Marriage Can Silently Revoke the Will You Already Wrote

Revoking a will is normally a deliberate act - tearing it up, or executing a later one that supersedes it. Section 69 of the Indian Succession Act, 1925 adds a way for it to happen without the testator doing anything at all: a will stands automatically revoked by the testator’s subsequent marriage. No document, no intention, no notice. The marriage alone does it.

Section 57 exempts Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains from that provision, which is why the rule is so rarely discussed in India - most testators simply aren’t caught by it, and the advice reflects that. Christians and Parsis are caught by it squarely.

The Exemption Tracks the Marriage Law, Not the Religion

The trap sits in the exemption. The Bombay High Court, in Kalyan Kumar Nag v. Dina Guha (1973), held that a Hindu marrying under the Special Marriage Act, 1954 fell within Section 69 after all - the exemption tracked the law the marriage was solemnised under, not the religion of the person marrying.

A 1976 amendment narrowed that considerably. Section 21A of the Special Marriage Act, inserted with effect from 27 May 1976, provides that where an SMA marriage is between two people who both profess the Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh or Jain religion, the Indian Succession Act does not govern their succession - the Hindu Succession Act does, and Section 69 does not bite. Two Hindus who civil-register rather than marry by religious ceremony are therefore not caught.

What remains within reach is the genuinely inter-faith SMA marriage - where the parties are not both from those four communities. There, the succession framework is the Indian Succession Act, and a marriage can extinguish a will the testator has no reason to think was affected.

A Revoked Will Is No Will, So the Whole Estate Goes Intestate

The consequence isn’t that the estate goes somewhere unintended by a small margin. A revoked will is no will at all, so the entire estate passes by intestate succession - to the heirs the statute names, in the shares it fixes, regardless of what the destroyed document said. A carefully drafted will leaving assets to a charity, a sibling, or a child from an earlier relationship simply ceases to exist.

The practical rule is narrow and easy to act on: for anyone not exempt under Section 57, and for any Hindu marrying under the Special Marriage Act, a marriage is an event that requires a fresh will afterwards. Not a review, not a codicil to the old one - a new will, since there is nothing left to amend.

Write a fresh will after the wedding if Section 57 does not exempt you, or if you are Hindu and marrying under the Special Marriage Act to someone outside those four communities. Not a review and not a codicil - there is nothing left to amend.