1Whilst Kolkata experienced an extended wave of regional rural to urban migration during the 80s and 90s when migrants used as vote banks were encouraged to occupy government-owned land on its fringes (Roy 2003), the following decades saw the removal of established non-regularized settlements from the city center to suburban spaces. Communities which had occupied the sides of railway tracks and canals for decades were subjected to frequent raids and enforced “rehabilitation” further out. As new urban planning paradigms promoted a rhetoric of clearing urban space of “congestion,” “pollution” and “encroachment” the demands of large-scale infrastructural projects like the metro, bypasses, condominiums, and environmental measures like flood prevention infrastructures ate into many such settlements on marginal government land. In other cases, squatters had taken over plots vacated by industries, often within middle-class neighborhoods, where residents had created communities around working-class cultures and the housing available in such localities. Once the sites were acquired by developers, these locals were evicted, and only rarely compensated through relocation in the same locality. Throughout those decades, less permanent settlements have increased in number, through processes of eviction and resettlement, as well as the housing needs of workers employed on those infrastructure projects dotted across the city. Furthermore, growing numbers of urban poor communities are temporarily resident on land that is subject to disputes, with no objective of being legalized or formally accessing resources and amenities provided by the state (Dhawan and Donner 2025).

2In this article, I focus on the link between marriage, gender, and carcerality through an analysis of the way marriage, documents and resettlement have shaped poor women’s lives after rehabilitation. The article engages with scholarship on the politics of dislocation and urban restructuring, feminist research on poor women’s reliance and entrapment in kinship and locality, and Hage’s concept of “stuckedness” as a form of classed, abject urbanism shaped by the carceral characteristics of marriage and neighborhood. The concept suggests that spatial as well as temporal elements are crucial for “stuckedness” and Hage’s discussion relates “stuckedness” to an existential feeling of being stuck in life produced by neoliberal governance that distinguishes between disposable and ideal subjectivities. The latter are cultivated in classed forms of citizenship that can productively “wait out” crisis. The article connects this concept to confinement in marriage and neighborhood, seen through gendered lives in a resettlement colony created at the outskirts of Kolkata where former squatters from localities closer to the city center were relocated in the 1990s. By discussing women’s strategies to keep control of their homes under conditions of perpetual precarity, I am building on the assertion that the post-colonial Indian state remains opaque and elusive (Das 2004), governance over the poor is marked by arbitrary acts (Gupta 2012) and the state actively “thrives in such grey zones of informality” (Mukherjee 2020:59) created during the colonial period and beyond. It is through eviction or the threat thereof, the resettlement procedures, bureaucratic violence and laws that carceral conditions are maintained and enforced by linking rights in rehabilitation flats to marital status.

3In this article, I will first introduce how resettlement emerged as legally tying women into marriage and then move to discuss different types of labor that relate to how women lack legal deeds to their flats and focus on the different kinds of labor they undertake to make up for this absence of paperwork. In a next step, the article argues that confinement in marriage and being stuck with kin are both conditions that are direct outcomes of forms of urban governance that displace the urban poor from city centers, confining them in informalized settlements that are unceasingly threatened with further displacement. Marriage emerges as a favored form of state-intervention in these communities, and women’s agency is determined by their ability to mobilize kin support, often along female lineages. Finally, the paper draws on Hage’s concept of “stuckedness” as a specific form of carcerality that is clearly relational. Using the concept encourages reflections on the individual experience of bureaucratic procedures that create “waiting it out” as an appropriate form of citizenship and classed moral code of conduct mapped onto differently positioned bodies. Where the carceral has been shown to often allow for incremental improvements (of education, of networks, or skills) (Moran et al. 2018; Parker 2025; Melton et al. 2025), “stuckedness” is a more resigned experience of entrapment in a precarious present, which threatens to extend beyond an individual woman’s life and represents a temporal mode of being in an extended moment of the present. In this sense, collective experiences of resettlement in and around Kolkata also shape long-term memory in communities that have been subjected to multiple enforced displacements (Mukherjee 2020) with consecutive generations living a life determined by modes of “waithood.”

