MARITAL PRIVACY AND INDIVIDUAL AUTONOMY IN INDIA: ANALYSING THE LIMITS OF LEGAL REGULATION OF INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS

Indian law has a strange relationship with the marital home. For most of its history it has treated that space as too private for the state to enter when a wife complains of sexual violence, and as public enough for the state to enter when a husband complains of her infidelity or her absence. This paper asks what the constitutional recognition of privacy in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) has changed, and what it has left untouched. It reads the privacy and autonomy cases of the last decade (Puttaswamy, Navtej Singh Johar, Joseph Shine, Independent Thought, Shafin Jahan and others) alongside four long-standing sites of regulation: restitution of conjugal rights, the marital rape exception, adultery and its civil consequences, and the evidentiary exposure of spouses. The paper argues that the law's central difficulty is not too much regulation or too little, but regulation that protects the institution of marriage at the expense of the individuals who make it up. Drawing on liberal, feminist and relational accounts of autonomy, it proposes a workable test for the legitimate limits of state intervention in intimate life: the law may protect persons within relationships from coercion and harm, but it may not enforce the relationship itself, police its moral content, or presume consent from its mere existence.