Bejla Oraon v. Kali Das Oraon (2026): proving a custom, and the limits of a 'ghardamad's' claim

Customary law asks a court to do something it is usually spared: to find, as a fact, what an unwritten rule of a community actually is, and then to apply it faithfully to a tangled genealogy. In Bejla Oraon v. Kali Das Oraon, decided on 9 July 2026, a Division Bench of Justices Sanjay Karol (who authored the judgment) and Nongmeikapam Kotiswar Singh worked through both tasks in a land dispute among the Oraons of Chotanagpur that had been in litigation, in one forum or another, since 1975. The judgment is a compact primer on how a custom is proved, on when the Supreme Court may disturb concurrent findings of fact, and on the discipline of reading a source of custom exactly as it is written.

A suit that outlived its parties

The original plaintiff sued in 1975. His challenge before the Supreme Court — now prosecuted through his legal heirs — was to the judgment of the High Court of Jharkhand at Ranchi dated 10 June 2024 in Second Appeal No. 35 of 1995. That decision had upheld the first appellate court (the 1st Additional District Judge, Gumla, in TA No. 42 of 1990), which in turn had affirmed the trial court (the Munsif, Gumla, in TS No. 22 of 1975). By the time the matter reached the Supreme Court in 2026, the dispute had run for roughly half a century across four tiers of adjudication, and every court below had ruled the same way. The Court's task, as it put it, was to examine the correctness of concurrent findings.

The genealogy

The dispute traces to one Sukhu Oraon, the grandfather, who had three sons — Dhungru, Ledura and Bhoula. The plaintiff (also named Sukhu, his grandfather's namesake) was Dhungru's second son and claimed all the land owned by the grandfather. His claim was opposed by Bhoula's daughter, Budhain, and her husband Punai, the original defendants. Their case rested on the assertion that Ledura, who had no children of his own, had taken Punai as his ghardamad, so that Ledura's property had devolved on Punai; they also relied on a deed dated 27 February 1975 said to record a partition between Budhain and Ledura. The plaintiff's answer was that neither Budhain nor Punai had any title, so that any such partition would be non est.

How a custom is proved

Before touching the facts, the Court set out the framework. It began with Halsbury's Laws of England, which lists four essential attributes of a valid custom: it must be immemorial, reasonable, certain in its terms, and continued as of right and without interruption since its immemorial origin. Distilling its own precedent, the Court added a set of working propositions: he who alleges a custom must prove both the custom and that he is governed by it; long and continuous usage must be shown; proof comes from the general evidence of members of the tribe or family, and is strengthened where the custom is supported by public record; the custom must be certain and reasonable, and not immoral or opposed to public policy; once judicially noticed, a custom need not be re-proved in every case; and, under Section 48 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872, the opinions of persons likely to know of the custom are relevant. Crucially, a custom cannot be built on the testimony of a single witness, because the very thing to be proved is long and continuous usage.

When Article 136 permits interference

The Court then addressed the harder threshold: its own power to reopen concurrent findings. Drawing on Srinivas Ram Kumar v. Mahabir Prasad, Bharwada Bhoginbhai Hirjibhai v. State of Gujarat, Mithilesh Kumari v. Prem Behari Khare and, most recently, Ramachandran v. Vijayan (2024), it reaffirmed that concurrent findings of fact are not ordinarily disturbed under Article 136. Interference is justified only in narrow situations — where the finding does not emanate from the pleadings, is foreign to or entirely divorced from the evidence, rests on irrelevant material while ignoring material evidence, runs contrary to a provision of law, is one no reasonable judicial mind could reach, or is perverse. It is a power to be used sparingly, and the burden of showing that concurrent findings are unjust lies on the appellant.

Reading the source: the ghardamad question

The heart of the case is a close reading of S.C. Roy's The Oraons of Chotanagpur, the ethnographic work on which both the trial court and the High Court had relied. Roy's account distinguishes between two situations. Most directly, he records that where there is no male issue or adopted son but only a ghardamad "duly adopted into the house as a prospective son-in-law by the last male owner or even by his widow", the deceased owner's Rajhas lands pass, on the widow's death, to that ghardamad — while bhuinhari land goes to the nearest male agnate.

The courts below, the Supreme Court held, had misdirected themselves on their own source. On the record it was Ledura — the uncle-in-law — who was said to have adopted Punai; there was nothing to show that Budhain's father Bhoula had adopted him. Roy's passage, however, speaks of adoption by the last male owner or his widow.

It was, the Court found, "nowhere established that an uncle-in-law can adopt his niece's husband as his ghardamad within the prevalent customary law." The High Court had compounded the error: having framed the substantial question of law about the uncle's ability to adopt a ghardamad, it declined to answer it merely because the findings below were concurrent — which, the Court observed, is not the appropriate way to dispose of a substantial question of law under Section 100 of the Code of Civil Procedure. The High Court's further reasoning — that no adverse inference could be drawn because a bar on adoption by an uncle-in-law had not been established — inverted the burden of proof, which lay on those asserting the custom.

Working through the six issues

The Court resolved the case issue by issue. It found that no partition between the branches of the family had been proved. On the ghardamad custom itself, it accepted that a son-in-law taken into the house does acquire a right in his father-in-law's property — the one strand of custom that the evidence established. But the alleged rule that an issueless Oraon's property passes to a nephew rather than a daughter was held not proved, the witnesses being internally inconsistent and a single witness being insufficient to establish usage.

On the daughters' position, the Court accepted the plaintiff's consistent evidence — which withstood cross-examination — that a daughter does not take a share in the property, the defendants' witnesses being inconsistent among themselves (some suggesting a daughter could take only where the land was transferred to her by a written instrument, which was not established here). On the question of who succeeded after the deaths in the family, the Court relied on Roy's rule that, absent a ghardamad or other male heir directly related to the owner, the nearest male agnate takes; Punai being deceased and there being no other male descendant, the plaintiff succeeded. Finally, the disputed deed — described as a "lease" by most witnesses and as a partition deed by the civil court — could not confer title either way: a lease does not pass title, and a partition is possible only among those who already hold shares, which Budhain did not.

Why it matters

Bejla Oraon is a reminder that custom is a question of fact that must be pleaded and proved with the same rigour as any other — and that a court applying a written source of custom is bound by its precise terms. The decision does not disturb the settled reluctance to reopen concurrent findings; it applies the recognised exception for a finding "divorced from the evidence" or contrary to law, triggered here by the misreading of Roy's text and the mislocated burden of proof. The outcome on the daughters' claim reflects the custom as proved on this record — the exclusion operating as a matter of intestate succession under the community's usage, distinct from any voluntary transfer by written instrument — and should be read as an application of a proven custom to particular facts, not a general pronouncement on tribal women's inheritance.

Related on Valkya

• Manni Devi v. Rama Devi: Section 2(2) and the succession rights of Scheduled Tribe daughters
• Samatha v. State of Andhra Pradesh (1997): tribal land, mining, and the Fifth Schedule
• Mary Roy v. State of Kerala (1986): equal inheritance for Syrian Christian women
• B.S. Lalitha v. Bhuvanesh: Section 6(5) is a narrow saving clause, not a jurisdictional bar

Sources

• Supreme Court of India, judgment in Bejla Oraon v. Kali Das Oraon & Ors., 2026 INSC 672 (9 July 2026)