Put a wedding invitation card and a marriage invitation affidavit side by side and read them. The same two names. The same date. The same venue. The same ceremony. Almost every fact in the affidavit is already on the card. So when a consulate or an office asks for the affidavit as well, it is worth asking what it is actually asking for — because it is plainly not asking for information it already has. It is asking for accountability. A card is printed. Nobody signs it, nobody swears to it, and nothing whatever follows for the person who ordered five hundred of them. An affidavit has a deponent, on oath, with his name and address on it — and if what he swore is false, there is a provision that reaches him. That is the entire difference, and once you see it the rest of this page follows from it. It is why the choice of deponent matters more than the wording. A name attached to a claim is only worth what the person behind it knows and can be held to, which is why an affidavit sworn by a cousin in another city who was told what to write adds a signature and nothing else. On the law, one correction worth making at the start, because the provisions people quote are from a repealed statute. The Indian Penal Code has been replaced by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, and for an affidavit like this one — which is not sworn in any judicial proceeding — the operative provision is section 236: a false statement in a declaration which is by law receivable as evidence is punished in the same manner as if the maker gave false evidence. And the part nobody is told: section 237 reaches the person who submits it. Whoever corruptly uses, or attempts to use as true, such a declaration knowing it to be false is punished the same way. In most families one person signs and a different person files the application. Both are in the frame. Where we stop: no statute in India requires this affidavit, prescribes its format or governs its use — so we ask what your reader actually wants rather than quoting a rule that does not exist. We will not arrange a deponent for you, under any circumstances. And we print no stamp value, notary charge or consular fee.
What this guide covers
Start with the comparison, because it is the fastest way to understand what this document is for.
A wedding invitation card carries the names of the two people marrying, the names of the families, the date, the time, the venue, the ceremonies and who is being invited. It is often more detailed than the affidavit, and it is certainly better printed.
So an institution that holds the card and still asks for an affidavit is not asking for information. That is the observation this whole page is built on, and almost nobody makes it — which is why the affidavit gets drafted as though the job were to restate the card at greater length.
Follow that through and one common instinct turns out to be exactly wrong.
The instinct is to make the affidavit comprehensive. Add the guest list. Add the menu arrangements. Add the hotel booking reference, the names of the priests, the three days of ceremonies, the number of expected guests.
None of that strengthens the document and all of it enlarges what somebody has sworn to. A reader who wanted the programme would have asked for the card. What he asked for was an affidavit, and an affidavit padded with unrequested particulars is a longer list of things that can turn out to be inaccurate.
So if not information, what. One word, and it is not a legal word.
Accountability. A person has stood up, identified himself, stated the facts as his own, and sworn to them in front of somebody authorised to administer an oath.
Nothing in that process makes the facts truer. It makes them attributable. Which is an entirely different service, and it happens to be the one a consulate or an office actually needs, because the problem they are solving is not ignorance of your wedding. It is that they cannot tell whether what they have been told is real.
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Stated more sharply, because the sharp version is the useful one.
What the affidavit supplies is a person with something to lose. If the statement is false, there is a provision that reaches the person who made it, and he knew that when he signed.
A reader relies on the document to exactly the extent that the deponent is exposed by it. That single sentence answers most of the practical questions on this page, including the one about who should sign and the one about whether a more impressive-looking signatory helps.
And here is the contrast that makes the point concrete.
Five hundred invitation cards are printed and distributed. Nobody signed any of them. If every fact on them were invented, there would be no person to whom anything attached — no oath, no declaration, no deponent.
The affidavit takes the same sentences and puts a name, an address and an oath under them. That is the whole of the transformation. It is small, it is real, and it is routinely sold as something far grander.
Which means every request for this document is really a question, and it is worth hearing the question rather than the request.
Not: tell us about the wedding. But: is there somebody who will put their name to this.
Hear it that way and the drafting becomes obvious. The answer should be short, it should come from the right person, it should state only what that person actually knows, and it should be capable of being read in thirty seconds by somebody with a hundred files to get through.
So the question this page returns to again and again is a question about a person rather than about a document.
