Vidhara

The Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act, 1956

§3Definitions

In this Act, unless the context otherwise requires,― (a) the expressions “custom” and “usage” signify any rule which, having been continuously and uniformly observed for a long time, has obtained the force of law among Hindus in any local area, tribe, community, group or family: Provided that the rule is certain and not unreasonable or opposed to public policy: and Provided further that, in the case of a rule applicable only to a family, it has not been discontinued by the family; (b) “maintenance” includes― (i) in all cases, provision for food, clothing, residence, education and medical attendance and treatment; (ii) in the case of an unmarried daughter, also the reasonable expenses of and incident to her marriage; (c) “minor” means a person who has not completed his or her age of eighteen years.

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Official text: India Code (official)

Official India Code text: The Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act, 1956, English PDF (bitstream 123456789/1638/1/AA1956____78.pdf, 146,411 bytes, sha256 5503d94a84375aba...) fetched directly from indiacode.nic.in (Akamai edge, DNS via dns.google) on 2026-08-03. Extracted via pdftotext 26.07 -bbox and the @nexlex/ingest inline parser. Automated parse; footnotes and amendment history excluded. Spot-verified against the PDF; full clause-level proofread pending.

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