Our Lordships On Our Relationships

Courts occasionally make observations on marriage and family that seem out of step with the times. But many judges also favour modern thinking, as SC did last week

- Renuka Bisht

What is marriage? What is family? They are institutions with almost universal participation but hardly a universal experience. But when they land up in the courts, our justices seem partial to some very archaic notions about marriage and family – steeped in hidebound moralities at odds with the great diversity of modern marriages and families. A much more constitutional message would be that alongside the right to choose their partner every adult citizen has the right to live this partnership per their own consensual desires.

Here are some of this year’s strikingly strange observations from benches around the country, and a couple of examples that show how powerful judges can be when they speak for individual liberties.

1) Madras HC has said in a custody case: “The concept of marriage is not for mere satisfying (sic) the carnal pleasure, but it is mainly for the purpose of progeneration.”

The haranguing has a quasi-religious timbre. Why shame married couples who give primacy to their sexual relationship or who choose not to have children? Why judge all marriages via one single concept of marriage? Such moral policing alienates swathes of the citizenry who fall outside its cramped lakshman rekha.

2) Kerala HC has said in a divorce case: “The consumer culture of ‘use and throw’ seems to have influenced our matrimonial relationships also.” It decried the younger generation for thinking “that marriage is an evil that could be avoided to enjoy free life without any liabilities or obligations. They would expand the word WIFE as Worry Invited For Ever, substituting the old concept of Wise Investment For Ever.”