4I bring in “stuckedness” as it evidences late capitalist conditions of disposability into conversation with the question of marriage’s carcerality in a context where adjustment to hardship informs idioms of women’s being stuck in marriage by virtue of governmental relocation policies. Carcerality does therefore emphasize the interconnectedness of family/familialism and state-supported forms of incarceration/confinement/entrapment in marriage, based, as stated in the introduction on the breakdown of relationships and reliant on kinship ideology, but as I show, feelings of “stuckedness” do not preclude possibilities of recreating relatedness through “kinning,” paid employment, and collective action (Dhawan and Donner 2025). In the case at hand marriage may rest on ideologies that women embrace, but it is the “stuckedness” through state-imposed bureaucratic failure to recognize ownership of property that forces them to dwell in the present. Thus, a temporal lens on practices of resettlement shows that time is an important resource that determines individuals’ access to resources like flats. Administrated by state officials whose daily work is to log complaints, this labor encourages practices of self-control and patience. State power occupies women’s time by forcing them to stay married, undertake lobbying work and petitioning, de facto dispossessing them and their children of life opportunities through being stuck in the present.

6Our interlocutors ended up in this locality as a consequence of measures to improve the city’s resilience against floods (Asian Development Bank 2021) and were provided with one-room rehabilitation flats. These have attached toilets and small verandas, as well as running water (at least initially) and were grouped into multistorey blocks.

7Whilst those allocated these flats have not been relocated housing since moving here, new forms of precarity around land have emerged in the locality, as from 2012 onwards the municipality pursued the eviction of the above squatters settled in jhupris (makeshift huts) in the same locality based on the assertion that they do not possess conclusive sets of documentation (Uchched Pratirodh Committee n.d.). Our interlocutors, on the other hand, did not belong to the households targeted by this drive, but they still experienced their own situation as a form of confinement caused by informality. Their confinement to the colony resulted from the fact that that the initial papers announcing the allocation of “rehabilitation” flats carried the names of both spouses in a married couple, but this documentation never found its way into the records of the land registry. Thus, whilst women often held on to the original set of allocation papers, only a husband’s name was registered on the deeds. This act of omission cemented marriage as a prerequisite to residency, ownership, and the transmission of the rehabilitation flats. Moreover, as the women are ageing, it is now also defining their right to shelter and access to care in old age and means they are forever stuck in marriage and its aftermath, i.e. the resulting relationships with children that are often informed by patriarchal kinship norms prioritizing male offspring’s rights to a flat. Looking at it in a temporal reverse, female occupants were singled out as residents without legally enforceable rights and the state directed attention to them when they were still squatters through rehabilitation, initially promising women empowerment by including their names in legally binding “titles” as promised in the allocation papers but not the documented deeds. This act of bureaucratic violence by erasure and “forgetting” to register their names dominates women’s everyday experience of relocation and status in the neighborhood and exemplifies how measures supposedly benefitting the poor in India produce citizens stuck in red tape (Gupta 2012). It also cements marital confinement, legally through the deeds registered in the husband’s name and in terms of intergenerational kinship relationships prefigured by marriage. Because of the intimate entanglement of residences with women’s marital status, marriages even between estranged spouses, who may have new partners and offspring, have not been legally resolved as upholding one’s claim to a flat and transmission of a flat to preferred heirs may be difficult.

8Similarly to monographs and ethnography of the local state in resettlement colonies and marginal neighborhoods I have emphasized how crucial marriage is as an institution and the collective experience of gendered kinship and neighborly relations in the lives of the urban poor in India, especially women (Roy 2003; Thapan 2003; Datta 2012; Grover 2018). I will now turn to the labor involved.

