Pinninti Venkataramana v. State (1977)

Unit 4 is examined on child marriage, and the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006 cannot be explained without first stating what the position was before it. This is the case that settles that position for Hindu law: a marriage in breach of the minimum-age condition is an offence and may found a divorce petition by the bride, but it is neither void nor voidable. Put it beside the 2006 Act and the whole Unit 4 answer becomes a comparison rather than a recitation: the 2006 Act's innovation was to make such a marriage voidable, and to make it void in the defined circumstances of s. 12.

Two criminal matters raising a common question were referred to a Full Bench. In the first, a husband had been convicted of bigamy and a second person of abetment, and their convictions had been confirmed on appeal with the sentences reduced to fine; they came in revision. In the second, a wife had complained of bigamy against her husband and others; the marriage between the parties had been solemnised in 1959, when the bridegroom was 13 and the bride 9, and the husband asked to have the complaint quashed on the footing that a marriage in breach of the age condition is void, so that there was no first marriage to make the second bigamous.

The question referred was whether a Hindu marriage governed by the Act, where the parties or either of them are below the ages set out in s. 5(iii), is void ab initio and no marriage in the eye of law — the view a Division Bench of the same Court had taken in an earlier case.

Any marriage solemnised in contravention of s. 5(iii) is neither void nor voidable. The only consequences are two: the persons concerned are liable to punishment under s. 18; and, if the requirements of s. 13(2)(iv) are satisfied, a decree of divorce may be granted at the instance of the bride. Apart from those two consequences there is no other consequence whatsoever. The earlier Division Bench decision was held not to lay down the correct law.

1. Section 11 is exhaustive, and s. 5(iii) is not in it. The grounds on which a marriage solemnised after the commencement of the Act may be declared null and void are those listed; breach of the age condition appears neither in s. 11 nor in s. 12. The legislature dealt with contravention of the different clauses of s. 5 differently, which it would not have done had every clause been a condition precedent whose breach avoided the marriage.

1. The Act supplies its own sanction. For breach of the age condition the Act provides a punishment in s. 18, and that is the remedy the legislature chose.

1. Consider the consequence for children. Courts lean against a construction that would render innocent children of a marriage illegitimate. The legitimacy protection in s. 16 operates where a decree of nullity is granted under s. 11 or s. 12; it would not reach children of a marriage struck down for breach of s. 5(iii), since neither section provides for that contravention — so on the rejected view those children would have no protection at all.

1. The 1976 amendment confirms it. The Marriage Laws (Amendment) Act 1976 left s. 5(iii) untouched but inserted s. 13(2)(iv), allowing a wife to seek divorce on the ground that her marriage, whether consummated or not, was solemnised before she attained fifteen and that she has repudiated it after attaining that age but before attaining eighteen. Had such a marriage been void ab initio there would have been no need for the clause. By inserting it the legislature gave a Hindu bride an option comparable to the option of puberty known to Muslim law, while proceeding on the footing that the marriage is not void.

1. The older law pointed the same way. Before the Act, a Hindu marriage was a sacrament rather than a contract, and the doctrine of factum valet meant that the fact of a duly solemnised marriage could not be undone by a number of legal prohibitions to the contrary; by s. 4 that older law yields only where the Act clearly provides otherwise, and here it does not.

The Full Bench noted that almost every other High Court had reached the same conclusion.

It opens the historical half of the child-marriage question. State this case for the pre-2006 position — punishment and, for a bride married below fifteen, repudiation and divorce, but a valid marriage — and then state the 2006 Act: s. 3 makes every child marriage voidable at the option of the party who was a child, and s. 12 makes it void where enticement, force, deceit, or sale, trafficking or an immoral purpose is present. The contrast is the answer.

It disposes of the argument that a marriage below the statutory age is no marriage at all — and with it the defence, taken in this very case, that a man cannot be guilty of bigamy because his first marriage was a child marriage.

It does not decide anything under the 2006 Act, which did not exist, and it must never be cited as the current position on validity: a child marriage today is voidable, and void in the s. 12 cases. Keep the current Hindu Marriage Act figures straight when you write it — s. 5(iii) now requires the bridegroom to have completed twenty-one and the bride eighteen, and the penalty under s. 18 is rigorous imprisonment up to two years, or a fine up to one lakh rupees, or both. Note finally that the bigamy offence discussed here was in the Penal Code, replaced by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023 on 1 July 2024.