Y.V. Chandrachud JUDGMENT
1. This is a matrimonial dispute arising out of a petition filed by the appellant for annulment of his marriage with the respondent or alternatively for divorce or for judicial separation. The annulment was sought on the ground of fraud, divorce on the ground of unsoundness of mind and judicial separation on the ground of cruelty.
2. The spouses possess high academic qualifications and each one claims a measure of social respectability and cultural sophistry. The evidence shows some traces of these. But of this there need be no doubt : the voluminous record which they have collectively built up in the case contains a fair reflection of their rancor and acrimony.
3. The appellant, Dr. Narayan Ganesh Dastane, passed his M.Sc. in Agriculture from the Poona University. He was sent by the Government of India to Australia in the Colombo Plan Scheme. He obtained his Doctorate in Irrigation Research from an Australian University and returned to India in April, 1955. He worked for about 3 years as an Agricultural Research Officer and in October, 1958 he left Poona to take charge of a new post as an Assistant Professor of Agronomy in the Post-Graduate School, Pusa Institute, Delhi.- At present he is said to be working on a foreign assignment. His father was a solicitor-cum lawyer practising in Poona.
4. The respondent, Sucheta, comes from Nagpur but she spent her formative years mostly in Delhi. Her father was transferred to Delhi in 1949 as an Under Secretary in the Commerce Ministry of the Government of India and she came to Delhi along with the rest of the family. She passed her B.Sc. from the Delhi University in 1954 and spent a year in Japan where her father was attached to the Indian Embassy. After the rift in her marital relations, she obtained a Master's Degree in Social Work. She has done field work in Marriage Conciliation and Juvenile Delinquency. She is at present working in the Commerce and Industry Ministry, Delhi.
5. In April, 1956 her parents arranged her marriage with the appellant But before finalising the proposal, her father-B. R. Abhyankar wrote two letters to the appellant's father saying in the first of these that the respondent "had a little misfortune before going to Japan in that she had a bad attack of sunstroke which affected her ment........