In a significant property succession dispute cutting to the heart of how ancestral gifts devolve under Hindu personal law, the Andhra Pradesh High Court was recently called upon to decide a deeply consequential question, whether the husband of a deceased woman could stake a claim to land she had received as a gift from her grandmother, or whether that property must travel back along the paternal line under the special succession rule carved out in Section 15(2)(a) of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956. At the centre of the dispute stands a Revisional Authority's order that upended a Revenue Divisional Officer's carefully reasoned mutation decision, handing control of agricultural land in Pentakota Village, Payakaraopeta Mandal to the husband of a woman long deceased, a finding now under the Court's rigorous scrutiny for its fidelity to one of Hindu succession law's most protective and often misunderstood provisions.
The controversy began with an act of familial generosity, Chikkala Venkayamma, the original owner of 1 acre 50 cents of agricultural land in Survey No. 54/3 at Pentakota Village, executed a registered gift deed in 2002 in favour of her granddaughter Srivirita, the elder of her son Dattatreya's two daughters. Srivirita's name was duly mutated in revenue records and a pattadar passbook issued in her name. Tragedy, however, struck in November 2005 when Srivirita died an unnatural death, leaving behind no children, only a husband. Faced with this turn of events, the grandmother Venkayamma cancelled the gift deed in 2007, and subsequently executed a registered Will in 2011 bequeathing the same property to her second granddaughter, Chikkala Devika Manasa.
Venkayamma herself passed away in May 2012. When Devika Manasa approached the Revenue Divisional Officer to have her name mutated in the records, the RDO allowed the application in 2017, cancelling Srivirita's pattadar passbook and directing the Tahsildar to update records accordingly. This relief, however, was short-lived, Srivirita's husband, the 5th unofficial respondent, challenged the RDO's order before the Revisional Authority cum Joint Collector, Anakapalli, which in April 2023 overturned the mutation order, declared the gift deed cancellation legally infructuous, and directed that the husband's name be mutated in the revenue records instead. Counsel for the petitioners forcefully argued before the High Court that this finding was wholly contrary to Section 15(2)(a) of the Hindu Succession Act, which expressly provides that property inherited by a female Hindu from her father or mother, in the absence of her own children, devolves not upon her husband but upon the heirs of her father, adding that a suit for declaration of title filed by Devika Manasa had also been decreed in her favour by the Civil Court in October 2025.
The High Court undertook a careful reading of Section 15 of the Hindu Succession Act and arrived at a conclusion that left little room for ambiguity. The Court observed that the bare language of Section 15(2)(a) is pellucid in its operation, where a female Hindu inherits property from her father or mother and dies issueless, the property does not pass to her husband or his family, but reverts to the heirs of her father. Applying this to the facts, the Court held that Srivirita's husband had derived no title whatsoever from his deceased wife over property that had come to her by way of gift from her paternal grandmother, and therefore had no standing to either question the cancellation of the gift deed or seek mutation in his favour.
The Court also specifically addressed the Revisional Authority's reliance on the Supreme Court's judgment in Thota Ganga Laxmi v. Government of Andhra Pradesh, holding it to be entirely inapplicable to the present facts, reasoning that "the cancellation can only be questioned by the donee/giftee, who is no more", and that since the 5th unofficial respondent had derived no title from his wife, he had no legal capacity to challenge the cancellation at all.
Accordingly, the writ petition was allowed, the impugned order of the Revisional Authority dated April 01, 2023 was set aside, the RDO's original mutation order was restored, and the Tahsildar, Payakaraopeta was directed to mutate the name of the first writ petitioner Devika Manasa in the revenue records forthwith.
Case Title: Chikkala Devika Manasa And Anr Vs. The State Of AP And Ors
Case No.: Writ Petition No. 12421/2023
Coram: Hon'ble Mr. Justice Tarlada Rajasekhar Rao
Advocate for the Petitioner: Adv. G Venkata Subba Raju
Advocate for the Respondent: GP For Revenue
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