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THE HUSBAND WHO DISCOVERED RELIGION ON A TUESDAY: REVISITING SARLA MUDGAL V. UNION OF INDIA

This article has been researched and written by Advocate Aarun Chanda, who practices divorce law in Mumbai and Pune. It is intended solely for academic purposes and should not be construed as legal advice. Readers are encouraged to consult a qualified advocate specializing in divorce cases for professional legal guidance.

Early in my career, a client sat across my desk, leaned forward with the confidence of a man who had solved a very difficult crossword, and announced that he had found a way out of his marriage. He hadn’t seen a lawyer. He hadn’t filed a petition. He had simply decided, that very week, to convert to another faith that permitted more than one wife. In his mind, this was the legal equivalent of switching mobile network providers — a quick form, a new connection, and the old contract simply lapses.

I remember asking him, gently, whether his wife had been informed of this development. He looked genuinely puzzled by the question, as though I had asked whether the sun had been consulted before sunrise.
I have told that story at more dinner tables than I care to admit, mostly because it never fails to get a laugh — right up until the laughter fades and someone in the room realises they know a real person who tried exactly this. And that, more than any textbook, is why Sarla Mudgal v. Union of India deserves to be read properly and not merely quoted from memory at seminars, usually for its most photogenic paragraph on the Uniform Civil Code.

Because the truth is, my crossword-solving client was neither the first nor the last person to believe that a marriage could be dissolved the way one cancels a subscription. Long before he walked into my chambers, other husbands — with rather more at stake and rather better lawyers — had tried the very same manoeuvre before the Supreme Court of India. And in 1995, the Court told them, in no uncertain terms, that marriage does not work that way.

1. WHAT THE CASE WAS REALLY ABOUT
Ask most people what Sarla Mudgal decided, and they will tell you it is “the Uniform Civil Code case.” That is a bit like describing a wedding as “the day the caterer showed up late.” Something important did happen that day, but it was not the caterer.
The actual dispute was narrower, and frankly more interesting to a practising lawyer: could a Hindu husband, married under the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, convert to Islam and take a second wife, without first obtaining a divorce from the first? The husbands argued yes — once they left the Hindu fold, they said, the Act no longer had any hold over them. The wives, understandably, disagreed.
The Supreme Court sided with the wives, and it did so not by picking a favourite among religions — a task no court should ever attempt — but by doing something far more old-fashioned and far more powerful: it read the statute properly, from beginning to end, as Parliament had written it.

2. A MARRIAGE WITH A PAPER TRAIL
Here is the thing about a Hindu marriage solemnised under the 1955 Act — it is not simply a private, personal arrangement that can be quietly unwound over a weekend. It is a legal status, created by statute, with its own rulebook for how it begins and, crucially, how it ends.
Section 5 of the Act lays down the ground rules for a valid marriage, and rule number one is monogamy — neither party may have a living spouse at the time of marriage. Section 13 lists the grounds on which a marriage may be dissolved, and conversion to another religion happens to be one of them. But — and this is the detail that seems to escape crossword-solving husbands everywhere — Section 13 does not say conversion ends the marriage. It says conversion gives the other spouse the right to ask a court to end it. There is a very large difference between a self-executing exit clause and a ground for relief that someone else must actually invoke.
Section 15 closes the loop rather neatly: remarriage is permitted only once a decree of divorce has become final. Not on conversion. Not on a change of heart. Only once a judge has said so, in writing, after due process.
Read Sections 5, 13 and 15 together — as the Supreme Court insisted they must be read — and the husbands’ argument collapses under its own weight. A Hindu marriage does not quietly expire the moment one spouse discovers a new faith. It continues, in full legal health, until a court dissolves it. Parliament could have written an automatic-exit clause into the Act if it wanted one. It chose not to. That choice was not an oversight; it was policy, and the Court was simply unwilling to let clever lawyering rewrite it.

3. THE REAL PUNCHLINE: SECTION 494 OF THE PENAL CODE
If the Hindu Marriage Act supplied the setup, Section 494 of the Indian Penal Code supplied the punchline — and, in my view, the actual ratio decidendi of the case, however much the headlines preferred the Uniform Civil Code angle.
Section 494 punishes bigamy — but only where the second marriage is “void” because an earlier marriage is still subsisting. The husbands’ lawyers spotted what looked like a gap and drove straight through it: if the Hindu Marriage Act no longer applied to a convert, they argued, then his second marriage could hardly be called “void” under that Act, and Section 494 would have nothing to bite on. It was a clever argument. It was also, the Supreme Court held, entirely the wrong kind of clever.
The Court pointed out that a word does not have to mean the identical thing every time it appears in different statutes written for different purposes. “Void” in Section 11 of the Hindu Marriage Act is doing a very specific job — sorting out matrimonial remedies. “Void” in Section 494 IPC is doing a completely different job — protecting society against the social and legal harm caused by bigamy. Once the Court accepted that these two provisions were not required to march in lockstep, the rest of the reasoning fell into place naturally: a second marriage contracted while the first still legally subsists is void for the purposes of the bigamy law, no matter which religious door the husband walked through to get there.
I have always thought this was some of the tidiest statutory interpretation in the books — not because the Court stretched the words, but because it refused to let a technical loophole swallow an entire legislative policy. Parliament plainly did not intend monogamy to be an option that lapses the moment it becomes inconvenient.

