Quick answer: In Ranchhodbhai Jesingbhai v. Anchhibhai Kavjibhai Chaudhari, decided on 11 September 2026, the Gujarat High Court held that where a Scheduled Tribe woman inherits agricultural land from her husband and no custom of her community is pleaded or proved to bar or restrict her succession, she takes that property as its absolute, self-acquired owner under the principle of “justice, equity and good conscience” read with Article 14 of the Constitution — and is therefore free to bequeath it by a valid will, regardless of any claim by her natal family to inherit it instead under a rule of survivorship.
1. Introduction
The Hindu Succession Act, 1956 converted a Hindu woman’s earlier “limited estate” in inherited property into full ownership and abolished the old rule sending a childless widow’s inherited property back to her husband’s reversioners on her death. But Section 2(2) of the Act excludes Scheduled Tribes from this reform, unless the Central Government notifies otherwise for a specific tribe. That carve-out leaves tribal succession to whatever custom can be proved — and, absent one, to whatever a court decides justice, equity and good conscience requires. Where no party proves a custom either way, the result has often turned less on doctrine than on which default a judge is prepared to assume.
On 11 September 2026, the Gujarat High Court confronted exactly this gap in a second appeal arising from litigation running over two decades. The dispute concerned agricultural land in Taluka Mandvi, District Surat, which a childless Scheduled Tribe woman, Chhaniben, had inherited from her husband and then bequeathed by will to her husband’s family rather than her own. Her brother sued to set the will aside and claim the land himself as her nearest surviving relative. Both courts below rejected his claim, but by reasoning from “old Hindu law” that, on the facts found, had no more claim to apply than the very statute they agreed did not govern the parties. Justice Maulik J. Shelat’s judgment — marked “Approved for Reporting” — corrects that reasoning while reaching the same result: a woman who validly inherits property, absent a proven contrary custom, takes it as an absolute owner rather than a defeasible or reversionary interest, and may dispose of it as she chooses.
This article traces the facts, the Court’s reasoning on tribal succession, self-acquired property and testamentary freedom, the separate argument that the land’s tenancy status barred any will, and the narrow scope of a second appeal under Section 100 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 — and closes with what it means for advising tribal families and clients whose title traces through such a will.
2. Case Summary and Background
Chhaniben belonged to the Chaudhari community, a Scheduled Tribe, and was married to Jivlabhai, who held agricultural land — the suit properties, referred to in the record as Block Nos. 51 and 366 — by way of tenancy rights in Taluka Mandvi, District Surat. Jivlabhai died issueless around 1958–59, and Chhaniben inherited his holding, her name being mutated in the revenue records accordingly. Chhaniben herself died issueless on 15 July 1991. Fourteen days before her death, on 1 July 1991, she executed a registered will bequeathing the suit properties to Anchhibhai Kavjibhai Chaudhari — the original defendant, whom she described in the will as her nephew. The will’s execution was proved before the trial court through the evidence of attesting witnesses and the registering officer.
Ranchhodbhai Jesingbhai, who was Chhaniben’s brother by the same mother but a different father, contested the will’s validity and Anchhibhai’s claim to the property. His pleaded case was that Chhaniben had earlier executed a will, dated 24 July 1972, bequeathing the property to his own son, Raysangbhai — a document he never produced or proved at trial. He also claimed that, as Chhaniben’s nearest surviving relative on her own side of the family, he was entitled to the property under a rule of survivorship once her 1991 will was set aside. On 27 September 2002, he filed Regular Civil Suit No. 26 of 2002 (renumbered Special Civil Suit No. 111 of 2011) before the Principal Senior Civil Judge, Bardoli, seeking a declaration that Chhaniben had no right to execute the will, a declaration of his own ownership by survivorship, possession of the properties with mesne profits, and a permanent injunction.