“RE-SETTLEMENT”: PAPERWORK AND HOMING LABOR

10Whilst the histories of post-partition settlement in middle-class neighborhoods read as histories of struggles over permanent settlement and amenities, including the collective efforts of creating urbane associational lives, they are also in their majority stories of upward mobility and triumph over adversity, prejudice and economic hardship based on class. The difficulties overcome and the way they shaped gendered life histories are depicted brilliantly in Satyajit Ray’s masterpiece Mahanagar, which reflects on the journey of its female protagonist from homemaker in a refugee colony to working urbanite. According to this narrative, East Bengali Hindu middle-class refugees made the city their home and achieved upward mobility through women’s education and employment. And in many cases, marriage and marital migration to the West, Southeast Asia or the Gulf, frequently leads to a specific classed form of marital confinement based on spousal visas and dependent status (Bhattacharjee 1992). But in the case of working-class refugees, not all resettlement “colonies” gained permanence through official recognition or became legalized and many working-class families experienced multiple dislocations. This, as Mukherjhee (2020) shows for her North Kolkata resettlement colony, turned such working-class neighborhoods into sites of “prolonged displacement” that is still reproducing a different form of entrapment, feelings of being stuck and loss of agency across generations.

11In the case of our interlocutors, female residents in rehabilitation flats had mothers, who had been domestic servants or had worked in the fields, and their daughters had turned into the main breadwinners in their households through what Roy has depicted as local forms of the feminization of poverty (Roy 2003). In many instances, separation, divorce or a husband’s lack of employment opportunities were held responsible for this pattern, and upward mobility remained out of reach or was severely constrained. The entanglement of marriage and housing (here more often a right to reside) in the absence of deeds with women’s names on them also fed into fears of displacement that contribute to a sense of being stuck in space and time. Mobility was largely experienced as enforced by the state initiating rehabilitation and forcibly being displaced to the margins of the city, but more recently also the restrictions of movement during the pandemic, and futures perceived as unpredictable because individual agentive moves depend on negotiating complex webs of relationships.

12In this and in other such marginalized paras (neighborhoods) a huge amount of “homing labour” (Donner 2026) is devoted to hold on to shelter and managing displacement in attempts to make a home permanent. In the case of the resettlement colony at hand shifting conjugal arrangements—enabling and disabling marital homes—are a source of constant conflict and anxiety for female married and widowed residents. As a widowed mother of teenagers said “I am not sure I can hang on to the flat. It was meant to be registered in my name, but I have run from pillar to post to get the papers changed.” The temporalities involved shaped women’s and their families’ lives over several decades. In a not uncommon case, a husband had deserted his young wife and children shortly after they had relocated to the colony and moved in with his common law wife. After a decade or so he returned to his first family, new children in tow, to claim the flat (in what had now become a desirable location due to infrastructure) for himself and his no-longer-so-young second family, arguing the flat was officially registered in his name. Whilst his first wife told us she tried multiple avenues to get her name registered as (co-)“owner” of the flat after the husband had left her and moved in with his new partner, she also felt when interviewed that officially documenting his desertion all along might have endangered her own right of residence in the long term, so she had not done so.

15But more generally, the entrapment effect of marriage was brought out in our ethnography when married women reported that formal separation through divorce from a violent husband had become impossible due to the ongoing struggles over the right “papers” for their flats. Furthermore, the above-mentioned cases also suggest that relationships with children and among siblings could either add pressure or become a source of strength over time. It is the need to manage relationships under conditions of precarious, informal resettlement that made the labor of “homing,” of creating a sense of belonging and safety for those related to oneself, a demanding task requiring constant renegotiation with different categories of kin and officials in order to keep the narrative of a right to residence alive. Much of the labor at stake here is related to pushing for legal recognition as owner/occupiers of the flats by negotiating with politicians, but other forms of such labor related to making up for deficient infrastructure, for example related to water that had to be fetched after queuing. Although initially the flats had running water powered by a pump on the roof, the costs for electricity turned out to be too high for the residents and they switched back to expecting women and girls to get water from a handpump farther off. Lastly their work also involved everyday housework, cooking, cleaning, and maintaining the flat as a home for them and their children.

PROPERTY REGIMES AND MARITAL CONFINEMENT

16Property regimes govern the lives of women in such settlements in multiple ways and differentiate between stakeholders according to gender, marital status and political acumen. They shape the rhythm of everyday lives, disrupt or allow one to maintain social relations, and make or break marital, kin or neighborly bonds mediated by relationships with the local state. The property regimes governing Kolkata’s marginal areas had been shaping our interlocutors’ lives for decades, as they came from un-registered settlements that are often located on occupied vacant or/and government land, such as the banks of canals (Kundu 2003), which had been periodically evicted. In the case of our resettlement colony interlocutors, the relocation promised to change their status from being criminalized squatters to being legitimate occupants of flats in an official, planned, and reasonably well-equipped resettlement colony. In their view this should have made their lives more secure and less precarious.

