Legal Question in Family Law in California

You will face two issues in obtaining a divorce in California with a spouse in India. The first is obtaining California jurisdiction over the other spouse. If you have lived in California for at least six months and in the county you file in for at least four months, California law considers California to have jurisdiction to dissolve the marriage. But you still have to serve the other spouse with the summons and other court papers before the California court will consider itself to have jurisdiction over her. Without jurisdiction over her, the court will not proceed. The procedure for serving U.S. court papers in a foreign country is not conceptually difficult, but it requires you to follow a lengthy series of steps under the Hague Convention which involves using State Department channels to obtain service of the papers under the supervision and procedures of the foreign country's judicial system. It is a slow process, but you have to make sure you do it and do it right or the California courts will not allow the case to proceed. This is especially true in the case of an annulment, as opposed to a divorce, because of the strictly limited circumstances in which you can get an annulment rather than a divorce.

Assuming you are able to jump through the Hague Convention hoops and get her served in India, and the annulment goes through, your second issue is whether the divorce will be recognized in India. Not being an Indian lawyer, I cannot answer that question. I can warn you, however, that India is one of a handful of countries that do not consider all aspects of U.S. family law to be valid. They refuse, for example, to enforce child custody orders or enforce parent kidnapping extradition requests issued by U.S. courts. So you will need to ask a qualified Indian attorney whether or not a U.S. annulment would be recognized in India.