A complicating fact ran through the proceedings: Chhaniben’s brother-in-law, Kavlabhai Chogdabhai — the elder brother of her late husband, Jivlabhai — was still alive when Chhaniben died, and had himself instituted Regular Civil Suit No. 46 of 1991 against both Ranchhodbhai and Anchhibhai. Its outcome was never placed on record in the present proceedings, but Ranchhodbhai admitted in cross-examination that Kavlabhai was alive at the relevant date. Kavlabhai was never joined as a party to Ranchhodbhai’s suit.
The trial court, by judgment and decree dated 7 December 2011, dismissed Ranchhodbhai’s claims to a declaration and to ownership by survivorship. Noting that the parties belonged to a Scheduled Tribe and that Section 2(2) of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 accordingly excluded them from the Act, the trial court nonetheless invoked the reversioner rule of pre-1956 Hindu law: that where a widow inherits property from her husband and dies issueless, the property reverts not to her own family but to the next heir of the husband from whom she inherited it — in this case, Kavlabhai. On that footing, it held that Ranchhodbhai, being Chhaniben’s brother rather than any heir of Jivlabhai’s line, had no right to claim the property by survivorship. It nonetheless granted Ranchhodbhai a permanent injunction protecting his possession of one plot, Block No. 366, since he was found to be in occupation of it. On appeal, the 3rd Additional District Judge, Surat at Bardoli, in Regular Civil Appeal No. 51 of 2015 (formerly Regular Civil Appeal Nos. 183 of 2012 and 2 of 2012), took a different statutory route — invoking Sections 14 to 16 and 30 of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 — but reached the same conclusion, dismissing the appeal by judgment and decree dated 24 June 2026. Ranchhodbhai’s heirs then filed Regular Second Appeal No. 500 of 2026 before the Gujarat High Court, which was reserved for judgment on 20 August 2026 and decided on 11 September 2026.
3. Legal Analysis
3.1 The trial court’s error: applying old Hindu law where no custom was proved
The appellant’s first and central argument was that both courts below had erred by resorting to Hindu law — whether the pre-1956 reversioner rule or specific provisions of the 1956 Act — when Section 2(2) expressly excludes Scheduled Tribes from its operation, and no party had pleaded or proved any custom of the Chaudhari community substituting for it. The High Court agreed the Act had no application, but rejected the conclusion the appellant wanted drawn from that premise. The flaw in the trial court’s reasoning was not that it looked outside the 1956 Act — that step was correct — but that it filled the resulting gap with an assumption borrowed from precisely the body of law the parties agreed did not govern them: the reversioner rule is itself a product of unreformed Hindu law, and invoking it here, absent any proof that the Chaudhari community actually followed it, substituted one unproved default for another.
3.2 Filling the gap: justice, equity and good conscience, and the burden of proving an exclusionary custom
Where a personal law statute does not apply and no custom is proved, Indian courts fall back on the residual principle of “justice, equity and good conscience” — traced by the High Court through a line of Supreme Court authority, from the Constitution Bench’s application of the principle to labour disputes in Niemla Textile Finishing Mills Ltd. v. Second Punjab Industrial Tribunal, AIR 1957 SC 329, and Superintendent and Remembrancer of Legal Affairs v. Corporation of Calcutta, AIR 1967 SC 997, to its extended treatment in the Ram Janmabhoomi title judgment, M. Siddiq v. Suresh Das, (2020) 1 SCC 1, and its application to a tribal succession dispute in Tirith Kumar, AIR 2025 SC 119. Each decision treats the principle as filling gaps left by an inapplicable or silent personal law with an outcome that is “legally sustainable and just,” not as licence for a court to import whichever unwritten assumption comes most readily to hand.
