THE HINDU MARRIAGE ACT, 1955 IN A NUTSHELL

Hindu mythology says that marriage is a sanctified relation between a man and woman to stay together while taking the generation ahead with undaunted commitment towards religious values and belief. Hindu scriptures also define marriage as a divine path that leads both man and woman towards achieving the gist of life. In ancient times, Hindu gurus and other prime member of religious community were not in favour of formulating any legislation to govern the institution of marriage. The religious leaders were also of the view that marriage is not a matter to be subjected to legislative interference.

Despite confronting a huge amount of divergence of opinions, the Government of India enacted Hindu Marriage Act as an important branch of the Hindu Bill Code in the year 1955. The primary aim of this Act was to improve the law related to Hindu marriages. This Act was applicable upon all Hindus but didn’t pertain to any person belonging to Muslim, Christian or Parsi community. After the law came into force, a remarkable change appeared in the Hindu matrimonial arena across the country.

This Act, under Section 5, specifies some certain conditions for proper solemnization of marriage between a Hindu man and a woman. A few prime conditions are as follow:

No one of the two should have another partner at the time and during the phase of marriage. No one of the two should have any mental instability.

• The man must be 21 years of age and the woman must be of 18 years.
• The parties must not be within the degrees of prohibited relationship or be sapindas of each other, unless a custom or usage governing each of them permits the marriage.

Under Section 8 of the Act, registration of a Hindu marriage is facilitative rather than a precondition of the marriage itself, and Section 8(5) expressly states that the omission to register a marriage does not affect its validity. Compulsory registration, where it applies, flows from the rules framed by individual State Governments and from the directions of the Supreme Court in Seema v. Ashwani Kumar (2006), which required all marriages to be registered. For registration, there is a prescribed format available with the concerned State Govt. bodies. The rules of this Act empower state govt. to penalize the person(s) behaving against the said rules. As per the provisions of the Act, both the parties enjoy the entitlement to approach the District Court for the restitution of their conjugal rights. In case, any of the partners does not want to stay in the company of the concerned husband/wife, he or she is legally entitled to take divorce after producing a solid reason for separation.

Following are the reasons under which a decree of divorce can be filed:

• If anyone of the two is having sexual intercourse with any outer source after marriage
• If anyone of the two is behaving in a callous and cruel way to his/her partner after marriage
• If anyone of the two is having any unsoundness of mind that is medically incurable
• Another ground is mutual consent under Section 13B, but the consent must be genuine and not forced. The parties must have been living separately for a period of one year or more before presenting the petition, and Section 14 bars the filing of any divorce petition within one year of the marriage except with the court’s leave in cases of exceptional hardship.

A mutual-consent divorce under Section 13B(2) ordinarily requires the parties to wait six months between the first and second motion. In Amardeep Singh v. Harveen Kaur, (2017) 8 SCC 746, the Supreme Court of India held that this six-month cooling-off period is not mandatory and can be waived by the court where there is no possibility of reconciliation and the parties have genuinely settled their differences. The Supreme Court reaffirmed this position in Shilpa Sailesh v. Varun Sreenivasan (2023), where it also held that it may dissolve a marriage that has irretrievably broken down by exercising its powers under Article 142 of the Constitution. It should be noted that the Marriage Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2010, which had proposed reforms in this area, lapsed and never became law.