescribed area — whom the State may settle on unoccupied land in bhumiswami right, the mechanism by which the single tenure is continually replenished. Distinguishing these statuses is the practical pay-off of Section 2: it determines who may sue for reinstatement on dispossession, who may transfer and on what conditions, and whose name is mutated in the records when land changes hands — the subject of mutation of land records.

Why the definitions decide cases

These are not inert preliminaries. Whether a structure is “land” under Section 2(k) decides jurisdiction between civil and revenue courts. Whether a person is a bhumiswami, a tenant or a mere Government lessee decides whether the Hindu Succession Act, the lease, or Chapter XIV governs his rights. Whether vacant land is “unoccupied” under Section 2(z-3) decides the State’s power to allot it. And the deliberate absence of a surviving bhumidhari class — the single most-asked point on this topic — reflects the Code’s reformist object of one State, one uniform tenure. Master Section 2 alongside Sections 57, 157 and 158, and the rest of the Code reads as a coherent system rather than a list of rules. For the institutional machinery that administers these statuses, see revenue officers’ hierarchy and powers.