A woman can spend her adult life with a man, raise his children, run his household and give up her career, and still walk away with nothing the day he dies, because a court later finds the marriage void.
This recurs whenever a marriage falls foul of Section 5, read with Section 11, of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 (HMA). The woman never becomes a wife in the eyes of law, so she can never become a widow either. And the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 (HSA) has no room for her.
The answer is not to pretend the marriage was valid. It lies in something the HMA already accepts: that the legal fate of a relationship and its economic consequences need not be tied together. Section 16 legitimises children of void and voidable marriages without validating the marriage. The same idea can be extended, carefully and narrowly, to the woman who lived the marriage in good faith.
Section 5(i) requires that neither party have a living spouse at the time of marriage. Section 11 declares a marriage in breach void from inception (Section 12 covers voidable marriages), so the woman never becomes a wife.
Section 8 of the HSA sends a Hindu male's intestate property first to his Class I heirs, which include the widow. But “widow” assumes a marriage that existed and ended in death. The Supreme Court said so in Rameshwari Devi v. State of Bihar (2000) where the second wife of a man whose earlier marriage was subsisting was denied any share as a widow. As statutory construction, this is unimpeachable. The problem is what follows: the woman is left with no legal identity in relation to the man she lived with for years, sometimes decades.
In Revanasiddappa v. Mallikarjun (2023), a three-judge bench held that children of void and voidable marriages, legitimised by Section 16, are entitled to their parents' property, including the share the parent would get on a notional partition of coparcenary property. While such children do not become coparceners by birth, they cannot be denied that share once it crystallises.
This departs from the stricter position in Jinia Keotin v. Kumar Sitaram Manjhi (2003), which confined such children to self-acquired property. This shift shows how the Court moved from treating Section 16 as a narrow savings clause to a genuine protective provision. The Court did not need to call the marriage valid to protect its children. It separated marital validity from who bears the economic consequences of the relationship. If that works for children, it can work for the mother who raised them.
Outside succession, courts have moved far towards protecting women in void or informal marriages during the man's lifetime. In Chanmuniya v. Virendra Kumar Singh Kushwaha (2011), the Supreme Court read “wife” broadly for maintenance: a woman who had lived with a man for a reasonable time in a marriage-like relationship could not be turned away for a technical defect. Badshah v. Urmila Badshah Godse (2014) sharpened this: the husband had concealed his first marriage,and the Court refused to let him use the defect he created to escape maintenance, so that a wrongdoer would not profit from his own wrong.
The Domestic Violence Act, 2005 built relationships “in the nature of marriage” into Section 2(f), with tests laid down in D Velusamy v. D Patchaiammal (2010) and Indra Sarma v. VKV Sarma (2013). Most recently, in Sukhdev Singh v. Sukhbir Kaur (2025), a three-judge bench held that a Section 11 decree still qualifies for Section 25 of the HMA, so a spouse in a void marriage can claim permanent alimony. The Court rejected the argument that a void marriage is non-existent for every purpose, leaving relief to the family court's discretion.
After the man's death, High Courts have at times allowed a second wife in a technically void marriage to draw a family pension where cohabitation was long, the first wife made no competing claim and refusal would leave her destitute. The family pension disputes involving second wives show how often this arises and how inconsistently it is resolved, with some benches demanding strict proof of marriage and others looking past the defect where dependence is undisputed.
While the man is alive, a woman in a void marriage may get maintenance, interim relief, Domestic Violence Act protection and even permanent alimony. The moment he dies, all of this protection disappears and the same relationship that was economically significant a day earlier becomes legally irrelevant.
Maintenance and succession serve different purposes - ongoing need versus distribution of an estate - but that does not explain why dependence stops mattering exactly when she needs help most. The case for protection is strongest then, as her household comes apart. The asymmetry is harder still to defend against the children. A child of the same void marriage inherits under Section 16 and Revanasiddappa. The mother, equally kept in the dark, inherits nothing.
The distinction between a valid and a void marriage is not itself irrational. The State may legitimately discourage bigamy and protect the lawfully wedded wife, and nothing here dilutes that. What is hard to defend is the consequence: a blanket exclusion that does not distinguish between a woman who knowingly entered a bigamous marriage and one who was deceived into it, and treats decades of cohabitation, dependence and household contribution as irrelevant.
Equality jurisprudence, from EP Royappa v. State of Tamil Nadu (1974) to Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India (1978), holds that arbitrariness is itself a form of inequality. A rule can survive classification and still fail because its consequences are disproportionate to its objective. Denying every such woman any protection, regardless of good faith, duration or dependence, does little additional work in protecting monogamy once maintenance and alimony are available during his lifetime. Article 21's guarantee of dignity reinforces the point. A woman who discovers, at her point of greatest vulnerability, that thirty years of shared life count for nothing is not being denied a status. She is being denied the material means to live with dignity.
Courts should not stretch “widow” to cover women in void marriages, nor treat void marriages as valid. Both would weaken the prohibition on bigamy and endanger the lawfully wedded wife and legitimate children.
A narrower path exists in the reasoning courts have used for maintenance, alimony and family pension. A statutory entitlement, separate from Class I heirship, could be created for a woman who can show that a marriage ceremony took place and was later found void under Section 11; that she had no knowledge of the impediment; that the parties cohabited for a substantial, defined period; that the deceased held her out as his spouse; and that she is now genuinely dependent. Her claim would rank below the lawfully wedded widow and legitimate children, so the existing hierarchy of succession remains intact.
It extends the logic that family pension jurisprudence around second wives has been working out in the High Courts and that the Supreme Court applied to maintenance in Chanmuniya and Badshah, to alimony in Sukhdev Singh and to inheritance for children in Revanasiddappa. Succession is the last major area of Hindu family law still holding out against this trend and it is not obvious why it should.
Rameshwari Devi remains correctly decided on the law as it stands and this piece does not argue for overturning it. The point is narrower. The complete legal invisibility of a woman in a void marriage, after decades of shared life, is not compelled by the objective of preserving monogamy, which is already protected by denying her the status of wife and widow. What she should not lose, in addition, is every means of economic support because the relationship that sustained her turned out to be void.
A bounded, equity-based entitlement, kept below the rights of the lawfully wedded widow and her children, would let the law hold two ideas together: that a void marriage never becomes a valid one and that a woman who lived it in good faith should not be left with nothing the day it ends.
Vedant Dhakad is an LL.M. scholar and Anubha Shukla is a third-year student at Gujarat National Law University, Gandhinagar.