Parvathi Nairthi v. Laxmi Nairthy
Supreme Court of India2026 INSC 521Bench: Justice Ujjal Bhuyan and Justice Vijay Bishnoi
The Supreme Court upheld the validity of an unregistered Will executed by the testator in favour of his younger sister, holding that mere exclusion of the wife and children from inheritance cannot, by itself, be characterised as a 'suspicious circumstance' so as to invalidate the Will, in the absence of independent material affecting its genuineness or due execution. The Court reiterated three settled propositions of succession law. First, the very purpose of executing a Will is to depart from the ordinary line of intestate succession; a testator is legally entitled, within the limits of his testamentary power, to distribute his property according to his own wishes, and the law presumes him to know his own mind. Second, there is no statutory requirement under the Indian Succession Act, 1925 or the Registration Act, 1908 mandating registration of a Will; registration is optional, and the law draws no adverse inference merely because a Will is unregistered. Third, the doctrine of 'suspicious circumstances' articulated in H. Venkatachala Iyengar v. B.N. Thimmajamma (1959) and refined in Bharpur Singh v. Shamsher Singh (2009) does not convert every unconventional disposition into an invalid one; what the doctrine requires is a circumstance that genuinely shakes the conscience of the court, such as a frail testator, an interested scribe and propounder rolled into one, suspicious signatures, or absence of independent attesting witnesses. The bare fact that the wife and children have been excluded, without more, is not such a circumstance. Applying these principles, the Bench affirmed the concurrent findings of the Trial Court and the First Appellate Court, both of which had been endorsed by the Karnataka High Court, that the Will was duly executed and attested in accordance with Section 63 of the Indian Succession Act and Section 68 of the Indian Evidence Act.