Two different questions get compressed into this one, and separating them is most of the answer. The first is whether the will is valid, which is about how it was made. The second is whether your family can actually use it in India, which is about proof and procedure. A will can be entirely valid and still be close to useless to the people who have to rely on it, and that is the position a lot of NRI families discover only after a death.
The law that governs the Indian flat
Succession to immovable property in India is regulated by Indian law regardless of where the deceased was domiciled. That is the starting point and it is not negotiable by choosing a different governing law in the will. A clause in an English will saying that the will is governed by the law of England and Wales does not move a Bengaluru flat out of Indian law. It may well govern the movable estate, because movables follow the domicile, but the land does not travel.
Validity: the formalities question
Indian law sets out its own requirements for an unprivileged will: a signature by the testator or by someone in his presence and at his direction, placed so as to give effect to the writing as a will, and attestation by two or more witnesses, each of whom saw the testator sign or received his personal acknowledgement, and each of whom signed in his presence. Whether a will executed abroad meets those requirements is a question about that particular document, not about that country in general. It is not safe to assume it does and it is not safe to assume it does not. Someone has to read the attestation clause and ask what actually happened in the room. Our guide on how a will must be made and executed in India sets out the Indian requirements against which the comparison is made.
Proof: the part that actually causes the trouble
Under the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 a document which the law requires to be attested cannot be used in evidence until at least one attesting witness has been called, where such a witness is alive, subject to the process of the court and capable of giving evidence. The proviso that spares registered documents from that requirement expressly excludes wills. So a will has to be proved through a witness, and your witnesses are in London.
That is a solvable problem and it is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to know now who those witnesses are, where they live and whether they can be traced, and to keep a note of that with the will. The families that struggle are the ones where the witnesses were a neighbour and a colleague whose surnames nobody wrote down.
The route the Act provides for a will proved abroad
The Indian Succession Act has a specific provision for exactly this situation. Where a will has been proved and deposited in a court of competent jurisdiction beyond the limits of the State, whether within India or outside it, and a properly authenticated copy of the will is produced, letters of administration may be granted in India with a copy of that copy annexed. That is the ancillary grant, and it is the ordinary path where an English grant already exists and an Indian asset has to be dealt with.
Jurisdiction is easier than people fear. A District Judge may grant probate or letters of administration if the deceased at the time of death had a fixed place of abode or any property, movable or immovable, within his jurisdiction. Property alone is enough, so the Bengaluru court is open to you because the flat is in Bengaluru, even though your father never lived here after 1998.
An English grant of probate is not an order an Indian bank or sub-registrar is bound to act on. The Succession Act gives an Indian grant effect within the State in which it is made, with a limited extension in some cases. The way to use a foreign grant here is the ancillary route described above, not to present the foreign document at a counter and expect it to work.
What changed on probate, and what did not
The provision that used to bar a legatee from establishing any right in court without a grant was removed in December 2025, so probate in India is now optional rather than a precondition. Our note on the removal of the mandatory probate requirement explains what survived. In practice the change helps you: where the estate is uncontested and the asset holder is cooperative, the will can often be relied on directly. Where a bank insists on a grant, or where a challenge is expected, the ancillary route is still there and a grant still binds the world in a way a will alone does not.
What I would actually do in your position
- Read the English will against the Indian requirements and see whether it even purports to cover Indian assets. Many do not.
- Make a short separate Indian will confined to Indian assets, executed here on a visit, with witnesses who live here. Our guide on an NRI will for Indian assets covers how the two documents are made to sit together.
- Fix the revocation clause in both so that neither cancels the other.
- Write down the witnesses to the English will, with addresses and identity details, and keep that note with the document.