In a landmark judgment delivered in April 1985, India's Supreme Court granted a small maintenance allowance to Shah Bano, a seventy-three-year-old Muslim divorcee, to be paid by her husband under the Criminal Code. Shah Bano had been married to Mohammed Ahmed Khan since 1932. Ahmed Khan married again in 1946, and in 1975, on account of property-related disputes between the two wives, Shah Bano and her children moved out from their family home; in 1978 she filed a maintenance suit against her hus…