Who is answering for this statement, and how do they know what they are swearing to.
Two halves, and both are necessary. A person who can be held to a statement but knows nothing about the facts is useless. A person who knows everything but cannot be identified or found is equally useless. The value of the affidavit is the overlap.
A word about why institutions work this way, because it is not bureaucratic habit.
A consular officer, an HR manager or a school administrator has no way of visiting a venue in another city and no reason to doubt you personally. What they have is a file, a decision to make and a great many files.
Asking for a sworn statement from somebody with a name and an address is the cheapest available method of shifting the cost of being wrong onto the person making the claim. That is not cynicism about them; it is how documentary systems everywhere manage the fact that they cannot verify everything.
Close this part by putting the two documents side by side one last time.
| The invitation card | The affidavit | |
|---|---|---|
| What it contains | The names, date, venue, ceremonies — usually more than the affidavit | The same core facts, fewer of them |
| Who is behind it | Nobody. It has no author in any sense that matters | A named deponent, with an address, on oath |
| If it is false | Nothing happens to anybody | A provision reaches the deponent, and another reaches whoever submits it |
| What a reader gets from it | Information | Somebody to hold responsible for the information |
Read the third row across. That is the only row in which the two documents genuinely differ, and it is the reason the second one exists.
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Now the practical consequence, and it is where most of the damage in this area is done.
If the document’s value comes from the deponent, then choosing the deponent is the most important decision in the exercise. In practice it is the decision taken with the least thought, usually in the last two days before a deadline.
The question asked is who is free to go to the notary. The question that matters is who knows the facts and can be held to them. Those two questions have different answers in most families, and the gap between them is where bad affidavits come from.
Describe the typical case, because naming it is usually enough to stop it.
The wedding is in one city. The person who needs the affidavit is abroad. The parents are busy with arrangements. So a cousin, or an uncle’s son, or a family friend in a convenient city is asked to sign, and is told over the phone what the document says.
He has now sworn, on his own oath, to facts he has been told rather than facts he knows. Nobody involved intended anything wrong and everybody in the family would describe the document as true. But the person carrying the statement is the person who knows least about it, which is precisely backwards.
So here is the test, and it is two words long.
Knowledge: does this person actually know the facts, from their own involvement, rather than from being told. Standing: is this person connected to the wedding in a way a reader will recognise without explanation.
Score every candidate against both and the answer is usually obvious within a minute. The father or mother of one of the two people marrying scores highest on both and is available in almost every case, which makes the common practice of using somebody else genuinely hard to explain.
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Be concrete about it, because knowledge sounds vague until it is listed.
That the wedding is fixed, not under discussion. The date, from his own knowledge. The venue, because he or his family arranged it. The two people marrying, obviously. And that the named guests are genuinely being invited by the family, rather than being added to the document for somebody’s convenience.
That last one is a real question and it is the one a reader is most interested in. An affidavit stating that four named people are invited to a wedding, sworn by a person who has never discussed those four people with anybody, is a statement about something the deponent does not know.
Which gives the practical answer for almost every case.
The right deponent is a parent of one of the two people marrying, or whoever is actually hosting the function if that is somebody else — an elder brother, an uncle in whose house the wedding is being held, a guardian.
And if the marriage is being solemnised at a registry or through a court marriage rather than with a large function, the host question may not arise at all. In that case the parties themselves, or the parent arranging the gathering afterwards, are the people with knowledge.
The same is true of a ceremony performed at an Arya Samaj temple, or of a marriage involving a foreign national where the arrangements are split between two countries. In each of those the question is unchanged — who arranged this, and who therefore knows it — even though the answer may not be the person a template assumes.
Occasionally the answer is not one person, and it is worth knowing when.
Where two families are jointly hosting and each is inviting its own guests. Where the parent with the knowledge is not the person the reader will recognise as the host. Where a function is being held in one city by relatives while the parents are in another.