The authority doing the substantive work, however, was the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Ram Charan and Others v. Sukhram and Others, AIR 2025 (Civil) SC 2363, extracts of which the Gujarat High Court reproduced at length — a case where a Scheduled Tribe woman’s heirs claimed an equal share in her father’s property. There, on the passage quoted, the Supreme Court held that courts confronting a silent custom should not simply presume an exclusionary one and place the burden on a woman’s heirs to disprove it; that assumption, the Supreme Court observed of the courts in that case, was “a patriarchal predisposition” carried over from Hindu law with “no place” where Hindu law itself did not apply. Denying a tribal woman a share in property for want of proof of an inclusionary custom, it held, offended Article 14 of the Constitution, since no “rational nexus or reasonable classification” justified excluding women alone from succession where no law or proved custom said so — a conclusion the Supreme Court linked to the Statement of Objects and Reasons behind the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, which made daughters coparceners specifically to correct that discrimination.
Applying that reasoning to Chhaniben’s case, the Gujarat High Court held that she — as Jivlabhai’s sole surviving heir when he died, with no proved custom either barring a widow from inheriting or limiting what she took — became the full and absolute owner of the suit properties, not a limited holder subject to reversion on her own death. That directly displaces the trial court’s reversioner theory: if Chhaniben’s ownership was full rather than limited, there was no reversionary interest in Kavlabhai or anyone else in Jivlabhai’s line for the property to revert to when she died. Once the property was hers absolutely — the judgment calls it her “self-acquired property” — what became of it after her death was a question for her alone to answer by will.
3.3 Testamentary freedom follows from absolute ownership — and defeats the survivorship claim
Having settled that Chhaniben’s ownership was absolute, the High Court held she was fully entitled to dispose of the property by will absent any proved custom restricting a woman of her community from doing so. Her 1 July 1991 will in Anchhibhai’s favour had been proved through attesting witnesses and the registering officer, and no perversity was shown in that finding, so the Court declined to disturb it. That was fatal to Ranchhodbhai’s survivorship claim on two grounds: a valid will simply defeats intestate succession over the same property; and even on the old-Hindu-law analogy the appellant himself invoked, an issueless widow’s inherited property would pass to her husband’s next heir — here, Kavlabhai — not to her own brother. Since Kavlabhai was never joined to the suit, the Court decided nothing about his rights, holding only that Ranchhodbhai’s own claim could not succeed regardless.
3.4 The tenancy-restriction argument, and why raising it too late — and too self-servingly — failed
The appellant’s second ground invoked Section 73AA of the Gujarat Land Revenue Code, 1879, which restricts the transfer of certain tenure land, arguing the suit properties fell within that restriction and so could not pass under a will at all — relying on a coordinate bench’s decision in LH of Late Jashvantbhai Abhesingbhai Vasava and Others v. Jesingbhai Abhesingbhai Vasava and Others, Second Appeal No. 113 of 2024, decided 19 November 2024, which had held a will ineffective over Section 73AA land. The High Court rejected this on three grounds. First, it had never been raised below, and nothing showed any revenue proceeding under Section 73AA(3)(a) challenging the mutation in Anchhibhai’s favour; a wholly new plea could not be raised for the first time in second appeal. Second, Jashvantbhai Vasava was distinguishable: there, the will’s beneficiary had affirmatively sued to be declared owner without obtaining probate, which Section 73AA barred; here, Anchhibhai made no such affirmative claim, merely defending an unchallenged mutation. Third, Ranchhodbhai himself had been instrumental in preparing and executing Chhaniben’s will — drawn from the attesting witness’s evidence — and a party who facilitates a transaction cannot later complain of its legal effect.
3.5 The limits of a second appeal under Section 100 CPC
Finally, the Court addressed whether the questions raised even qualified as “substantial questions of law” opening the door to interference under Section 100 CPC with the concurrent findings of two courts below. Drawing on the Constitution Bench’s classic formulation in Sir Chunilal V. Mehta and Sons Ltd. v. Century Spinning and Manufacturing Co. Ltd., AIR 1962 SC 1314 — that a question already settled by the highest court ceases to be “substantial” however important it once seemed — and on Jaichand (Dead) through LRs and Others v. Sahnulal and Another, 2024 SCC OnLine SC 3864, and Russi Fisheries (P) Ltd. v. Bhavna Seth, 2026 SCC OnLine SC 555 (each restating, through earlier Supreme Court authority, that even an erroneous finding of fact cannot found interference in second appeal absent perversity or a clear error of settled law), the Court held the appellant’s questions were, at most, questions of law rather than substantial ones, and the findings below neither perverse nor contrary to settled principle. It dismissed the second appeal in limine, confirmed both decrees, and made no order as to costs.
