Srinagar, Dec. 17 -- Farhana still remembers the number. It was read out softly during her nikah in Srinagar's old city, noted down by the imam, and nodded at by the witnesses. Her mehar was fixed at rs 600,000.

"It sounded official," she said. "I thought it meant something."

It never came. When her marriage ended three years later, the number stayed on paper. The furniture her parents had given stayed with her former husband. The promise made to her, she said, silently disappeared.

But now, the Supreme Court of India said that promise was never meant to be silent.

In a latest judgment in State of U.P. v. Ajmal Beg & Anr., the court spoke with rare clarity about mehar under Muslim law and the way it has been reduced to a formality acr...