17At first sight women in the resettlement colony appeared to have gained “rights” as occupants of marital homes built maintained and provided by the municipality in exchange for vacated plots closer to the city center. But during our research, their reality appeared to be much more complex and in flux, as rights to those flats and therefore control over residence and transmission of their homes depend on marriage. For decades now, these women have engaged individually and as part of fragile temporary lobbying groups (i.e. at the time of our workshop) in the political work of pushing for official acknowledgement of their independent rights in the rehabilitation flats. Crucially, over time and as they enter later stages of their lifecycle, this work has taken on a new urgency, as marriages have failed and husbands disappeared or passed away. Some of the most pertinent examples of conflict-ridden entanglements between marriage, property and kinship relate to the right to shelter in old age. In the case cited above, where adult children from a second marriage came with their father to live in the flat his first wife and her children occupied, he threatened to pass the flat on to the former set of children. In another case, a widow was forced to move in with neighbors whilst fighting for her right to shelter in a flat that had been registered in her husband’s name. Even where spouses are not directly engaged in arguments over paperwork, holding on to marriage and property-related documents seemed the only way to imagine secure residence in the future. An elderly interlocutor whispered when she spoke about the allocation letter she had received before moving into the flat. This document had become a bargaining chip in the relationship she had with her adult children and was hidden at the bottom of a pot of rice under her bed, “because my daughters are after the paper.”

18The related infrastructural labor of “homing” (Boccagni 2017) can be characterized as two-fold: first the process of being recorded on deeds involves a complex negotiation between family members (between spouses; their children; brothers and sisters) and some local actors like councilors as representative of and with connections within the KMC. Second, and directly related to the question of marriage’s role, legality needs to be constructed through the enactment of appropriate gendered kin responsibilities which rely heavily on women’s care and kin work. As Datta (2012) has shown, the home made by poor women in marginal neighborhoods carries with it aspects of publicly enforced patriarchal norms that distinguish between “legitimate domesticities” accepted by the public and drawing on common sense “customary law” and subjective experiences of necessary arrangements that are shaped by the informality of their urban locality. For women, marriage, respectability and kinship are related through the social control exercised in the locality, and their homes depend on respectability to be enacted. Thus, their conduct as a wife, mother, sister and neighbor may result in an affirmation or a challenge to patriarchal norms in the eyes of relatives and the community, but due to the complexity of rights in flats and the custom of male inheritance, their acts of “homing” additionally confine them in these roles, whether they would choose to stay in the locality, are employed, or not. Property is expected to be occupied by a couple and their children, and then passed along patriarchal lines that prioritize a son and his family. But in practice housing may be passed on along female lines of nurture and shared livelihoods. Thus, we were often told that women’s attempts to ensure security in old age for themselves via “inheritance” meant that they would contravene the culturally enshrined expectation that a son would move in with his wife and look after his mother and rather try to make a daughter the official occupant and carer, partly also because daughters can earn a living as domestic servants, whilst sons may remain unemployed. In many cases these possibilities were opened up after a woman came to dispute the rights in the property held by the husband, because he was not fulfilling expectations to contribute to the upkeep of the household. Marriage and age are common threads that shape such infrastructural entanglements with women considered dependents in theory, and conflict over ownership of and access to flats contested by husbands, married sons, daughters, and even children from a husband’s first marriage.

