Introduction
Maintenance under Indian family law occupies an uneasy position between welfare and rights. Section 25(1) of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 (“HMA”) empowers courts to grant permanent alimony “at the time of passing any decree or at any time subsequent thereto” and in such amounts as the court “may deem just,” having regard to the income and property of the parties, their conduct, and “other circumstances of the case.” The breadth of this formulation is deliberate, but it is also revealing. Maintenance is not framed as a consequence that flows automatically from marriage or its dissolution. Instead, it is presented as a remedial measure that the court may or may not extend, depending on its assessment of fairness.
The statutory language of the HMA thus situates the claimant, who in practice is disproportionately the woman, as a beneficiary of judicial discretion rather than as a holder of a legal right. The permissive “may,” coupled with the absence of any presumptive entitlement, places the burden squarely on the applicant to demonstrate their deservingness. In doing so, Section 25 adopts a conduct-oriented logic, one that treats maintenance as post-marital assistance rather than as rightful recognition of the nature of economic interdependence created by the institution of marriage itself.
This article advances this argument in three steps. First, it examines the statutory framing of Section 25, highlighting how its language deliberately embeds discretion and moral evaluation and how this shapes judicial outcomes. Second, it analyses judicial interpretation and its limitations, both gendered and otherwise, showing how courts have attempted to expand access to maintenance while remaining constrained by the statutory text. Third, it explores the lived consequences of the current framework, arguing that over-reliance on judicial discretion and assessments of conduct produces inconsistency, unpredictability, and uncertainty for claimants, and prevents maintenance from functioning as a genuine entitlement to the aggrieved party.
I. The Statutory Framing of Section 25
Section 25’s discretionary character is firmly embedded in the statute’s own language. Sub-section (1) empowers the court to grant permanent alimony only if it “may seem to the court to be just,” after “having regard to” a non-exhaustive list of considerations, including the income and property of both parties, “the conduct of the parties,” and “other circumstances of the case.” The repeated use of permissive formulations including the words “may,” “may deem just,”and “having regard to”signals that maintenance is not conceived as an automatic legal consequence of marriage or its dissolution, but as a conditional remedy dependent on judicial evaluation. The statute does not mandate relief even upon proof of economic need. Instead, it vests the court with wide latitude to decide whether support ought to be granted at all, and if so, on what terms.
This discretionary structure is reinforced by sub-sections (2) and (3), which permit the court to “vary, modify or rescind” an alimony order whenever it “may deem just.” Read as a whole, Section 25 institutionalises discretion, moral assessment, and ongoing judicial surveillance as central features of permanent alimony, rather than as exceptional considerations.
This legislative design was judicially recognised as early as the 1962 judgment of the Madras High Court in D.S. Seshadri v. Jayalakshmi, where the court held that Section 25 “does not confer any such absolute legal right” to maintenance. The court distinguished this from other statutory frameworks, describing Section 25 as a “special jurisdiction” that “vests a discretion in the court” to provide for an indigent spouse based on the comparative means of the parties. This discretion must be “exercised judicially”, specifically requiring the court to weigh the “conduct of the parties”.
This discretionary foundation decisively differentiates Section 25 from entitlement‑oriented secular maintenance schemes (such as Section 125 CrPC, now Section 144 of BNSS), in which courts have repeatedly held that relief must be granted as of right once statutory conditions are satisfied. The contrast shows Section 25’s embedded logic that maintenance flows only if the court, exercising broad evaluative judgment, finds it just.
II. Judicial Interpretation Within Statutory Limits
Courts have not ignored the hardships produced by Section 25’s discretionary framing. On the contrary, they have repeatedly attempted to soften its consequences through purposive interpretation, particularly by expanding the category of persons eligible to seek permanent alimony. The Supreme Court’s decision in Sukhdev Singh v. Sukhbir Kaur marks the most significant recent example of such judicial effort. Building on the principle in Chand Dhawan v. Jawaharlal Dhawan, the Court held that a void marriage, one that is void ab initio under Section 11 of the HMA, does not preclude a claim for permanent alimony under Section 25, and that a decree of nullity qualifies as a “decree” for the purposes of invoking the provision.
At first glance, Sukhdev Singh appears to reorient maintenance towards functional reality rather than formal marital validity. However, the three-judge bench was careful to restate that whether maintenance is granted still “depends on the facts of each case and the conduct of the parties.” The expansion of eligibility on the one hand, and the reaffirmation of discretion on the other, exposes the intrinsic limitations of judicial intervention. It goes on to show that courts may, at best, widen the doorway to Section 25, but they cannot alter what lies beyond it. Once inside the provision, claimants remain subject to a statutory regime that conditions economic relief on judicial assessments of conduct, dependency, income, and undefined other circumstances.
The consequences of this limitation are visible across inconsistencies in maintenance cases till date. Even where some degree of financial dependency subsists, courts have frequently reduced or denied maintenance by equating education, employability, or modest income with full financial self-sufficiency, thereby reintroducing discretionary assessments of deservingness into what is ostensibly a remedial framework. A recent illustration of this approach is found in the Allahabad High Court’s decision dated 3 December 2025, where the Court reiterated that maintenance is payable only if the wife is “unable to maintain herself,” and consequently denied maintenance to a wife earning ₹36,000 per month. In doing so, the Court placed weight on her educational qualifications, lack of ‘any major liabilities’, and the fact that the husband bore responsibility for maintaining his aged parents.
