Court case(2007) 3 SCC 169

After her marriage the respondent, Taruna Batra, lived with her husband in the house of her mother-in-law, who owned it; the husband had no share in it. The marriage broke down and the husband filed for divorce. The wife claimed the right to continue residing in the mother-in-law's house and obtained an injunction from the trial court restraining her in-laws from interfering with her residence, which was eventually upheld by the Delhi High Court on the view that the house was her matrimonial home. The mother-in-law and father-in-law appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court allowed the appeal. Markandey Katju J. held that the definition of shared household in s. 2(s) was clumsily drafted and could not be read literally, since that would allow a woman to claim residence in every house of her husband's relatives in which she had lived even for a short time, which would lead to chaos. The wife's claim for alternative accommodation under s. 19(1)(f) lay only against the husband, not his in-laws or relatives. A shared household means a house belonging to or taken on rent by the husband, or a house belonging to the joint family of which the husband is a member. Since the house belonged to the mother-in-law, not to the husband or a joint family, it was not a shared household, and the wife could not claim a right to live there.