Vidhara

The Special Marriage Act, 1954

§22Restitution of conjugal rights

When either the husband or the wife has, without reasonable excuse, withdrawn from the society of the other, the aggrieved party may apply by petition to the district court for restitution of conjugal rights, and the court, on being satisfied of the truth of the statements made in such petition, and that there is no legal ground why the application should not be granted, may decree restitution of conjugal rights accordingly. [Explanation.―Where a question arises whether there has been reasonable excuse for withdrawal from the society, the burden of providing reasonable excuse shall be on the person who has withdrawn from the society.]

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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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