What is striking is not merely the outcome, but the analysis adopted. Despite the absence of any finding that the wife enjoyed a standard of living comparable to that of the matrimonial home, or that her income ensured long-term economic security, the Court treated earning capacity and modest income as sufficient to disentitle her from maintenance. This approach sits uneasily with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Rajnesh v. Neha, where it was clarified that the object of maintenance is not mere subsistence, but the preservation of a standard of living reasonably consistent with that enjoyed during the subsistence of the marriage. Rajnesh explicitly cautioned against reducing maintenance to a mechanical inquiry into income alone, emphasising that courts must account for lifestyle, social status, and the economic consequences of marital breakdown.
Yet, as the recent Allahabad decision demonstrates, this normative guidance is often overlooked in practice. By collapsing the inquiry into a binary assessment of earning versus non-earning, courts risk converting maintenance into a fault-adjacent remedy, one that disregards the reality of unpaid domestic labour and the gendered distribution of economic disadvantage within marriage. The result is a jurisprudence in which women may be deemed self-sufficient on paper while remaining materially worse off than during the marriage.
More pertinently, courts have repeatedly acknowledged that they are bound to consider conduct under Section 25, even where such consideration undermines the remedial purpose of maintenance. This statutory mandate becomes most stark under Section 25(3), which authorises rescission of permanent alimony if the wife has “not remained chaste” or if the husband has engaged in sexual relations outside wedlock.
Judicial enforcement of Section 25(3) demonstrates the limits of interpretive reform. In cases such as Sardari Lal v. Mst. Vishano, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court applied the “mandatory” requirement of Section 25(3) to justify the initial denial of maintenance to a wife proven unchaste during earlier divorce proceedings. The court reasoned that since Section 25(3) compels the court to “rescind” an order if a wife becomes unchaste after an award is made, it would be “incongruous” to grant such an award in the first instance to a spouse whose unchastity was already established.
By treating the conduct of the parties as a vital and crucial circumstance, the court held that judicial discretion “ought to be exercised against a person whose conduct is reproachable”. This interpretation effectively transforms Section 25(3) from a post-decree corrective measure into a legal bar that denies even a starving allowance to those deemed morally unworthy, leaving them instead to the “resources of [their] immorality”. Furthermore, the court in Sardari Lal extended this moral evaluation to the support of a minor child, setting aside his maintenance because the wife’s adulterous life had been used in the prior divorce decree to establish that the husband was not the child’s biological father.
Importantly, this constraint operates in a gendered manner. Although Section 25(3) is formally symmetrical, its language is not. The wife’s conduct is assessed through the concept of “chastity,” a historically loaded and morally saturated standard, whereas the husband’s conduct is framed in narrower, act-based terms. Judicial interpretation cannot neutralise this asymmetry; it can only apply it. As a result, even genuine claims for maintenance remain vulnerable to denial or withdrawal based on moralised scrutiny of women’s sexuality.
The combined operation of Sections 25(1) and 25(3) reveals a deeply paternalistic logic: maintenance is not a right arising from economic interdependence, but a conditional benefit awarded to those who conform to judicially approved norms of behaviour. The statute implicitly treats women not as autonomous economic actors shaped by marital inequality, but as moral subjects whose financial security depends on sexual propriety.
- Structural Consequences of a Welfare-Based Framework
The reliance on judicial discretion and assessments of conduct under Section 25 produces several structural consequences. First, it generates inconsistency and unpredictability. Identically situated claimants may receive vastly different outcomes depending on how individual judges assess conduct, earning capacity, or surrounding circumstances, rather than on any stable entitlement grounded in need.
Second, this framework sustains uncertainty for economically vulnerable spouses, who cannot rely on maintenance as a guaranteed post-marital right. Since relief remains contingent on judicial discretion, claimants are left without ex ante clarity as to whether financial dependency will translate into enforceable support. Maintenance thus operates less as a legal safeguard and more as a discretionary concession.
Third, and most problematically, the framework enables moralised evaluations of deservingness. By embedding conduct as a central consideration, Section 25 authorises courts to subject claimants to subjective scrutiny that frequently mirrors social and gendered norms. Women, who have historically borne the economic costs of marriage and divorce, are disproportionately exposed to such assessments, whether through inquiries into chastity, employability, or perceived self-sufficiency. In this way, discretion does not operate neutrally but risks reproducing existing structural inequalities under the guise of promoting equity in law.
Conclusion
By contrast, a rights-based framework would conceptualise permanent alimony as an enforceable entitlement grounded in dependency, contribution, and post-marital need, without requiring applicants to demonstrate moral virtue or financial deprivation beyond a reasonable threshold. Judicial interpretation, however creative, cannot accomplish this transformation. Courts may mitigate harsh outcomes at the margins, but they remain bound by statutory language that embeds conduct and discretion at the heart of the scheme. As long as relief remains contingent on discretion and conduct, courts will continue to adjudicate not merely economic need, but moral worth.
The resulting injustice is therefore not a product of judicial failure, but of statutory limitation. Maintenance is denied not because courts are indifferent to vulnerability, but because the law authorises, indeed requires, them to weigh economic dependency against moral judgment. Until that architecture is re-imagined, permanent alimony will remain uncertain, uneven, and contingent, falling short of its promise as a genuine instrument of post-marital justice.
Author Bio: Samaira Singh is a second-year law student at Jindal Global Law School. She enjoys writing on questions of contemporary and enduring legal significance, with a particular focus on their socio-political implications. Her interests lie in public law theory.
[Ed Note: This piece was edited by P. Sannidhi and published by Vedang Chouhan from the student editorial board.]
