India dispatch: Supreme Court rebukes lower courts for branding a woman’s career choices as cruelty, raising questions about how matrimonial law treats working women

Samridh Chaturvedi is a JURIST correspondent and a third-year law student at the School of Law, Christ (Deemed to be University) where he covers legal, policy, and human rights developments in India.

The Supreme Court of India delivered strong criticism against two lower courts, ruling that a woman whose dental practice she maintained while living away from her husband violated Indian divorce laws through acts of cruelty and desertion. Judges Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta issued the ruling on May 13, eliminating all accusations against the wife and determining that the lower courts based their decisions on backward, feudalistic thinking, and outdated customs. The Supreme Court upheld the divorce decree because it found that the marriage between the couple had ended permanently, but sent a clear message that all professional work and personal decisions made by married women should not be regarded as legal offenses against their husbands.

The case started when a dentist married an Army officer in 2009. The wife established her first dental practice in the city Pune, then relocated to the city Kargil to join her husband during his military assignment. After becoming pregnant, the woman experienced complications, and returned to the city Ahmedabad to access medical facilities that Kargil did not provide. The couple’s daughter was born in 2012, developing medical problems that required special treatment in Ahmedabad. The husband then requested a divorce after the marriage ended because he claimed that his wife had treated him with cruelty and had abandoned him. In 2022, a family court granted the divorce after determining that the wife preferred her work over the marriage because she opened a dental practice without telling her husband and his family members, which the court considered to be cruel behavior. The Gujarat High Court upheld this view in August 2024. The wife asked the Supreme Court to remove negative evidence from the record without disputing the divorce decision.

The significance of the findings—which reached the highest court—needs explanation through the definitions of “cruelty” and “desertion” which Indian matrimonial law provides. The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 allows a spouse to seek divorce on these grounds under Section 13. “Cruelty,” which can be physical or mental, refers to conduct that makes it unreasonable to expect the petitioner to continue living with the other party. “Desertion” means willful abandonment without reasonable cause for a continuous period of at least two years. The findings of cruelty and desertion serve as legal terms which determine case outcomes because they establish moral obligations that judges must consider during spousal maintenance, reputation, and custody decisions. The wife in this case was not opposing the divorce; she was fighting to ensure that the legal record did not say she had been cruel to her husband simply for pursuing her profession. The Supreme Court rejected the lower courts’ reasoning through its complete judgment. The bench stated that a well-educated woman with professional qualifications must not limit her activities to her marital responsibilities because marriage does not erase her personal identity. The court held that modern India should not accept the expectation that women must stop their dental professional activities because their husbands receive military assignments to Kargil.

The family court reached an appalling conclusion when it declared that the wife’s attempts to build her career constituted acts of cruelty toward her husband. The bench rejected the husband’s request for separate prosecution of his wife on perjury charges after concluding that the husband sought to bring charges against his wife out of personal revenge. What stands out about this judgment is not just its conclusion, but the frankness of its language. The Supreme Court has decided many cases since 2018, all of which have established women’s rights to property, spousal maintenance, and protection from domestic violence. However, family courts and high courts have failed to keep pace with these societal changes which have shaped matrimonial litigation processes. The 2022 family court ruling—requiring a woman to inform her husband before opening a clinic—was a standard judicial decision. This judicial perspective holds that a married woman must base her professional and personal choices on her husband and his family’s understanding of her activities. In this context, the Supreme Court’s direct identification of this approach as feudalistic is significant, as it signals to family courts nationwide that such reasoning will fail on appeal.

The case presents a fundamental structural issue for consideration. The woman in this matter had to fight through a family court, a high court, and finally, the Supreme Court to get adverse findings removed from the record of a divorce she was not even contesting. The process to obtain something that should not have been recorded costs both time and money. The situation creates an important question about how many women with similar court outcomes at lower levels lack both financial resources and legal assistance needed to bring their cases. Every year, Indian courts handle more than 10,000 matrimonial cases across the country. Most findings will go unchallenged because family courts set standards that treat a wife’s professional independence as legally suspect, leaving women with a cruelty or desertion label—and no legal avenues to challenge these findings.

As an Indian law student, what strikes me most is the gap between the law’s stated values and its day-to-day application. The Constitution guarantees equality and dignity. The Supreme Court has, in judgment after judgment, affirmed that those guarantees extend fully to women within marriage. A family court in 2022 still needed to determine whether a woman who operated her own clinic without her in-laws’ approval had experienced her husband’s cruel treatment. The problem is not primarily legislative. The Hindu Marriage Act provides sufficient legal framework to achieve just outcomes. The problem exists because most legal professionals who handle cases at this level continue to use outdated beliefs which the Constitution and Supreme Court have already rejected. The Supreme Court needs to continue its work of correcting any findings that appear in its judicial decisions. The judgment shows that case-by-case correction requires women to pursue multiple appeals until they find a court which will fairly apply the law. Family courts need both judicial training and institutional accountability to prevent any need for correction work to take place. Legal observers and women’s rights organizations will monitor whether the Law Commission, the National Judicial Academy, and Parliament will respond to this ruling during the upcoming months.

Opinions expressed in JURIST Dispatches are solely those of our correspondents in the field and do not necessarily reflect the views of JURIST’s editors, staff, donors or the University of Pittsburgh.