KOLKATA: The Calcutta High Court recently dismissed a wife’s appeal challenging a family court’s order granting her husband divorce after the division bench found the woman’s attempt to separate her husband from his parents and family amounted to cruelty. The bench comprising justices Soumen Sen and Uday Kumar observed last week: “Indian culture nurtures the concept of a pious obligation of a son to maintain his parents. If a wife makes an attempt to deviate the son from the normal practice and normal custom of society, she must have some justifiable reason for that."
"The wife wanted the husband to get separated from his family. It is not common practice for a son in India to get separated from his parents at the instance of the wife.’’
The bench was hearing a plea filed by a wife from West Midnapore district challenging the order of the district family court given in 2009 granting divorce to the husband on the ground of cruelty.
The couple got married in 2001. “Thus, the desire of the appellant to have a separate residence with her husband away from in-laws is not based on justifiable reasons as such it amounts to cruelty."
"Normally, no husband would tolerate such acts of wife and no son would like to be separated from his parents and other family members. The persistent effort of the wife to constrain the husband to be separated from the family would be torturous for the husband,’’ the bench said.