HC: Divorced woman can’t use ex’s name

Swati Deshpande TNN

Mumbai: What’s in a name? The famous Shakespearan line popped up during an acrimonious court proceeding on Wednesday. “A lot,’’ said an aggrieved man, especially when my ex-wife is misusing it. The Bombay High Court agreed and passed a rare order that might make divorced men smile. The court directed a divorced woman to stop using her former husband’s name and surname.

The HC also clarified that the “ex-wife cannot use the husband’s name anywhere, including in her bank account’’.

The landmark judgment was passed by Justice Roshan Dalvi as she dismissed a petition filed by a woman challenging an interim order of the family court in Bandra.

R R Vachha, principal judge of the family court in Mumbai, had last September restrained the woman from using her exhusband’s name and surname as their marriage had ended four years ago. “By using the ex-husband’s name or surname, there is always a possibility of people being misled that she is still the wife, when in fact she is not,’’ said Vachha. The HC upheld the family court order and said it need not be interfered with but should be given effect to “for all purposes’’.

Divorced woman can’t use ex’s surname too

Mumbai: The Bombay High Court has directed a divorced woman to stop using her former husband’s name and surname. The HC also clarified that the “exwife cannot use the husband’s name anywhere, including in her bank account’’.

The battle over names between the couple arose a year after the family court in February 2006 granted them divorce and the HC finalised it the same year. But the wife says she has moved the Supreme Court where the matter is pending; she claimed she was still his wife.

The couple had begun their divorce fight in 1996 after staying together for a little over six months. When after their divorce, the woman filed for more maintenance, the husband—a 49-year-old police inspector—contended through his lawyers that his ex-wife continued to use his name even though she was no longer legally his wife and sought that she be restrained from doing so. The man alleged that she was

“mischievously posing as his wife, entering into altercations and caused embarrassing situations for him’’. He produced a news report from a local paper in his native village in Maharashtra about one such act of hers and said in villages where people were known by their family names, such behaviour affected not only him but also his entire family.

The Lalwanis also argued that since the woman was not a wife anymore, she was not entitled to tag on her ex-husband’s name and surname to her own as it would be misleading. The wife argued that her ex was merely being “malicious and trying to malign’’ her. The family court held that “the marriage had come to an end by virtue of the orders of two courts, but still the woman claimed to be the wife’’. Observing that the issue arose out of a marital relationship, it restrained her from using the ex-husband’s name.

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