In those cases two deponents, each swearing to what they themselves know, is stronger than one person swearing to everything. But understand the trade: each deponent is individually on oath for the whole document, so two signatures mean two people exposed rather than the exposure being halved. Where a genuinely joint statement is the point, a joint affidavit is a service of its own.
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A small drafting point with a disproportionate effect.
The deponent’s address in the affidavit should be an address at which he can actually be found, and it should be the same address that appears on the identity document attached to it.
Readers check this, not out of suspicion but because it is the easiest internal check in the document. An affidavit giving a village address while the attached identity card shows a city one invites a question that nobody needed to be asked, and answering it later costs more than getting it right took.
Related, and the rule is simpler than people assume.
Attach what the reader asked for. If they did not specify, one ordinary government identity document for the deponent is normally enough, and it should match the name and address in the affidavit exactly.
Do not attach a bundle. Three identity documents with three spellings of the same name create a problem the affidavit did not previously have, and a mismatch between documents is read as a discrepancy rather than as an abundance of proof.
And the step that converts a drafted page into an affidavit at all.
The deponent signs in the presence of the person administering the oath, having identified himself. He does not sign at home and send it to be stamped, and somebody else does not sign on his behalf because he is travelling.
A document signed in one place and sworn in another has not been sworn at all, whatever stamp it carries. If the deponent genuinely cannot attend, the answer is a different deponent who can — not a workaround, and never a signature applied by a relative with permission given on the phone.
Now the law, and it needs a correction at the outset because the provisions people quote no longer exist.
Anybody who has asked about this before will have been told about sections of the Indian Penal Code. That statute has been replaced by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, and the numbering has changed completely.
More importantly, the provision usually quoted is the wrong one anyway. Perjury provisions are aimed at false evidence in a judicial proceeding. A marriage invitation affidavit is not sworn in any proceeding. It is a declaration made for an institution, and the Sanhita deals with that situation in its own sections.
Begin with how the Sanhita defines the conduct, because the definition does a lot of work.
Section 227 catches anyone bound by an oath — or simply bound by law to make a declaration on a subject — who states something false in one of three ways: knowing it is false, believing it is false, or merely not believing it to be true. The full wording of the section is set out on our lost document affidavit page and we have not copied it out a second time here.
That third limb is the one to sit with. It does not require a lie, or even a suspicion of one. It covers the person who signed without forming any view at all about whether the contents were so — which describes a great many of the affidavits in circulation.
And then an Explanation that closes the escape route everybody reaches for.
The natural instinct, when a fact is uncertain, is to soften it: to say one believes or understands or expects rather than stating it flatly. People assume that a statement about one’s own belief cannot be false, because only the believer knows what he believes.
Explanation 2 to section 227 provides that a false statement as to the belief of the person attesting is within the section, so a person may be guilty of giving false evidence by stating that he believes a thing which he does not believe, or that he knows a thing which he does not know.
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Now the section that actually governs a document like this, and it is rarely mentioned anywhere.
Section 236: whoever, in any declaration made or subscribed by him, which declaration any Court or any public servant or other person is bound or authorised by law to receive as evidence of any fact, makes any statement which is false, and which he either knows or believes to be false, touching any point material to the object for which the declaration is made or used, shall be punished in the same manner as if he gave false evidence.
Note the limiting words as well as the operative ones: the false statement must touch a point material to the object for which the declaration is made. A misspelt street name is not that. The date of the wedding, the identity of the host and whether the named guests are actually invited plainly are.
And the consequence is expressed by reference rather than separately, which is worth pausing on.
The section does not create a lesser offence for declarations made outside a courtroom. It says the maker is punished in the same manner as if he had given false evidence.
So the law does not treat a sworn statement to an institution as a smaller thing than a sworn statement to a court. Which is precisely the opposite of how these documents are treated in practice, where an invitation affidavit is widely regarded as a formality to be arranged by whoever is handy.
Now the provision that changes how a family should think about this, and almost nobody has heard of it.
Section 237: whoever corruptly uses or attempts to use as true any such declaration, knowing the same to be false in any material point, shall be punished in the same manner as if he gave false evidence.
