If you married under the Special Marriage Act 1954, your divorce is governed entirely and exclusively by that Act — and the first and most important reassurance I give interfaith couples is that this is genuinely protective. Your different religions, any family or community pressure arising from them, and any religious personal law that might otherwise apply are legally irrelevant to the dissolution of your marriage. The Special Marriage Act is a secular statute, and the Vadodara Family Court treats an interfaith couple married under it in exactly the same way as any other couple.

Your routes to dissolution are: mutual consent divorce under Section 28 of the SMA, which follows the same two-motion procedure as Section 13B of the Hindu Marriage Act — living separately for at least one year, a joint petition, a six-month cooling-off gap between motions (waivable under Amardeep Singh v. Harveen Kaur where appropriate), and reaffirmation of consent at the second motion; and contested divorce under Section 27 of the SMA on grounds including adultery, cruelty, desertion for two years or more, unsoundness of mind, venereal disease, leprosy, presumption of death, and imprisonment — a list that substantially mirrors the Hindu Marriage Act grounds and is applied with the same evidentiary standards.

Jurisdiction lies with the District Court — which in Vadodara means the Family Court — where the marriage was registered, where the parties last resided together, or where the respondent currently resides. The procedural experience in Vadodara's Family Court is indistinguishable from an HMA matter: the same filings, the same Section 9 Family Courts Act reconciliation attempt, the same approach to maintenance, custody, and streedhan. Appeals from the Vadodara Family Court in SMA matters, as in HMA matters, lie to the Gujarat High Court at Ahmedabad. The family law advocates at the Vadodara panel of Aapka Legal Advice handle SMA matters regularly, including situations where one spouse is a foreign national, which sometimes adds a cross-jurisdictional dimension worth addressing early.