Published on : 05 Nov 2025, 3:30 am 3 min read

The Banjara community, a scheduled tribe, has become substantially ‘Hinduised’ and Banjara marriages performed with Hindu rituals fall within the scope of the Hindu Marriage Act (HMA), the Delhi High Court recently ruled.

A Division Bench of Justices Anil Kshetarpal and Harish Vaidyanathan Shankar rejected the objection by a woman’s husband that the divorce plea under HMA was not maintainable since the couple belonged to a scheduled tribe.

Thus, it upheld a family court order which had held that a divorce petition filed by a Banjara (Lambada) woman under the Hindu Marriage Act was maintainable.

The Court relied on the expert literature and ethnographic studies cited by the woman to observe that though the Banjara community has

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