As per this thread on the forums, a smartgrid can be passed a limited set of params as dict to be passed to child grids. However, onvalidation isn't part of the params that can be passed to child grids via a dict.
This is problematic because then it means a child grid created cannot have any custom validation done, for instance, to enforce multi-column unique constraints.
I humbly request that onvalidation be part of the smartgrid params that can be passed to child tables via a dict.