Bollywood, October 29, 2026: The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected Anita Advani’s plea seeking recognition of her relationship with late Bollywood superstar Rajesh Khanna as a marriage, describing the case as “luxury litigation” and finding no grounds to entertain it.
A bench of Justices M M Sundresh and Prasanna B Varale declined to interfere with the Bombay High Court’s April 1 order dismissing Advani’s plea. Her counsel told the court that the civil suit was ultimately about seeking dignity.
Advani has maintained that she was in a live-in relationship with Khanna for several years and was with the actor during the final phase of his life. Khanna died in July 2012 at the age of 69.
The latest order follows years of litigation over the nature of their relationship. Advani had challenged an earlier decision by a Mumbai sessions court, which rejected her civil suit in 2017 seeking a declaration recognising the relationship as a marriage.
Anita Advani’s Luxury Litigation ends in Supreme Court
The dispute also involved a complaint Advani filed in 2013 under the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, against Khanna’s estranged wife, Dimple Kapadia, their daughter Twinkle Khanna and son-in-law Akshay Kumar. She had sought monthly maintenance and a three-bedroom flat in Mumbai’s Bandra area.
In 2015, the Bombay High Court quashed the domestic violence proceedings, holding that the relationship, on the facts presented before it, was not in the nature of marriage for the purposes of the Act. The court also observed that Rajesh Khanna‘s family members could not all be made parties to the proceedings when Advani had not lived with them.
Beyond the courtroom, Advani has spoken publicly about her relationship with the actor. She appeared on Salman Khan’s reality show Bigg Boss in 2013 and later published a memoir titled The Endearingly Wicked Ways of Rajesh Khanna, offering personal recollections of the late star.
In an interview with the Meri Saheli podcast, Advani said their relationship was known to friends and that they had initially tried to keep it private before it became widely known.
Rajesh Khanna, widely regarded as one of Hindi cinema’s biggest stars, died in 2012. His Bandra bungalow, Aashirwad, which had previously belonged to actor Rajendra Kumar, was reportedly sold to an industrialist in 2014.
The Supreme Court’s latest decision marks another major setback in Advani’s effort to obtain legal recognition of the relationship. Her counsel’s appeal to the idea of dignity did not persuade the bench to entertain the plea, bringing the latest stage of the long-running legal dispute to a close.