Read it carefully. It is not about making the declaration. It is about using one, knowing it to be false — and the punishment is the same.
Which produces the single most useful point on this page for anybody about to arrange this document casually.
Two different people are reached by two different sections. The person who swore the statement, and the person who submitted it knowing what was in it.
In most families those are not the same person. One relative signs in India; another relative abroad files it with an application. Both are within the scheme of these provisions, and the one abroad is usually the one who has least thought about it.
Spell the consequence out, because it is the reason this part of the page exists.
When an agent offers to arrange somebody to sign, the exposure does not stay with that signatory. The signatory is reached under one section. The family member who submits the document, knowing perfectly well that the signatory has never met anybody involved, is reached under the other.
And the agent, who arranged all of it and was paid for it, is nowhere in the file. He does not sign and he does not submit. Think about who is actually carrying the risk in that arrangement, and who is being paid to create it.
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Reduce this part to a single sentence and it is this.
A false invitation affidavit is not a paperwork problem; it is a declaration offence, it is punished as if the maker had given false evidence in court, and it reaches the person who files it as well as the person who signs it.
Which does not mean anybody should be frightened of a truthful affidavit. A parent swearing accurately that his daughter is marrying on a stated date at a stated venue, and that named relatives are invited, has nothing whatever to worry about. The warnings here are about one specific thing: putting something in that is not so.
Turn now to the readers, because the document is shaped by whoever is going to read it rather than by any rule.
Four kinds of reader ask for an invitation affidavit, and they are asking for subtly different things. Knowing which one you are dealing with changes what belongs in the draft.
A consulate deciding a visitor visa. An employer deciding leave. A school or institution deciding an absence or a concession. And occasionally a carrier or a booking office deciding a fare or a cancellation. Same document, four different questions behind it.
The commonest reader, and the one where the stakes are highest.
A consular officer deciding a short-stay visit is asking whether the stated purpose of the travel is genuine. The affidavit answers that one question: there is a real wedding, on a real date, and this applicant is actually invited to it by the family holding it.
It answers nothing else in that file, and the rest of the file is the larger part by far. Ties to the country of residence, means, employment, travel history, previous applications. An accurate affidavit supports one limb of an application; it does not carry the application, and the whole of it sits beside the broader visa documentation work rather than replacing it.
A much lower-stakes reader, and often one who did not need an affidavit at all.
An office asking for proof before sanctioning leave for a sibling’s wedding is usually satisfied by the invitation card and a written application. Somewhere between the request and the employee, the word affidavit gets added.
So ask. If the employer does specifically want a sworn statement, the same rules apply and the document is short. But an affidavit produced where a letter was wanted has cost somebody stamp paper and a trip to the notary for nothing, and that is worth two minutes of checking.
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A third reader, with a different concern again.
A school or college asking about an absence, a hostel asking about a weekend away, an examination body asking why a date cannot be attended. Here the reader wants a parent or guardian to take responsibility for the statement rather than a student’s own account.
Which fits the structure of this document exactly, because that is what an affidavit does. The deponent is naturally the parent, the facts are within his knowledge, and the document is about as short as an affidavit gets.
And a fourth, which comes up less often and is worth a line because people are told it exists.
Occasionally a carrier, a travel desk or a booking office asks for documentary support for a concession, a change or a refund connected with a family function. Whether an affidavit is the right thing there depends entirely on what the particular policy asks for.
We mention it to make a point rather than to encourage it: in this category the request is a commercial policy, not a legal requirement, and an affidavit sworn to satisfy a refund rule is sworn on exactly the same oath as one sworn for a consulate. The document does not know it is being used for something small.
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Now the fact that explains why there is no standard format anywhere, and why every template you find differs.
No Indian statute requires a marriage invitation affidavit. None prescribes its contents, none provides for its use, and no authority has published an official form of it.
It is a document created entirely by practice, to satisfy requirements imposed by institutions. Which is why searching for the legally correct format is a waste of an evening: there is nothing to find, because there is no law to find it in.
And the consequence of there being no rule is that every reader sets his own.
