Divorce papers and documents required in India

What "divorce papers" actually means in India

The phrase comes from American television, where a spouse is served with a printed packet. India has nothing equivalent. There is no form to download, no standard packet, and no government website that issues divorce papers. What exists is a court file, and it is built document by document for your specific facts by whoever drafts it.

That has one practical consequence worth stating plainly at the top. Anyone selling you "divorce papers" as a product is selling you a template that will still have to be rewritten around your marriage, your dates and your settlement. What is genuinely reusable is the structure — which paragraphs a petition must contain, what a verification clause has to say, what a vakalatnama looks like — and that structure is what this page sets out, document by document, with a sample of each.

A second consequence: the registry that receives your file checks form before anyone reads the merits. Scrutiny objections are almost never about whether your marriage has broken down. They are about a missing signature, a verification clause that does not separate knowledge from information, an annexure index that lists eight documents when seven are attached, or an affidavit sworn before nobody. Each of those costs a week and a trip.

1. The petition

The petition is the pleading. It tells the court who the parties are, why this court can hear the matter, what happened, which section of the Act you are invoking, and exactly what order you want. Everything else in the file exists to support it.

What it is not is a narrative of the marriage. A petition that runs to fourteen pages of grievance and two lines of legal foundation is a weak petition, because the court decides on the paragraphs that do legal work — jurisdiction, the statutory ground, and the particulars of that ground — and those get buried. Keep the story short and the particulars specific.

• Who prepares it: your advocate, or you if you are appearing in person. Section 13 of the Family Courts Act, 1984 means no party is entitled as of right to a legal practitioner, so appearing in person is lawful — but a petition is the one document where the drafting genuinely matters.
• Cause title: the court, the case number left blank for the registry, and the parties described by name, age, parentage and address. In a Section 13B petition both are "Petitioner No. 1" and "Petitioner No. 2"; in a contested petition, "Petitioner" and "Respondent".
• Marriage paragraph: date, place, and that it was performed according to Hindu rites and ceremonies. If registered, the registration date, the registrar and the certificate number.
• Applicability paragraph: that both parties were and remain Hindus (or Buddhists, Jains or Sikhs), so the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 governs the marriage.
• Residence paragraph: where the parties last resided together. This is doing jurisdictional work, so it must be accurate.
• Children paragraph: names, ages and who they are living with — or a positive averment that there is no child of the marriage.
• The ground: for Section 13B, the three requirements of sub-section (1). For a contested petition, the specific clause of Section 13(1), 13(1A) or 13(2), with dates, places and incidents pleaded as particulars.
• Jurisdiction paragraph: which limb of Section 19 you rely on, stated as a fact, not as a conclusion.
• Pending proceedings paragraph: every case between the parties, by number and court — or a positive averment that there is none.
• Prayer: the exact relief. A prayer that does not ask for what you want cannot be granted.
• Signature, and the verification clause.

2. The supporting affidavit

Every petition is accompanied by an affidavit in which the party swears that the contents are true. It is short — five or six paragraphs — and it does two things: it puts the pleading on oath, and it identifies which parts of the petition are within the deponent’s own knowledge and which are on information, advice or record.

That second function is the one people skip, and it is the one that matters. A blanket "all the contents are true to my knowledge" is untrue on its face, because the legal submissions in a petition are not within anyone’s personal knowledge, and a cross-examiner will take you to that line years later.

• Who prepares it: drafted with the petition, sworn by the party personally.
• Where it is sworn: before a notary public or an oath commissioner. The attestation must carry the notary’s stamp, register number and date.
• Stamp paper: on the value the State requires for an affidavit — this varies by State and is small.
• Content: that the deponent is the party, is conversant with the facts, has read the petition, that the specified paragraphs are true to knowledge and the rest true on information and record, and that nothing material has been concealed.
• Common mistakes: undated attestation; the deponent signing on a different date from the notary; paragraph numbers in the verification that do not match the petition after a redraft; and an affidavit sworn before the petition was finalised.

3. The vakalatnama

A vakalatnama is the instrument by which you authorise an advocate to act for you. Without one on record the advocate has no locus and the registry will not accept the filing. It is a single page, it costs almost nothing, and it is responsible for more returned files than any other document in a matrimonial matter.

It carries a small court-fee stamp or an advocate welfare fund stamp, depending on the State, and it must be both signed by the client and accepted in writing by the advocate. An advocate’s acceptance is not implied by their appearance.

• Who prepares it: the advocate’s office. You sign it; the advocate signs the acceptance.
• One per party per advocate. In a joint Section 13B petition where each spouse has their own advocate, that is two vakalatnamas.
• Must name the court and the matter. A vakalatnama drawn for one case does not travel to another.
• Common mistakes: the client signs but the advocate’s acceptance is left blank; the stamp is missing; the date is left blank; a second advocate is engaged later and no fresh vakalatnama is filed; the party’s name in the vakalatnama does not match the name in the cause title.

4. Proof of the marriage

The court must be satisfied that a marriage was solemnised before it can dissolve one. Where the marriage was registered under Section 8 of the Hindu Marriage Act, the certificate does this on its own. Where it was not — and a great many Indian marriages are not registered — the marriage is proved by evidence of the ceremony instead.