Before parting with the case, the Court added an unusual coda: it directed its Registry to forward the judgment, through the Government Pleader, to the State of Gujarat, recommending that the State press the Central Government to notify Scheduled Tribe communities following Hindu tradition under Section 2(2) — replacing case-by-case reconstruction of custom with a settled statutory framework.
4. Practical Significance
For advocates advising Scheduled Tribe clients on succession, the judgment confirms that the absence of the Hindu Succession Act’s default rules does not leave tribal women with a lesser or defeasible interest in inherited property. Unless an adverse custom is affirmatively pleaded and proved — with evidence of its actual content and observance, not asserted from the bench — a tribal widow or daughter who inherits property takes it absolutely, exactly as a Hindu woman would under Sections 14 to 16 of the 1956 Act. The burden of proving a restrictive custom lies squarely on the party asserting it; failure to plead its specific content, as happened here, will be treated as a failure of proof, not neutral ground for the court to fill in on its own.
For drafters and executors of wills by Scheduled Tribe testators, testamentary capacity follows the character of ownership: property genuinely inherited and held absolutely can be freely willed, but property under a statutory transfer restriction — such as tenure land under Section 73AA of the Gujarat Land Revenue Code, or its analogues elsewhere — may not be, and that restriction should be checked and cleared through the appropriate revenue proceeding before execution, rather than left to surface as a defence years later. Title diligence on land traced through such a will should confirm tenure classification both at the will’s date and at any later transfer.
For litigators, the case illustrates two recurring traps in second appeals: raising a statutory bar for the first time at that stage without any foundation laid below, and expecting a High Court under Section 100 to reappraise settled facts merely because the reasoning below was imperfect. A court may affirm a correct result on different reasoning, as happened here.
For state functionaries and legislators, the Court’s closing recommendation is a direct invitation to close a long-standing statutory gap. Litigants and revenue authorities dealing with tribal succession in Gujarat, and in any other state with a substantial Scheduled Tribe population following Hindu customary practice, would benefit from the certainty a Section 2(2) notification would bring, reducing the need for courts to reconstruct outcomes case by case through the residual principle of justice, equity and good conscience.
5. Conclusion
Thirty-five years after Chhaniben’s death and twenty-four years after her brother first sued to undo her will, the Gujarat High Court has settled — at least as between these parties — that a Scheduled Tribe woman’s inheritance from her husband is no lesser an estate than a Hindu woman’s would be, absent proof of a custom saying otherwise. The judgment does not purport to create new law; it applies the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Ram Charan v. Sukhram to a fresh set of facts, and in doing so corrects a court below that had reached for an unreformed and unproved Hindu-law default instead of confronting the gap the exclusion of Scheduled Tribes from the 1956 Act actually leaves. Its more transferable holding may prove to be the narrower one on Section 73AA: that a party who helped execute a will cannot later invoke a tenure restriction to defeat it, and that such a restriction cannot be raised for the first time in second appeal without any foundation laid below. Left genuinely open, and flagged by the Court itself as needing legislative attention, is the underlying uncertainty that produced this litigation in the first place — the continuing exclusion of Scheduled Tribes from a codified law of succession, which leaves every such family’s inheritance to depend on proof of a custom that, as this case shows, often does not exist in any provable form at all.