A consulate publishes a checklist. An employer has an internal policy. A school has a practice. None of them is bound by the others and none of them is bound to accept what you produce, however carefully it is drafted.
That is not a weakness peculiar to this document. It is the ordinary position of any document put before somebody who has to decide something: it is evidence offered, not an instruction given. The difference here is that people are often told the opposite by whoever is selling them the affidavit.
Which produces the one instruction this part of the page really wants to leave you with.
Get the requirement in writing from whoever is asking, and draft to that. The email, the checklist, the message, the printed list handed over at a counter. Then the affidavit says what was asked for, in the order it was asked for, and nothing else.
Almost every defective affidavit we are asked to look at was drafted to somebody’s memory of a verbal instruction, frequently an agent’s. They contain details nobody wanted, and they omit the one thing the reader specifically needed.
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The last part of this guide is about the limits, and they need stating because the document is sold well beyond them.
An affidavit is evidence of a statement. It is not evidence that the statement is true, and nothing about swearing it makes a fact more real than it was before.
What it establishes is that a particular person said a particular thing, on a particular date, on oath. Everything a reader does with it after that is the reader’s own assessment, and he may reach a different view from the one you were hoping for without anybody having done anything wrong.
The first specific limit, and the most important one.
This affidavit is sworn before the wedding, about a wedding that has not happened. It cannot prove a marriage, because at the moment of swearing there is no marriage to prove.
The documents that establish a marriage come afterwards: the registration record, and the marriage certificate issued from it. Whether that is through marriage registration after a ceremony, under the Special Marriage Act, or as an NRI marriage registration where one party lives abroad, the certificate is the proof and the affidavit never becomes one.
A second limit, which sounds obvious and causes real trouble.
Swearing that a wedding will take place on a date does not oblige anybody to hold it on that date. Families postpone weddings for a hundred ordinary reasons, and nothing in an affidavit prevents that.
Which is worth knowing in both directions. A deponent has not committed an offence because a wedding moved — a statement true when made does not become false later. And a reader relying on the date is relying on a plan, which is exactly why some readers ask for the venue booking as well.
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A third, and it catches people out when a reader is being strict.
The affidavit is a statement that somebody has been invited. It is not the invitation. The invitation is the card, the message, the call — whatever the family actually used.
So where a checklist asks for an invitation, sending only the affidavit answers a different question from the one asked. Send the card as well. A reader who asked for both and received one has a reason to come back, and a second round of correspondence costs weeks that the wedding date may not have.
And the fourth limit, which deserves saying plainly because the entire market for this document is built on blurring it.
No affidavit grants, supports or guarantees a visa. It is not issued by any authority, it is not recognised by any immigration law, and it has no standing beyond being one paper in a file assessed by somebody else.
Anybody who tells you that this affidavit will get a visa, or that a mission is bound to accept it, is describing a document that does not exist. The honest description is narrower and still worth paying for: it is the piece of the file that answers, on somebody’s oath, whether the stated reason for the trip is real.
Which leads to the warning that matters most, and it is not about Indian law at all.
Consular systems treat a false or misleading document very differently from a weak application. A visa refused because the applicant’s ties were not strong enough is a refusal. A visa refused because a document in the file was found to be untrue is a finding about the applicant’s honesty.
And that finding travels. It sits on a record, it is asked about on later applications, and it is frequently asked about by other countries as well. The affidavit that was added to make a file look stronger can be the reason the file is treated as unreliable for years.
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Put the two outcomes side by side, because families routinely choose the worse one while trying to avoid the better one.
A plain, accurate, slightly thin application that is refused can be made again, better, later. An application refused on the ground that something in it was misleading is a far harder thing to come back from, and no fresh affidavit repairs it.
So the exaggeration that was supposed to prevent a refusal has instead produced the one kind of refusal that is difficult to recover from. That trade is almost never explained to the family being advised to make it, and it is the single strongest reason to keep this document strictly accurate.
So the advice, where somebody is worried that an accurate affidavit looks too plain.
Do not strengthen the affidavit. Strengthen the file around it, with documents that are true and verifiable.
