Whose Property Is It Anyway? How Hindu Succession Law Fails Women Twice

Section 15 of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 was meant to give women full ownership of their property. In practice, it hands that property to the family that may have abandoned them and calls it law.

The Promise

Here is something the law gets right. Section 14 of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 declares that any property possessed by a female Hindu whether acquired before or after the Act shall be held by her as its full owner. Not a limited owner. Not a custodian. Full owner.

It was a meaningful break from centuries of Hindu personal law that treated women as temporary holders of property, never its real beneficiaries. Section 14 said: what is hers is hers.

Then came Section 15.

The Problem

Section 15 governs what happens to a woman’s property when she dies without a will intestate, in legal terms. The order of succession it lays down is this: first, her children and husband. Second, her husband’s heirs. Third, her own parents. Fourth, her father’s heirs. Fifth, her mother’s heirs.

Read that again. Her husband’s relatives come before her own parents.

This is not a drafting accident. It reflects a particular vision of a woman’s identity one rooted entirely in her marriage. The law assumes that once a woman marries, her primary family becomes her matrimonial family. Her natal family the people who raised her become a distant afterthought, ranked third at best.

For a woman who dies young, survived by children and a husband, this order rarely causes visible harm. But for a woman who is widowed, childless, or estranged from her matrimonial family, Section 15 produces outcomes that even the courts have called deeply unjust while enforcing them anyway.

Image-2 this is an AI generated image.

The Horror Story the Courts Keep Citing

Narayani Devi married and was widowed within three months. Her matrimonial family allegedly abandoned her. She returned to her parents, built an education, built a career, and accumulated her own savings over decades provident fund, bank deposits, assets that were entirely self-made.

She died intestate in 1996. A dispute arose over her estate between her natal family and her late husband’s relatives.

In Omprakash & Ors v. Radhacharan & Ors (2009) 15 SCC 66, the Supreme Court gave everything to the husband’s heirs.

The reasoning was textually correct: Narayani’s property was self-acquired, not inherited from her parents, so Section 15(2)’s exception which sends inherited property back to its source did not apply. Section 15(1)(b) controlled. The husband’s heirs took all of it.

The Court did not pretend this was comfortable. It said plainly: “This is a hard case… but then only because a case appears to be hard would not lead us to invoke different interpretation of a statutory provision.” And: “Sentiment or sympathy alone would not be a guiding factor.”

The law was clear. The law was also, by any reasonable moral standard, wrong.

2026: The Law Is Still Wrong

Seventeen years after Omprakash, nothing has changed in the statute. We know this because in April 2026, the Bombay High Court was asked to decide a nearly identical question in Santsaran Gursaran Advani v. Nina H. Bhalla (2026:BHC-OS:9925).

A woman had died. Her brother her own brother claimed a share of her estate. The Court rejected him. Under Section 15(1), the deceased’s husband’s sister ranked ahead of her own brother. The Court acknowledged that the Law Commission has recommended reforming this provision. It acknowledged that a constitutional challenge to Section 15 is currently pending before the Supreme Court. And then it held: “Section 15(1) cannot be held as unconstitutional” at least not by a single judge, not yet.

Its hands, it said, were tied.

This is the second failure the title refers to. The first failure is the law itself a succession scheme that treats a woman’s identity as inseparable from her marriage even in death. The second is the failure to fix it. The Law Commission flagged this problem. Constitutional petitions have been filed. An Amicus Curiae has been appointed in a cluster of Supreme Court cases challenging Section 15(1)(b) specifically on grounds of gender arbitrariness under Articles 14 and 15 of the Constitution.

And still, in courtrooms across the country, judges are being forced to hand dead women’s property to families that may have had nothing to do with their lives because Parliament has not moved, and the Supreme Court has not yet ruled.

What Needs to Change

The fix is not complicated in principle. Section 15(2) already contains the germ of a better logic the idea that property should return to its source. A woman’s self-acquired property should follow the same neutral rules that apply to self-acquired property of men under Section 8. Her natal family should not be ranked below her husband’s relatives as a default. The source of the property not the fact of the marriage should determine where it goes.

This is what the pending Supreme Court challenge argues. It is what the Law Commission recommended. It is what basic fairness demands.

The Constitution’s Unfinished Business

Section 14 told women their property was theirs. Section 15 quietly qualified that because after death, “theirs” turned out to mean “their matrimonial family’s.”

A woman can spend forty years building a life after her marriage ended by death, by abandonment, by circumstance and the law will still send everything she made to a family she may not have spoken to in decades.

The Supreme Court called it a hard case and moved on. The Bombay High Court called its hands tied and moved on. At some point, someone has to actually move.

Hindu Succession Act, 1956, ss. 14–15. Omprakash & Ors v. Radhacharan & Ors, (2009) 15 SCC 66. Santsaran Gursaran Advani v. Nina H. Bhalla & Ors, 2026:BHC-OS:9925.

Image-3 this is an AI generated image.