It is in this background that, under the leadership of enlightened Indians, the Widow Re-marriage Act was passed in 1856. In 1929 came the Child Marriage Restraint Act (Sharda Act), which fixed the minimum age of marriage for girls and boys at 14 and 18 respectively. The post-independence Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 went further and raised the marriage bar for girls to 15 (boys remained 18), made it mandatory that neither party had a living spouse at the time of marriage (thus making monogamy the law), and permitted divorce under certain conditions. (The minimum age of marriage is now 18 years for girls, and a debate is current on whether the legal age of 21 years for boys should be brought down to 18 years).
The Special Marriage Act of 1954 legalized unions between spouses of different religions, provided that the girl was 18 years of age and the boy 21.
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