The venue booking or its confirmation. The printed card itself. Evidence of the family relationship between the host and the guest. Where somebody genuinely is paying for part of the trip, an honest undertaking saying precisely which part. Each of those is checkable, and a checkable document is worth more to a reader than an emphatic one.
What does not help is manufacturing further sworn documents to sit beside the first one. A character affidavit, a no-objection affidavit or an indemnity bond added because somebody suggested the file looked thin answers a question nobody asked, and each one is another document somebody has sworn to. Where a mission has specifically asked for a sworn statement from the traveller rather than the host, that is a visa affidavit, and where a passport record needs correcting first it is a passport affidavit — different documents for different questions, not reinforcements for this one.
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And closing this part with the honest ranking, which is not the ranking most people are given.
For a wedding-visit application the affidavit is a supporting document, not a leading one. What usually matters more is the applicant’s own position, then the evidence that the wedding is real and arranged, then the relationship, and then the affidavit tying the three together on somebody’s oath.
Which is a reassuring conclusion rather than a deflating one. It means a short, accurate, properly sworn affidavit by the right person is all this part of the file needs — and that the money and anxiety people spend trying to make this one document do more are better spent on the parts of the application that actually decide it. If you want a view on which of those parts is weak, a short consultation is a better purchase than a longer affidavit.
The rest of this page is our own side of the work, written plainly so nobody has to ask what is included.
Three kinds of call, and they arrive in a rush because a wedding date is fixed. A family whose relatives abroad have been asked by a consulate for proof that the wedding is real. An employee whose office wants something on record before sanctioning leave for a brother’s wedding. And a host who has been handed a list of required documents by an institution and told that an affidavit is on it.
All three are usually in a hurry and all three want the same thing drafted in an hour. That part is fine — this is a short document and a same-day affidavit drafting job. What is not fine is drafting it before the three questions in the next section have been answered.
Three questions, always, and the third one is the one nobody expects.
Who is going to swear it, and what is their connection to the wedding. Who is going to read it, and what have they actually asked for in writing. And is the wedding definitely happening on the date you are about to put in a sworn statement.
The third question is not a formality and we ask it directly. A date that is still being discussed between two families is not a date to swear to. If the venue is provisional, the affidavit either says so honestly or it waits a week, and waiting a week has never cost anybody a visa.
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Here is the thing itself, named as a piece of paper rather than as a package.
A short affidavit in the deponent’s own voice: who he is, his address, how he is connected to the wedding, the names of the two people marrying, the date, the venue, the ceremony being performed, who is being invited and why the statement is being made. Nothing else.
Short is the point, not a saving. Every extra sentence in an affidavit is another sentence sworn to, and a deponent who has sworn to twelve facts he was not asked about has taken on eleven unnecessary exposures. We draft what the reader asked for and we stop.
A short list, and each item on it has been requested by somebody.
We will not state that a visa should be granted, that leave should be sanctioned, or that any authority ought to accept anything. We will not describe the deponent’s finances or undertake that he will bear anybody’s expenses unless he has actually agreed to that and understands it is an undertaking. And we will not invent a relationship — a cousin does not become a brother because the form has no box for cousin.
That last one happens constantly and it is the most dangerous of the three, because the relationship is the single fact a reader can most easily check against the other documents in the same file. An affidavit that upgrades a relationship is a false statement sitting next to its own contradiction.
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One request we refuse flatly, and it is made often enough to deserve its own section.
We are asked, politely and sometimes with an offer of extra payment, to arrange somebody to swear the affidavit. A staff member, a local person, anybody with an identity document.
We do not do this, in any circumstances, for any document on this site. An affidavit sworn by a person with no connection to the facts is a false declaration from the moment it is signed, and the person signing it carries the consequence while the family who paid for it keeps the benefit. The answer is always a real deponent with real knowledge, and if there is nobody, the honest conclusion is that this is not the document for your problem.
Briefly, because this part is covered properly elsewhere on the site and does not need repeating here.
