Marriage under Indian law has traditionally been understood as a sacrament and a status relationship rather than a dissoluble contract. The fault theory of divorce, inherited largely from English ecclesiastical law and codified in the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 and allied matrimonial statutes, required a petitioner to prove a specific matrimonial offence adultery, desertion, or cruelty before a decree of divorce could be granted. Over the last five decades, however, the ground of cruelty has undergone a remarkable judicial transformation. Courts have progressively expanded the concept of “mental cruelty” to absorb within its situations where a marriage has, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist, even though no single act of the parties satisfies the classical, discrete definition of a matrimonial wrong. This paper traces that transformation and argues that cruelty, as judicially interpreted in India, has become the principal doctrinal vehicle through which courts recognise and give effect to the “irretrievable breakdown of marriage” theory a theory that Parliament has, despite repeated recommendations of the Law Commission of India, declined to enact as an independent statutory ground. The paper examines the statutory framework governing cruelty across personal laws, surveys the leading Judicial pronouncements from Dastane v. Dastane to Shilpa Sailesh v. Varun Sreenivasan, and critically evaluates the Supreme Court’s use of Article 142 of the Constitution to dissolve marriages that are dead in substance though alive in law. It concludes by arguing for a calibrated legislative reform that would codify irretrievable breakdown as a distinct ground, subject to safeguards protecting the economically weaker spouse, so that litigants need not rely on the judicial fiction of stretching “cruelty” to do the work that the breakdown principle was designed to do.