Vidhara

The Special Marriage Act, 1954

§12Place and form of solemnization

(1) The marriage may be solemnized at the office of the Marriage Officer, or at such other place within a reasonable distance therefrom as the parties may desire, and upon such conditions and the payment of such additional fees as may be prescribed. (2) The marriage may be solemnized in any form which the parties may choose to adopt: Provided that it shall not be complete and binding on the parties unless each party says to the other in the presence of the Marriage Officer and the three witnesses and in any language understood by the parties,―“I, (A), take the (B), to be my lawful wife (or husband)”.

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Official text: India Code (official)

Official India Code text: The Special Marriage Act, 1954, English PDF (bitstream 123456789/1387/1/A1954-43E.pdf, 377,569 bytes, sha256 8edbdc1c6178de27...) 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. This PDF prints its amendment footnotes at body height, so sections 3 to 7 were re-extracted from the source line stream and their numbering restored (D-058). Automated parse; footnotes and amendment history excluded. Spot-verified against the PDF; full clause-level proofread pending.

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