An affidavit becomes a statement on oath because somebody authorised to administer the oath does so, and for this kind of document that is ordinarily a notary. The deponent attends, identifies himself and signs in the notary’s presence.
What a notary does and does not add to a document is set out on our notary agreement page, and the notary affidavit and notary attestation services are listed separately. One habit worth keeping: before leaving the counter, copy the notary register entry — its number and date — onto your own copy of the document.
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And the claims we will not make, each of which is made daily by somebody selling this document.
We will not tell you that this affidavit will get a visa, that a consulate is required to accept it, that it proves the wedding, or that having one makes an application strong. None of those is true and the first two are not ours to promise about anybody else’s decision.
What we will tell you is the narrow truth: it places a named person, under oath, behind a claim that until then existed only as print on a card. Worth having, worth paying for — and considerably less than what the word affidavit is usually made to carry.
Some situations arrive wearing the clothes of a simple affidavit and are something else underneath.
A family dispute about whether the wedding should happen at all. A visa refused on the ground that documents were misleading. A case where an affidavit already filed somewhere is now said to be false. Anything that has become a proceeding.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.
In the second and third of those especially, please do not draft a fresh affidavit to explain an earlier one. A second sworn statement about a disputed first one is how a document problem becomes a personal one, and it should be written, if at all, with advice rather than in a hurry.
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The clearest limit on this page, and it is a limit on us rather than on you.
We have no knowledge of your wedding. We have not met the families, seen the venue or spoken to a priest. Everything in the affidavit comes from what the deponent tells us, and that is exactly as it should be, because the oath is his and not ours.
So nothing we issue is a certification by us that a wedding is taking place, and we will not add a line, a letterhead or a stamp suggesting otherwise. Where a reader wants institutional confirmation rather than a family’s statement, the documents that carry it are the registration papers and afterwards the marriage certificate — not an affidavit, and not anything from a drafting office.
On the page rather than on a call, so you can weigh it against anybody else first.
Our charge for drafting this affidavit is ₹600 and the usual turnaround is Same day once the deponent’s details and the wedding particulars reach us. It is a short document and it is priced as one.
The fee is for the drafting. The stamp paper, the notary’s own charge and any attestation beyond notarisation are separate and are paid where they are incurred, not to us as part of this figure.
Immediately next to the figure, because a price without its edges gets argued about later.
It leaves out the stamp paper and the notary’s charge. It leaves out any embassy attestation or apostille, which are different exercises for documents that have to work abroad. It leaves out translation where the reader needs the document in another language. And it leaves out the whole of the visa application, which is visa documentation and is a far larger piece of work than this affidavit.
It also leaves out the other documents a wedding generates, each listed separately: the marriage affidavit itself, a joint affidavit where both parties depone together, a single status affidavit where somebody needs to establish they are free to marry, and the registration work that follows the ceremony.
This page carries no stamp value, no notary fee and no visa fee, and that is deliberate.
Stamp duty on an affidavit is fixed by each State. A notary’s charge is his own. Consular fees are set by each mission and change without reference to anybody in India. None of the three is ours to state and all three are quoted confidently all over the internet.
A figure printed here would be budgeted against by somebody standing at a counter tomorrow. If they arrive short, this page has cost them a day. The provisions quoted earlier are different — a section number stays where it is until Parliament moves it, which is why those appear and amounts do not.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
A small habit, and for this document it matters more than for most because of who ends up holding it.
The original usually leaves your hands. It goes into a visa file, an office record or an institution’s folder, and you do not get it back. So the deponent should keep a clear photograph or scan of the signed and notarised affidavit, with the notary’s register number visible, before it is submitted anywhere.
The reason is practical rather than legal. Two years later somebody may ask the deponent what exactly he swore to, and the honest answer should not be that he does not remember and cannot check. A certified true copy is worth obtaining where the document mattered, and a legal file management arrangement exists for families who would rather somebody else kept the folder.
The same applies to everything else a wedding generates, and families discover this years afterwards rather than at the time: a duplicate marriage certificate exists as a service precisely because the original is so often the one document nobody can find. If you would rather talk any of this through before drafting, a video consultation takes fifteen minutes.
