The starting point is a negative one, and it saves a lot of wasted reading. The general intestacy rules in the Indian Succession Act, 1925 do not apply to you. That Act says in terms that the Part containing them does not apply to the property of a Muhammadan, and that the Part dealing with domicile does not apply either. The Hindu Succession Act, 1956 does not apply to a Muslim. So neither of the two statutes people usually reach for governs your estate.
What does govern it
The Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937 provides that notwithstanding any custom or usage to the contrary, in all questions regarding intestate succession, special property of females, marriage and its dissolution, maintenance, dower, guardianship, gifts, trusts and trust properties and waqfs, the rule of decision in cases where the parties are Muslims shall be Muslim personal law. Intestate succession is the first item on that list. So an Indian court asked to distribute your Bengaluru flat applies Muslim personal law to it.
Note the words the Act itself uses, because they carry a carve out that matters in Karnataka. The section applies "save questions relating to agricultural land". Where agricultural land is in the estate, the position can be affected by State law rather than settled purely by personal law, and that is a point to take advice on rather than to assume either way.
How the distribution is structured
Muslim law does not work the way the Hindu statute works, and translating one into the other causes most of the confusion in mixed advice.
- There is no coparcenary of the Mitakshara kind and no birthright in ancestral property. Nobody has a share while you are alive.
- The estate is ascertained first. Funeral expenses, debts and any lawful legacies come off the top, and what remains is the heritable estate.
- What remains is then distributed among heirs in fixed fractions. Certain relatives take defined shares, and what is left goes to the residuary heirs in a defined order.
- Both sons and daughters inherit, and so does a widow, though not in equal fractions.
I have deliberately not printed the fractions here, because the correct fractions depend on exactly who survives you and on which school of law your family follows. The Sunni and Shia schemes of distribution differ in structure, not merely in detail, and an answer written for one and applied to the other is simply wrong. This is the single most important thing to settle before anyone draws up a family arrangement.
Succession to immovable property in India is decided by Indian law, and for a Muslim the Indian rule of decision is Muslim personal law. Living in Sharjah does not import the succession law of the UAE into a Bengaluru flat. Your movable estate is a different question and can turn on where you were domiciled, which is why the two halves of a cross border estate need separate thought.
Why a will helps less than it does for others, and still helps
Muslim law limits testamentary freedom. The general position applied in India is that a Muslim may dispose of only a limited part of the net estate by will, and that a bequest beyond that limit, or a bequest in favour of an heir, needs the consent of the other heirs. So you cannot simply write your Indian estate the way you like, and any advice that tells you otherwise is not describing your law.
A will is still worth making, for four reasons that have nothing to do with changing the shares. It can appoint an executor, so somebody has authority from day one. It can specify the assets, so nothing is missed. It can deal with the part of the estate that is within your testamentary power. And it can record the family details a court will otherwise have to reconstruct from memory. Our guide on how an NRI should make a will for Indian assets covers the execution requirements, which are the same whichever personal law governs the distribution.
What your family will have to do here
An intestate Muslim estate in India is administered through the same practical machinery as any other. The instrument depends on the asset.
- For bank deposits, fixed deposits and securities, the document that gets money released is a certificate from the civil court covering the debts and securities of the deceased. Our guide on how to get a succession certificate in India sets out the application and what it does.
- For pension, provident fund, gratuity and insurance, and to support mutation of revenue records, the administrative heirship certificate is usually enough.
- For immovable property, the heirs take as tenants in common in their respective fractions, and a formal division needs either a registered partition or a suit.
- Work out which instrument you need before you start, because families routinely spend months obtaining the wrong one. Our comparison of the succession certificate, the legal heir certificate and the court grants lays out which document opens which door.
Planning points specific to your position
Keep a written record of the school your family follows and of the family tree, with dates. Keep the Indian title documents together and tell someone where they are. If you hold Indian assets jointly or have made nominations, understand that a nomination decides who receives, not who owns, so it does not override the shares Muslim law fixes. And if agricultural land is in the estate, raise that early, because it is the one item where the general rule is expressly qualified.