Registration is proof of a marriage, not the marriage itself. A Hindu marriage is complete when the ceremonies are performed; registration records it. So an unregistered marriage is fully valid, fully dissolvable, and simply proved a different way.

5. Address proof of both parties

Address proof is doing two jobs and both are consequential. It establishes jurisdiction under Section 19, and it fixes the address at which the respondent will be served. Get either wrong and you lose months.

On service in particular: an address that is stale is worse than useless. If the respondent cannot be served personally, the court will eventually order substituted service — affixation at the last known address and publication in a newspaper — which adds time, adds cost, and gives the respondent a later argument that they never knew about the proceeding.

• Accepted: Aadhaar, passport, voter identity card, driving licence, a recent utility bill, a bank statement showing the address, or a rent agreement.
• File proof for both parties, not just your own. The respondent’s address proof establishes where service is to be attempted.
• Where the wife is the petitioner and relies on the Section 19 clause allowing her to file where she resides, her current address proof is the jurisdictional document in the file. It should show the address as it is on the date of filing.
• Common mistakes: filing an Aadhaar with an address the party left years ago; relying on a parental address without any document tying the party to it; and, where a party has moved recently, filing nothing to show the move.

6. Income documents

Income documents come into the file the moment money is in issue — which is on any application for interim maintenance under Section 24, any claim for permanent alimony under Section 25, and any Section 13B settlement in which the court is asked to satisfy itself that the agreed figure is fair.

Both sides file them, not only the person paying. Rajnesh v. Neha requires disclosure from both parties precisely because a maintenance figure is a function of two incomes and two sets of liabilities, not one.

7. Photographs

Two or three recent passport-size photographs of each party, and, where the marriage is unregistered, photographs of the ceremony itself. The recent photographs are used for identification when the court records statements — in a Section 13B matter the judge is satisfying themselves that the person in front of them is the person named in the petition.

Wedding photographs do different work: they are evidence that the ceremony took place, so they should show both parties, and ideally the ceremony rather than a posed portrait taken afterwards.

8. The settlement or memorandum of understanding

In a mutual consent file the settlement is not an optional extra; it is the document the court reads most carefully. It records what the parties have agreed about alimony, custody, property, stridhan and pending cases, and it is what the court relies on when it satisfies itself under Section 23(1)(bb) that consent was freely given and that nothing is left in dispute.

It is annexed to the petition, taken on record at the first motion, and — if a waiver of the six-month period is sought — it is the single most important document in the waiver application, because one of the four conditions in Amardeep Singh v. Harveen Kaur is that the parties have genuinely settled everything.

• Who prepares it: the two advocates, negotiating. It should be finished before the petition is drafted, because the petition recites it.
• Signed by both parties, with each page initialled, and attested by two witnesses.
• Does not require registration as a settlement — but a transfer of immovable property agreed in it must be carried out by a separate registered instrument. The settlement is the promise; the deed is the transfer.
• Common mistakes: amounts without dates; "the parties have settled all disputes" with no particulars; no mechanism for what happens on default; and no list of the pending proceedings that are to be withdrawn.

9. The affidavit of assets and liabilities

This is the document most people filing a maintenance application in India have never heard of, and it is mandatory. In Rajnesh v. Neha, (2021) 2 SCC 324, the Supreme Court directed that an Affidavit of Disclosure of Assets and Liabilities, in the format annexed to the judgment, be filed by both parties in all maintenance proceedings — including proceedings already pending — before every Family Court, District Court and Magistrate’s Court in the country.

Three formats were prescribed. Enclosure I is for non-agrarian deponents and runs from Part A to Part K, covering personal information, existing maintenance orders, dependants, medical conditions, children, income, assets, liabilities, a separate part for the self-employed, what you know of your spouse’s finances, and a further part where either party is living abroad. Enclosure II is for agrarian deponents and asks about landholding, crops, livestock and loans against the land. Enclosure III is a separate format for the State of Meghalaya, framed for its matrilineal society.

The consequences of not filing are real. The Court directed that where a respondent delays filing wilfully, the court may strike off the defence, and that it may proceed to decide the maintenance application on the applicant’s affidavit alone. A false statement can attract proceedings for perjury and for contempt. Parties who are below the poverty line, in the economically weaker section, or casual labourers are exempt.

10. The index, the list of dates and the annexures

These are the pieces nobody thinks of as documents, and they are the ones scrutiny most often objects to. A court file is paginated, indexed and tied. The index lists every document with its page numbers; the list of dates gives the court a chronology it can read in thirty seconds; and the annexures are the supporting documents, marked in sequence and referred to by that mark in the petition.

• Mark annexures in one sequence — ANNEXURE P-1, P-2, P-3 in a petition — and refer to each by its mark at the point in the pleading where it is relied on. Never annex something the pleading does not mention.
• Where several documents form one group, file them as a colly: "ANNEXURE P-3 (colly)" for three months of salary slips.
• Every annexure that is a photocopy needs to be legible. A dark photocopy of a bank statement will be objected to, and the objection is fair.
• A document not in English needs a translation, and in most courts the translation has to be certified.
• Page the whole file continuously and make the index match. An index that lists a document at page 47 when it is at page 51 is a scrutiny objection.
• File the number of sets the court requires: one for the record, one for each respondent for service, and one advance copy where the court practice requires it. Keep a complete set for yourself.

The eight mistakes that get a divorce filing returned