The Bombay High Court’s recent decision in ABC v State of Maharashtra has recognised a long-denied truth: a single mother is a “complete parent” in India. In doing so, it challenged the deeply embedded assumption under the law governing Hindus that lineage, including family membership and social identity like surname or caste, must flow through the father, even though the burden of care is on the mother. Employing the principle of substantive equality, the court allowed the mother to change the child’s surname and caste to her own. However, the court has been less willing to apply the same equality-based reasoning in cases dealing with the birthright of children in their mother’s joint family (ancestral) property.

While a mother is now considered a ‘complete parent’ for a child’s civic identity, Hindu inheritance laws still treat her as an incomplete parent who can function as a primary caregiver and guardian but  not as a source of legal continuity for the transmission of ancestral property. Customarily, ownership of ancestral property (mitakshara coparcenary) under Hindu law was restricted to four generations of male members born into the family, giving little to no ownership rights to the female members. Far-reaching reforms were made to Hindu females’ inheritance rights through the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, especially by the 2005 amendment, which gave daughters ownership rights by birth in their father’s ancestral property. Yet these reforms have not entirely unsettled the deeper patrilineal structure of the joint family and the rights that flow from it. Rather, the provisions remain silent on the extent to which these rights can be practiced by the daughters, often used to limit their rights during interpretive challenges in the courts.

On the one hand, the Delhi High Court has adopted a progressive stance in Manu Gupta v Sujata Sharma, ruling that daughters enjoy equal rights in all aspects of the joint family, including the right to act as Karta (the head of the family responsible for making all the welfare-based decisions for the family and property). Conversely, the Bombay High Court in Vishwambhar v. Sunanda took a restrictive view by denying birth rights to daughters’ children in the joint family property coming from their maternal ancestors.

The continuing emphasis on the male line as the only recognised source of ancestral property shows how inheritance laws are still linked to outdated assumptions of lineage being paternal and heavily dependent on the marital status of the parents. This not only reinstates the inferior position of a mother in traditional families but is out of step with the social reality of other non-traditional forms of families including single mothers with sole custody, or unmarried females who have legally adopted a child. In these cases, a child is raised solely by the mother and her family, but when it comes to the birthrights in the property, the law will be on the lookout for the father, who could be absent, untraceable, unbothered, or non-existent.

This rigid imagination further marginalises children who are born outside of wedlock, leaving them financially and legally vulnerable. By categorising them as ‘illegitimate,’ the law restricts their inheritance rights solely to their mother’s property, expressly excluding them from the paternal line and the broader maternal line of relatives. If the child’s mother dies, this child could be left destitute, having no rights to the properties held by the paternal or maternal lines, depending entirely on wills or gifts for financial security.

In Mamta Vakil v. Bansi Wadhwa, the same court affirmed that prioritising agnates (male-line descendants) over cognates (female-line descendants) for inheritance of self-acquired property is gender-discriminatory and violates Article 15(1) of the Constitution. This constitutional scrutiny must now be applied to ancestral property rights. Interpreting the law to restrict birthrights to sons’ children while excluding daughters’ children results in the perpetuation of discrimination based on birth and gender. However, focusing only on judicial interpretations is insufficient until the law breaks the rigid imagination of a traditional family unit, that the State actively preserves, and the judiciary defends by employing age-old precedents. Instead, the 2018 Law Commission Consultation Paper’s recommendation to abolish the joint family property scheme of succession altogether requires urgent reconsideration.