STUCK WITH KIN

20Women experienced the government’s construction of the flats as marital homes as material reiteration of ideals of “empowerment” implemented on governmental levels through confinement in marriage. The way that such reformist approaches affect women has been labelled “carceral feminism” often embraced by the state in the name of the protection of women, as evident in the papers by Ramble, Gardner and Basu in this volume too. With reference to marriage, Basu (2012) has shown how reformed family courts in Kolkata promising “justice” and thereby “empowerment” enforce marriage as an institution and frustrate female petitioners’ expectations of support from state agencies. Similarly, the reformist impetus to provide resettlement flats in the name of both spouses enforces rather than challenges patriarchal, heteronormative interdependencies through marriage as an institution, if only through “omission” of women’s names on documents. This suggests once more that the relationship between carcerality and marriage is not solely a matter of (im)mobility but of broader processes related to governmentality that extend into intimate lives.

21In her original discussion of carceral states, Ruth Gilmore (2007) had emphasized, with reference to imprisonment in California, that it reshaped kin relations as based on motherhood as necessary for survival inside and outside. Similarly, one of the major ways in which marriage acts as a form of spatial, legal and social confinement in the neighborhood of the resettlement colony relates to it as a form of legitimate institution to be upheld against the odds. Where women possess documents, when these are not conclusive, they mobilize them to make claims based on kinship roles but struggle to realize acknowledgment and full citizenship. This challenging property and ownership situation has not only led to the abovementioned potential for intra-family conflict; it also forces residents to get involved in what I have elsewhere referred to as “property work”—informal lobbying in the neighborhood and beyond (Donner 2026). Most obviously this involves women’s interactions with local politicians, and not surprisingly councilors regularly act as mediators between residents and the Cooperation and are well-informed about petitioner’s circumstances, including their marriages (Dhawan and Donner 2025; Donner 2026). But such actors are also positioned as official guardians of state-sanctioned cultural norms and may enforce patriarchal values where possible, as such councilors are routinely also asked to mediate in conflicts between and among affines. A further dimension of marital confinement—either the carceral character of marriage shaped by prison sentences or the moral-political relations governing marriage in order to maintain one’s place in the locality—is how inter-generational relations determine access to shelter. Mothers told us repeatedly how they intentionally created a paper trail based on documentation ranging from ration cards to school certificates that would support their own and (sometimes specific) children’s claims to the flats based on factors including but also beyond marriage. This I would argue, often constituted conscious “kinning” (Howell 2003) work, practices of incorporation into households for example. This is employed where daughters were made “heirs” of flats. Arguably, “kinning” has been mostly explored as the creation of bonds beyond genealogical or biological relatedness. However as Abram and Lien (2023) suggest, kinning can be more broadly employed and is “a process of selection, whether it concerns adopted children, step-children or children conceived biologically by their parents, and that is at least partly demonstrated through the occupation, ownership and inheritance of property. … Most crudely, kinning one child selected for adoption inevitably means not kinning other children not chosen. More subtly, perhaps, kinning one sibling by leaving them property (e.g. through primogeniture) implies by default not—or differently—kinning other siblings” (Abram and Lien 2023:4–5).

22Because the initial allocation papers issued had started their local journey, the shadow of marriage remained relevant for the shape of these actions. A mother would manipulate those paper trails to benefit specific children, often daughters, in order to prevent alienation of their property by a husband and children from a second marriage or a son and a daughter-in-law, and, conversely, a mother could also hide papers from one child in order to give another child control over the transmission of the flat. In the resettlement colony, favors given to kin (not only spouses), and support from neighbors, keeps the institution of marriage at bay whilst simultaneously enforcing the way it limits women’s agency. As Grover and Datta have shown, respectability is locally rooted in performing appropriate kinship relations in publics that spill into the home (Datta 2012; Grover 2018). Marriage may be locally constructed as an idealized state of respectability, but these neighborhoods are also full of women who are heads of households as men may move on. Whether a marriage is officially dissolved (and most are not) or whether a spouse returns (often periodically) to the flat and claims the “marital home” he owns, depends on plans for futures that involve children and grandchildren. The same can be said about “wives”: whether they ensure that a husband’s bigamy becomes a relevant factor in negotiating access to the flat may be determined by their local standing as mother, wife and as friend and neighbor.