4. THE WISDOM OF AN EARLIER JUDGE
None of this, incidentally, was invented by the Supreme Court out of thin air in 1995. Nearly fifty years earlier, in Robasa Khanum v. Khodadad Bomanji Irani, the Bombay High Court had already asked, and answered, much the same question. Justice M.C. Chagla wanted to know whether one spouse could, by converting, drag the other into an entirely different legal system governing their marriage — without so much as asking permission. His answer was a flat no. A marriage is governed by the law under which it was solemnised, and that law does not change because one party has had a change of heart, however sincere.
I like to think of Justice Chagla’s reasoning as the legal equivalent of a very good referee’s whistle — it does not stop the game because it disapproves of anyone’s beliefs, it stops the game because someone has, quite plainly, moved the goalposts without telling the other team. the supreme court in sarla mudgal borrowed this whistle and blew it rather firmly.

5. FREEDOM TO BELIEVE, NOT FREEDOM TO ESCAPE
It is worth pausing here, because this is the point where the case is most often misread — sometimes by newspapers, occasionally by law students, and once, memorably, by my crossword enthusiast of a client.
The Supreme Court never said a person cannot change their religion. Article 25 of the Constitution guarantees that freedom, and nothing in this judgment touches it. What the Court refused to accept was the idea that this freedom could double up as an exit ramp from obligations already owed to someone else. Put simply: you are free to change what you believe. You are not free to unilaterally rewrite what you owe.
And a Hindu wife, under the 1955 Act, is owed quite a lot — maintenance, a share in matters of inheritance, the legitimacy of her children, and the basic security of knowing her husband cannot simply acquire a second wife while she is still, in the eyes of the law, his only one. These are not sentimental expectations. They are statutory entitlements. Allowing conversion to switch them off on demand would have turned every one of these protections into something a husband could opt out of at will — which is, if you think about it, a rather strange kind of “right” to hand to only one side of a marriage.

6. A QUIET WORD ON FRAUD, DRESSED UP AS FAITH
Lawyers have a phrase for what the husbands in these cases were attempting, even though the Supreme Court never used it in so many words — a fraud on the statute. It is the old trick of achieving indirectly what the law forbids you from doing directly. If a man cannot, under Hindu law, lawfully take a second wife while his first marriage subsists, he ought not to be able to arrive at the very same destination by taking a short detour through another religion first.
Courts have applied this idea for years in tax law, in company law, in property disputes — situations that never make it into anyone’s dinner-table stories, but which rest on exactly the same instinct the Supreme Court showed here: look past the form of what someone has done, and ask what they were actually trying to achieve. Conversion, in these cases, was not really about faith. It was about finding a costume for bigamy. The Court was not fooled by the costume.

7. THE UNIFORM CIVIL CODE — IMPORTANT, BUT NOT THE POINT
I do want to give the Uniform Civil Code observations their due, because they are genuinely significant and they continue to shape political and constitutional debate to this day. The Court did lament, in fairly pointed terms, that Article 44 remained unimplemented, and it urged Parliament to consider the matter seriously.
But here is the detail that tends to get lost: the Court did not need a Uniform Civil Code to decide the case in front of it. The Hindu Marriage Act and Section 494 IPC, read sensibly together, gave a complete answer on their own. The remarks on Article 44 are important, thoughtful, and worth every law student’s attention — but they sit alongside the ratio, not inside it. Treating them as the whole of the judgment is a bit like remembering a trial only for the judge’s closing remarks about the state of the court cafeteria.

8. LILY THOMAS CLOSES THE DOOR
Five years later, in Lily Thomas v. Union of India, someone tried, essentially, to reopen the same argument in a different courtroom, presumably hoping for a different mood on the bench. The Supreme Court was not in a different mood. It reaffirmed Sarla Mudgal squarely: a Hindu marriage survives conversion, a second marriage without a prior decree of divorce amounts to bigamy, and the personal law of the newly adopted religion is simply beside the point. The question was never whether Islam permits more than one wife. The question was whether a Hindu husband could use conversion to step out of obligations he had already taken on. After Lily Thomas, nobody could pretend that question was still open.

9. WHERE THINGS STAND TODAY
The Indian Penal Code has since given way to the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, and Section 494 no longer exists under that name. But the policy behind it — that bigamy remains an offence where an earlier marriage still subsists — has carried forward largely intact, and nothing in the recodified law disturbs the basic proposition established in Sarla Mudgal. A Hindu marriage continues until a competent court dissolves it. Conversion, by itself, does not do the job. Good legal reasoning, it turns out, tends to outlive the section numbers it was originally ATTACHED TO.

10. NOTES I ACTUALLY USE IN PRACTICE
A few habits I have picked up over the years, for whatever they are worth to a younger colleague reading this:
i. Do not get drawn into arguing about the sincerity of someone’s conversion. It is rarely the real issue, and courts are not in the business of grading anyone’s faith.
ii. Focus pleadings on four things: a valid first marriage, its continued existence, the absence of a divorce decree, and a second marriage contracted while the first was still alive. Everything else is decoration.
iii. Remind clients — gently, as I wish someone had reminded mine — that a marriage under statute does not come with a self-destruct button that either spouse can press alone.
iv. Treat Sarla Mudgal as a matrimonial law case first and a constitutional law case second. That is where it earns its keep in the courtroom.

11. CLOSING THOUGHTS
I think about my old client from time to time — the one who treated matrimony like a mobile connection he could simply port away from. I never did find out whether he went through with his plan, though I suspect the conversation he eventually had with his wife was considerably less pleasant than the one he had with me.
What Sarla Mudgal tells us, once you clear away the noise around the Uniform Civil Code, is something rather old-fashioned and rather reassuring: the law does not let anyone quietly write themselves an exit from an obligation they voluntarily took on. Not through a clever reading of a statute. Not through a change of faith undertaken for entirely the wrong reasons. An obligation created by law ends only in the manner the law provides — through a court, through due process, and not through unilateral wishful thinking.
That is not, in the end, a case about religion at all. It is a case about keeping promises the law has already written down for us — which is, when you strip away the wigs and the Latin, most of what this profession is actually for.

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