Mumbai: A lavish home featured in an architectural magazine, a throbbing birthday party with free-flowing alcohol, trekking, globetrotting and sporting a luxury brand t-shirt—all belied a Pune man’s claim of penury, after which the Bombay High Court enhanced the interim monthly maintenance awarded to his estranged wife by a family court from ₹50,000 to ₹3.5 lakh.
A division bench of justices B P Colabawalla and Somasekhar Sundaresan observed that the man, from a wealthy business family, had not come to the court with clean hands. The judges also felt that his pleadings were “laced with a deep sense of entitlement”. The court ordered him to deposit ₹42 lakh—one year’s worth of the enhanced maintenance—into the woman’s bank account within four weeks.
The judgment came in interim applications filed by both parties: the man claimed he no longer had the means to pay ₹50,000 monthly maintenance, while the woman argued that the amount awarded to her by the family court was too low. The couple, married in November 1997, separated in 2013. Their 25-year-old son lives with the father, and their 19-year-old daughter lives with the mother. A Pune family court granted the man a divorce in 2023 and ordered him to pay maintenance to the woman.
The woman showed the high court pictures from a party in May 2024, when the man and his son had jointly celebrated their 51st and 24th birthdays, respectively. In the pictures, both were seen wearing Kenzo t-shirts. The court observed that even a simple crew neck t-shirt from the luxury brand costs upwards of ₹15,000. While there was nothing inappropriate about celebrating a milestone birthday with free-flowing alcohol and expensive clothing, the judges said that what had not appealed to them was “the act of contemporaneously lying on oath about being a man of no means, earning just ₹6 lakh per annum.”
Taking into account the financial structure of an Indian business family, the high court said that the man’s income tax returns—in which he had shown his income to be ₹6 lakh per annum—alone cannot be an indicator of his wealth. The court observed that the man’s father was the “proud patriarch” of a well-known real estate business in Pune, conservatively valued at ₹1,083 crore.
The man himself, described as the ‘torchbearer’ of the business, was “a man of undeniably powerful financial means”, with his share in the family-owned land bank alone exceeding ₹100 crore, the court said. It also noted that the family’s real estate company was building a residential township with 550 flats in Pune, among other projects.
The court observed that Indian family businesses are typically run by the male members working as a collective unit to reap benefits from their professional activity. “…each family member shows dependence on the other and they arrange and re-arrange their affairs to best preserve and conserve family assets within themselves, enabling them to depict to courts a diminished picture of their financial strength solely for purposes of defending proceedings to pay maintenance,” the judges said.
The judges also said that the woman, having been married into this family for 16 years, is entitled to the same lifestyle she enjoyed during the marriage.
The woman told the court that the man had defaulted on paying the maintenance, forcing her to pay for her daughter’s education on her own. The man claimed that the woman worked as a tutor, ran a small business, received help from her brother, and was capable of supporting herself and her daughter. In fact, the man said, a divorced woman struggling to make ends meet “would not even think of” enrolling her daughter in yoga, baking, and violin classes.
However, the judges remarked sharply, “We are unable to appreciate this line of argument, not just for its patriarchal tenor”. They said, “That a mother dares to work hard and even claim to depend on her own brother to give the daughter (who is as much the man’s offspring) a decent life, cannot be a disqualification for expecting that the daughter’s expenses for a decent standard of living be met by the father…”.