STUCKEDNESS AND DISPOSABILITY

23These are gendered social fields and women in poor communities often experience their everyday life in the community and the family as a continuum of confinements, temporally and spatially. These also produce specific forms of gendered labor that following Boccagni’s use of the term I refer to as the infrastructural labor of “homing” (Boccagni 2017:23; Donner 2026). Much of this work depends on forging relationships with people as infrastructure in order to make up for the vagaries of life-making and characteristic mobilities necessary for survival in the global Southern metropolis (Simone 2018). But marginal urban communities are also marked by what Rodgers has referred to as “abject urbanism,” evident in the community as a continuous experience of being excluded and removed (Rodgers 2019). In this sense places like the resettlement colony are situated “between the lightness of legality/approval/safety and the darkness of eviction/destruction/death” (Yiftachel 2009:250), whilst those living here are caught in liminal limbo. Processes of urban restructuring have thus been shown to incarcerate poor citizens in their neighborhoods, and these processes affect their imaginations and hopes for the future (Rogers 2019).

24Carcerality is here not just a matter of confinement in space, although that is one aspect of it, but occurs in particular places and in time, as migrant/refugee/working-class communities in the city are pre-occupied making do without or in spite of state attention, which in the case of India has been shown to be generally arbitrary (Gupta 2012). In this sense carcerality is produced through iterative, more porous processes of slow violence (Nixon 2011) experienced across sites and created in conjunction with institutions like marriage and through bureaucratic neglect. In moving beyond spatiality, the concept becomes linked to the temporalities marked by a lack of agentive space over extended periods of time. These temporal conditions signal that we should “afford primacy to the confiscation of various types of opportunity or potentiality that would otherwise have been available, and whose loss is experienced as detrimental” (Moran, Turner and Schliehe 2018:677) as a precondition of the carceral. In relation to the wider framework within which scholars have situated carcerality, displacement, whether through war or urban restructuring, is marked by temporal uncertainty and “waithood” experienced by increasing numbers of communities across the globe. But Hage’s (2015) discussion of “waithood” and the feeling of “stuckedness” is not necessarily the same as the “waithood” referenced in other cases (see Jeffrey 2010), as the former is accompanied by feelings of abjection. “Stuckedness” in this sense suggests imposed waithood/entrapment/confinement through the modalities of governmentality specific communities are subjected to. The lack of a coherent causal spatial dynamic (because mobility and immobility may both be involved, as in the case of lockdowns), effectively silences resistance to urban confinement as an unstable and temporary status. As women are kept busy doing the labor of (re-)building the homes they occupy as married women, they come up against the limits of effective, agentive gendered subjectivities that would allow concerted struggles, for example against domestic violence or the dissolution or refusal of marriage to take root. However, as Thapan rightly states, poor women are taking pride in their ability to work hard and support their kin, which is often a form of agency and resistance that is more individualized (Thapan 2003). Clearly, our interlocutors would act collectively on occasion, such as in a case where a widow was being evicted from her flat by her son and his wife, for example. In this case, neighbors supported the widow’s complaint to the local councilor and demanded that his strongmen remove the couple. It is also common for women to mobilize political parties against husbands who use excessive force, and such community mobilsation is often triggered by female neighbors. However, equally common are cases in which political parties are “persuading” wives to take estranged spouses back upon the request of relatives. This links the importance of moral validation as “respectable” citizens that our interlocutors sought, but also relates to marriage as an ideal state of affairs. In this context Hage’s (2015) emphasis on “waiting it out” as a virtue in neoliberal constructions of citizenship can also reinforce culturally embedded ideals of women “adjusting” to their affinal homes and holding on to unhappy marriages.

WAITING IT OUT AS GENDERED CITIZENSHIP

25In middle-class discourse women belonging to the lower classes lack the capacity to endure marriage, either by virtue of their temperament and lack of refinement, or due to their capacity to earn independently. Either way, class-based ideas about civic virtues are directly associated with “waithood” as a classed mode of being. Hage describes thus:

enduring the crisis becomes the normal mode of being a good citizen, and the more one is capable of enduring a crisis, the more of a good citizen one is. As usual this takes on a racial, civilizational and class dimension: the ones who do not know how to wait are the “lower classes,” the uncivilized and racialized others. The civilized, approximating the image of the hero, are those who get stuck in a classy way. They know how to endure. (Hage 2015:9)

26Under conditions of precarity and faced with arbitrary bureaucratic acts (Gupta 2012), illegible modes of the state (Das 2004) that oscillate between rational argument and the magical force of documents, kinship is a major resource to be creatively used and managed. Significantly, marriage certificates, deeds for properties, proof of residence through ration cards are central documents and need to be managed in conjunction with the everyday ebbs and flows of kinship and household.

