A and B agree to marry each other and none else during life. A breaches and marries another. What remedy for B under Specific Relief Act?

The Contract and Its Two Limbs

The agreement between A and B contains, if analysed carefully, two distinct undertakings. The first is an affirmative agreement — a promise to marry each other. The second is a negative agreement — a promise not to marry anyone else during the parties' lifetimes. This two-limbed structure is not an accident; it is the key that determines the entire question of what remedies are available and what remedies are not.

No Specific Performance: The Absolute Bar

The first and most emphatic answer the law gives is that B cannot compel A to marry her. A contract to give in marriage is a contract of the most intensely personal nature. As far back as Re, Gunput Narain Singh (1875 ILR 1 Cal 74), it was held that a suit for specific performance of a contract to give in marriage will not lie. This position has been carried forward and restated with clarity in the commentaries on Section 14(1)(c) of the Specific Relief Act, 1963, which bars the specific enforcement of contracts that are dependent on the personal qualification or volition of the parties. The ceremony of betrothal does not, by Hindu law, amount to a binding and irrevocable contract of which the court would give specific performance — and no court, whatever its sympathy for B's situation, will decree that A must appear at an altar and exchange vows with B against his will.

The reasoning here is not merely technical. It goes to the very dignity of the institution of marriage and the character of the obligation. Marriage is not the construction of a building or the delivery of goods — it is a union of two persons that rests entirely on personal volition. Even Article 23 of the Constitution, as explained by the Supreme Court in Peoples Union for Democratic Rights v. UOI (AIR 1982 SC 1473), casts a shadow over any attempt to compel personal service against a person's will. No decree of court can make A a willing husband, and a court of equity has never pretended otherwise.

No Injunction to Enforce the Affirmative Promise

For the same reason, Section 41(e) of the Act steps in to deny B the indirect route. That provision prohibits the grant of an injunction to prevent the breach of a contract the performance of which cannot be specifically enforced. Since the positive promise — to marry B — cannot be specifically enforced, B cannot obtain an injunction compelling A to stop preparations for the marriage or restraining him from performing a marriage ceremony with B alone. The two provisions, Section 14 and Section 41(e), form a closed arch — no door is left open for the enforcement of the affirmative undertaking.

Section 42 and the Negative Covenant: A Tempting but Failed Argument

This is where the analysis becomes genuinely interesting, and where a student might be tempted to argue that Section 42 — the provision which enables the enforcement of negative covenants even when the affirmative agreement cannot be specifically performed — offers B some relief. The argument would run: A agreed not to marry anyone else; A has broken that promise by marrying another; and the court should therefore injunct him from contracting further marriages with third parties.

But Section 42 does not come to B's rescue here, and the reason is instructive. Section 42 permits the enforcement of a negative covenant only where the negative agreement is a stipulation in a contract that is otherwise valid and properly structured. The provision was designed for commercial and professional settings — a singer who agrees not to perform elsewhere, an employee who agrees not to join a rival firm, a vendor who agrees not to sell to others. The illustration cited under the analogous provision — Lumley v. Wagner (1852) 1 De GM&G 604 — involved the enforcement of a negative clause in a theatrical contract. In every such case, the court enforces the negative covenant because doing so does not compel the promisor to serve the plaintiff; it merely prevents service to a third party. The promisor retains the freedom to stay idle.

An agreement to marry none else but each other stands on fundamentally different ground. Here, the negative covenant — "and none else" — is not separable from the affirmative promise in the way that a "not to sing elsewhere" clause is separable from a "to sing here" clause. If the court were to issue an injunction preventing A from marrying anyone, the practical and inevitable result would be either to compel A to marry B or to condemn him to celibacy for life. Neither outcome is one that a court will enforce. The law has never permitted a negative covenant to be weaponised in a way that achieves the very compulsion that the prohibition on specific performance was designed to prevent. As the sources confirm, a negative covenant will not be enforced if its enforcement would result in compelling specific performance of a contract of personal, confidential, or fiduciary service — and a fortiori of a contract of marriage itself.

The Only Available Remedy: Damages

What remains for B, then, is the oldest and most straightforward remedy in the law of contract — a suit for damages. A contract to marry is a valid contract in Indian law, and its breach gives rise to a cause of action in damages. B may sue A for compensation under Section 73 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872, recovering such sum as fairly represents the loss suffered — which may include damage to reputation, mental anguish, loss of the social and economic advantages that the proposed marriage would have brought, and expenses incurred in preparation for the marriage. The courts have recognised that the breach of a promise to marry is a peculiarly serious wrong, and the assessment of damages is not confined to pecuniary loss strictly measured.

What B cannot recover — either through specific performance, declaration, or injunction — is A himself. The law, with all the firmness of its equitable tradition, draws an absolute distinction between compelling a person to part with property and compelling a person to part with his liberty of choice in matters of the heart. The former it can do; the latter it will not.

The Marriage That Has Already Occurred

There is a further dimension peculiar to the facts as stated: A has already married another. This development forecloses even the possibility of an injunction going forward, for A's breach is now complete and the marriage is a fait accompli. An injunction operates prospectively — it prevents a threatened or continuing wrong. Once A has married, the negative covenant cannot be revived by any court order, and the marriage between A and his new spouse cannot be dissolved through proceedings in a civil suit under the Specific Relief Act. B's remedy is therefore exclusively in damages, and those damages must be assessed as at the date of the breach.

The law here may appear to leave B with a remedy that is cold comfort — money, where what was promised was a lifetime's companionship. But this is not a failure of the legal system; it is its most honest acknowledgement that there are some human obligations which the machinery of courts and decrees simply cannot replicate.