Citations
Primary judgment
- Ranchhodbhai Jesingbhai (Since Dead, through Heirs and LRs) and Others v. Anchhibhai Kavjibhai Chaudhari (Since Dead, through Heirs and LRs) and Others, R/Second Appeal No. 500 of 2026 with Civil Application (For Stay) No. 1 of 2026, Gujarat High Court at Ahmedabad, C/SA/500/2026 (GJHC240603442026), reserved 20 August 2026, pronounced 11 September 2026 (Maulik J. Shelat, J.), arising from the judgment and decree dated 24 June 2026 of the 3rd Additional District Judge, Surat at Bardoli, in Regular Civil Appeal No. 51 of 2015 (formerly Regular Civil Appeal Nos. 183 of 2012 and 2 of 2012), itself arising from the judgment and decree dated 7 December 2011 of the Principal Senior Civil Judge, Bardoli, in Special Civil Suit No. 111 of 2011 (formerly Regular Civil Suit No. 26 of 2002). Source: Indian Kanoon, accessed 15 September 2026.
Precedents relied on in the primary judgment
- Ram Charan and Others v. Sukhram and Others, AIR 2025 (Civil) SC 2363 (quoted at length in the primary judgment; not independently retrieved for this article).
- Sir Chunilal V. Mehta and Sons Ltd. v. Century Spinning and Manufacturing Co. Ltd., AIR 1962 SC 1314.
- Jaichand (Dead) through LRs and Others v. Sahnulal and Another, 2024 SCC OnLine SC 3864.
- Kshitish Chandra Purkait v. Santosh Kumar Purkait, (1997) 5 SCC 438 (cited within Jaichand v. Sahnulal).
- Kondira Dagadu Kadam v. Savitribai Sopan Gujar, AIR 1999 SC 2213 (cited within Jaichand v. Sahnulal).
- Russi Fisheries (P) Ltd. v. Bhavna Seth, 2026 SCC OnLine SC 555.
- Bholaram v. Ameerchand, (1981) 2 SCC 414 (cited within Russi Fisheries v. Bhavna Seth).
- Madhavan Nair v. Bhaskar Pillai (Dead) by LRs, (2005) 10 SCC 553 (cited within Russi Fisheries v. Bhavna Seth).
- Kashibai w/o Lachiram v. Parwatibai w/o Lachiram, (1995) 6 SCC 213 (cited within Russi Fisheries v. Bhavna Seth).
- Kulwant Kaur v. Gurdial Singh Mann (Dead) by LRs, AIR 2001 SC 1273 (cited within Russi Fisheries v. Bhavna Seth).
- LH of Late Jashvantbhai Abhesingbhai Vasava and Others v. Jesingbhai Abhesingbhai Vasava and Others, Second Appeal No. 113 of 2024, Gujarat High Court, decided 19 November 2024 (distinguished, not followed).
Authorities quoted within the extract of Ram Charan v. Sukhram reproduced in the primary judgment (mentioned as background within that quotation; not independently retrieved)
- Niemla Textile Finishing Mills Ltd. v. Second Punjab Industrial Tribunal, AIR 1957 SC 329.
- Superintendent and Remembrancer of Legal Affairs v. Corporation of Calcutta, AIR 1967 SC 997.
- M. Siddiq v. Suresh Das, (2020) 1 SCC 1 (Ram Janmabhoomi Temple case).
- Tirith Kumar, AIR 2025 SC 119.
Statutory provisions engaged
- Section 2(2), Sections 14 to 16, and Section 30, Hindu Succession Act, 1956 (exclusion of Scheduled Tribes; a Hindu female’s absolute ownership of inherited property; testamentary power over such property).
- Section 73AA, including Section 73AA(3)(a), Gujarat Land Revenue Code, 1879 (restriction on transfer of restricted-tenure land).
- Section 100, Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 (scope of a second appeal; the requirement of a substantial question of law).
- Articles 14, 15(1), 38 and 46, Constitution of India (equality and non-discrimination on grounds including sex).
- Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005 (making daughters coparceners in Hindu Mitakshara joint family property; referenced for its Statement of Objects and Reasons).
This article is not legal advice and does not create an attorney–client relationship. Readers should verify the certified copy of the judgment and any subsequent clarificatory orders before relying on it, and consult a qualified advocate on the facts of their matter.