27Whilst marriage often creates kinship relations that are problematic and that women may feel stuck with, Jefferson, Turner and Jensen (2018:5) argue that kinship is also potentially a source of support in crisis and offers different imaginations: “The idea of kinship is itself a way of imagining time and immortality. Kinship—or what Janet Carsten (2000) calls cultures of relatedness—seems to offer some of the few possible support networks in situations of desperation and in the absence of other structures of support.” This was clearly the case where daughters were envisaged as potential heirs to the flats through active “kinning” practices that mothers employed where they wished their daughters would occupy the flats. However, as Victoria Goddard and I have argued under current conditions of multiple crises and neoliberal governance, kinship (in particular parenthood which often relies on women’s (in-)formal marital status), if analyzed in the context of the political economy of urban restructuring becomes a main state-imposed site of confinement, often via the attached politics of responsibilization and familial ideologies (Goddard and Donner 2023). For middle-class women, propertied citizenship is based on ideals of “family” and “motherhood” and reinforces care work as a way to insure women against marital crisis and the threat of homelessness (Donner 2022). In the cases of our interlocutors, the possibility of material property transmission to children produced a pressing form of presentism that dominated their thinking and everyday actions. Whether they sometimes used microcredit directed towards wedding expenses or commodities for the home, or their moves between natal homes in the country and the urban colony, huge efforts intended to safeguard against the fall-out of conjugal crisis. Hanging on in there, whilst their flats further deteriorated and age crept up on them, often also implied diminishing chances to make a living as a domestic servant. Forward planning meant keeping a foot in the flat to have a place to stay at the point we in their lives met with them. During our workshop all lamented their lack of success in transforming the collected papers into official records, and one remarked that therefore her flat had become a prison that she had to endure rather than what the middle-class mediators of rehabilitation had made it out to be. It is this aspect of “waiting out” that Hage (2009:93) suggests links the experience of camps and migrants’ experiences to “stuckedness” as a modern condition produced by prevalent forms of governmentality that severely curtail agency by enforcing “a specific form of waiting where one is not waiting for something but rather waiting for something undesirable that has come … Unlike waiting that can be passive or active, ‘waiting out’ is always passive, … it involves both a subjection to the elements or to certain social conditions and at the same time a braving of these conditions.” In the context I am concerned with, immobility co-exists with the work of (re-)creating life in the present, including through (women’s) “homing” labor. The pervasive sense of perpetually re-creating life through homing labor enforces Simone’s point that living under such informalized conditions in the Global South creates “rhythms of endurance” that enable specific regimes of what he describes as “peripheries of care” (Simone 2018). I have argued these rely on gendered infrastructural labor (Donner 2026) which “might not bring down the city, but they are in most respects able to bring down the city to the requirements of their makeshift economies that effect a modest but real redistribution of goods and services to their residencies otherwise formally cut off or excessively disciplined” (Simone 2018:17).

28When focusing on women’s lives in such communities, it appears that the work of “homing” needs to be understood as part of the spatial and temporal conditions of confinement and a lack of agency. However, “stuckedness” in the way that Hage (2009, 2015) understands it is a marker of neoliberal forms of “waithood,” which are actively responded to, but often through reiterative processes. Essentially seen in crisis, “stuckedness” is the experience of immobility which forecloses “going somewhere” that would afford livable alternatives and encourages a form of “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011). Even before Covid-19, much had been written on the removal of Indian working-class communities from urban spaces through policies and actions that marginalized, criminalized and erased livelihoods, settlements and histories as well as hopes for the future (Fernandes 2006; Bhan 2009; Donner 2012). During the pandemic the violent processes of forcible relocation and confinement became more organized as vigilantes, paid and unpaid, enforced “lockdowns” on those marked as “other” in the name of public moralities and in the interest of middle-class urbanites (Donner et al. 2020; Puspendra, Ranjan, and Chaturvedi 2022).

