Registration Without Renunciation: Civil Marriage, Denominational Exclusion, and the Epistemic Misframing of Goolrokh Gupta

Document Type

Research Article

Abstract

The Gujarat High Court in Goolrokh M. Gupta v. Burjor Pardiwala (‘Goolrokh’) advanced the unsettling proposition that a Parsi woman automatically loses her natal religious identity upon interfaith marriage under the Special Marriage Act, 1954, unless she secures a judicial declaration proving continued practice. Although the subsequent consolidation of this case with the Sabarimala Reference treats the dispute as a constitutional conflict between individual liberty and denominational autonomy, that framing misidentifies the kind of legal question before the court. It inflicts a distinct epistemic harm by applying the wrong doctrinal vocabulary, evidentiary standards, and burdens of justification to a dispute whose core is statutory. The prior legal question in Goolrokh turns on whether a civil act of marriage registration can be interpreted to enforce the exact religious penalties that the legislature explicitly acted to abolish. To resolve this displacement of the statutory question, this paper advances three reinforcing arguments. First, the administrative tagging of Goolrokh to the nine-judge reference in Kantaru Rajeevaru v. Indian Young Lawyers Association applied an imprecise organising principle in treating a surface-level factual similarity as a sufficient basis for grouping. In doing so, it grouped Goolrokh, whose dispositive question is statutory, with a reference whose questions concern the internal architecture of Articles 25 and 26. Second, the Gujarat High Court applied three erroneous doctrines in deciding Goolrokh: the common law concept of coverture, the fiction of deemed conversion, and the shifting of the evidentiary burden. Each of these amounts to a judicial reinstatement of the colonial penalties Parliament deliberately abolished in the 1954 Act. Third, a denomination’s rule of exclusion fails the threshold criteria of Article 26(b) when its operative trigger is State-regulated civil marriage rather than spiritual conduct. To locate this boundary, the paper develops a typology distinguishing exclusions that respond to theological non-conformity (‘Type A’) from those that attach religious penalties to a secular legal status (‘Type B’). The Trust’s exclusion of Ms. Gupta is the latter kind and falls outside the protected domain of denominational self-governance regardless of how Article 26(b) is otherwise interpreted. By positioning the statutory framework of civil marriage before any constitutional adjudication, this paper provides a new basis for contesting denominational overreach upstream of the balancing exercise of Articles 25 and 26 of the Constitution.

Publication Date

10-12-2026

Journal

NUJS Law Review

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