Written for the reader who has found this page after the fact, which is a common way to arrive here.
Find out what was actually sworn, by reading your own copy rather than remembering it. If everything in it was true when it was signed, you have nothing to do and nothing to worry about, even if the application was refused for other reasons.
If something in it was not accurate, the response is advice rather than another affidavit. A wedding postponed after an affidavit was sworn is not a false statement — circumstances changed, and that is a different thing from swearing to something untrue. Knowing which of the two you are in is exactly what a short consultation is for.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
One practice, worth more than everything else on this page put together.
Before anybody drafts anything, get the requirement in writing from whoever is asking. The email, the checklist, the message, the page from the website. Then draft to that, and only to that.
Most of the bad affidavits we are asked to fix were written to somebody’s recollection of a verbal instruction, and almost all of them contain facts nobody wanted and omit the one that was actually required. Reading the request is free and it takes two minutes.
If one sentence survives this page, let it be about what you are actually doing when you sign.
The card is printed and nobody stands behind it. The affidavit is sworn, and the person who signs it is standing behind every sentence in it — which is the entire reason anybody asked for one.
So read it before you sign it, line by line, including the lines that look like formalities. A deponent who cannot say in his own words what he swore to has signed somebody else’s document with his own name on it, and the name is the part that carries.
Tell us who will swear it and how they are connected to the wedding, the names, the date and the venue, and what the reader has actually asked for in writing. We will draft a short affidavit that says those things and nothing else, in the deponent’s own voice, ready to be sworn before a notary the same day. If what you have described is not a case for an affidavit at all, we will tell you that first.
The provisions behind the warnings on this page. Everything stated here about a false affidavit was read against the current criminal law rather than recalled from the old one, which matters because the Indian Penal Code has been replaced by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 and the section numbers people still quote for perjury are no longer the operative ones. Section 227 defines the conduct, reaching a person under an oath or under a legal duty to declare, and covering not only a knowing or believed falsehood but also a statement the maker does not believe to be true. Its full wording is reproduced on our lost document affidavit page and is not duplicated here. Two Explanations widen it: by the first, a statement is within the section whether it is made verbally or otherwise; and by the second, a false statement as to the belief of the person attesting is within the section, so a person may be guilty of giving false evidence by stating that he believes a thing which he does not believe, or that he knows a thing which he does not know. Section 229 supplies the punishment, sub-section (1) dealing with intentionally giving false evidence in a judicial proceeding and sub-section (2) with giving or fabricating false evidence in any other case.
The two provisions that matter most for a document like this are the ones nobody mentions, because an invitation affidavit is not sworn in a judicial proceeding at all. Section 236 deals with a false statement made in a declaration which is by law receivable as evidence: a person who, in any declaration made or subscribed by him, makes any statement which is false and which he either knows or believes to be false, touching any point material to the object for which the declaration is made or used, shall be punished in the same manner as if he gave false evidence. And section 237 reaches a different person entirely: whoever corruptly uses or attempts to use as true any such declaration, knowing it to be false in any material point, shall be punished in the same manner as if he gave false evidence. So the deponent is reached by one section and the person who submits the document is reached by the other, which is the single most useful thing on this page for a family in which one person signs and another person files.
What we have not done. We have not printed any stamp value for an affidavit, any notary’s charge or any consular fee, because the first is fixed by each State, the second is the notary’s own and the third is set by each mission and changed without notice. We have not said what any consulate, employer or institution will accept, because that is each reader’s decision made on their own criteria and no statute governs it. We have not set out the law of oaths and notarial acts at length, because that is dealt with on another page of this site and belongs there rather than in a second copy. And we give no view, anywhere, on whether any particular application will succeed.
Related work on this site. What a notary does and does not add to any document, including an affidavit, is set out on our notary agreement page. For the visa application this affidavit usually travels with, which is much the larger exercise, see visa documentation. For the ceremony and the record that follows it, see marriage registration and marriage certificate. For the other affidavits in this family, see single status affidavit and joint affidavit.
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