The well-known adage “ignorance of law is no excuse” was once suffixed by the late justice VR Krishna Iyer with the words “except for the lower courts”. He was lamenting the cases of miscarriage of justice resulting from misreading of laws often reported from the lower ladders of the judicial hierarchy. An astounding instance of this has been recently reported from Madhya Pradesh where a family court refused to apply the divorce law under the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 to several Jain couples on the ground that their community had been recognised by the Union government as a minority under the National Commission for Minorities Act, 1992. The court’s preposterous idea reflects its shocking misconceptions about the nature and scope of the two Acts.

Since the British rule in India, the religious and customary traditions of four Indian communities — Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs — in respect of family rights and relations have been known by the compendious expression Hindu law. A number of laws using the word Hindu in their titles were enacted before the advent of Independence. The process began with the Hindu Widows Remarriage Act of 1856 and ended with the Hindu Women’s Right to Property Act, 1937. Rulers of some princely states also enacted similar laws among which were the Mysore Hindu Law Women’s Rights Act of 1933 and the Baroda Hindu Nibandh of 1937. The well-known Hindu Code Bill, prepared in 1940s by a committee of eminent........

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