29Feminist studies of Foucauldian versions of the panopticon have been usefully employed to think through the carceral qualities of the neighborhood, which as Bartky suggests reproduces femininity through the control of women’s bodies with power located everywhere and nowhere (Bartky 1988). Often this is amplified through state surveillance and by appeals to moral politics, and enforced by gendered vigilantism, particularly where legal, spatial and political regimes are marked by differing degrees and scales of informality as is the case in marginal neighborhoods of Kolkata. Drawing on processes of restructuring in Indian cities, Bandyopadhyay (2023) argues that in order to use violence to control those deemed undesirable formerly free spaces (parks and streets) have become sites of punitive regimes, which blur the boundaries between street and prison through “carceral spillovers” (Bandyopadhyay 2023). Clearly the policing of gendered behavior in the locality is a case in point, with marriage only nominally protective, but often an extension of patriarchal street threats. As Gupta (2012) has argued, the poor are not only subjected to bureaucratic violence and neglect, they also suffer from excess state attention, i.e. in the complex processes of negotiations that produce “resettlement colonies” through deliberate occupation (“encroachment”), violent removal (“eviction”) and displacement (“rehabilitation”) in conversation officials as detailed by Baviskar for Delhi in the 1990s (Baviskar 2003).

CONCLUSION

31In this article, I have argued that women become confined to homes provided by the state based on marriage as part of “rehabilitation programs.” Poor neighborhoods such as the resettlement colony we did our research in are often bureaucratically created as “grey zones of informality” (Mukherjee 2020) within which forms of governance reproduce unstable and precarious conditions of prolonged displacement. The legal reliance on the patriarchal institution of marriage produces gendered forms of confinement that “tie” women to flats/place/community and spouses/people. As in bordering regimes across the globe, marriage in the resettlement colony serves as a legal and political necessity for women’s right to “remain” and is a precondition for “settled” status and legal recognition of a right to shelter. Just as spousal visas create gendered vulnerabilities (Bhattacharjee 1992) in case of transnational marriage migration (see Mody and Jivraj in this volume), access to a rehabilitation flat defines women as spouses even when conjugal life has come to an end. With real estate markets creating pressures within and beyond the neighborhood, the reality of a politics of disposability that comes to bear on the urban poor is marked by evictions, demolitions and series of resettlement.

32As shown in our examples, recognition of their rightful place in the locality and access to a rehabilitation flat requires the ongoing labor of homing, comprised of housework and paid employment, but also the manipulation of kinship relations and engagement in local politics. The relevant agents of the state (councilors, municipality staff) have kept these women in limbo by not adding their names to the deeds for the flats, whilst issuing eviction notices based on distinctions between “legitimate” resettled paper-holding households and those who are “mere” squatters. Women we worked with are well aware that the marital home and the conditions of confinement in marriage/home/neighborhood require extra labor to manage the uncertainty they experience due to the bureaucracy of resettlement that has been going on for decades now. As Mondal (2025:38036) asserts the costs of resettlement can be measured: “institutional ambiguities produce high transaction costs for the displaced—measured in time, effort, and lost opportunity—as they navigate unclear eligibility criteria, documentation requirements, and uncertain timelines.”

33Moran, Turner and Schliehe (2018:676) suggest that carceral practices are characterized by three conditions namely detriment, intention, and spatiality, which together make for the carceral experience. As confinement in the neighborhood is directly related to confinement in marriage through processes of governmentality, the official neglect of women in the documents related to the flats informalized their relation to the city and meet all these criteria. Women in our research feared that their futures may entail another round of displacement given the pressure of developers on the municipality to release more plots in the area. Clearly our interlocutors’ narratives are rife with references to globally apparent urban processes including the dynamics of dispossession, accumulation and urban expansion and the effects implicit in spatial and temporal fixes for capitalist crises (Harvey 2003). All of the latter are tied in with middle-class demands for urban development and the conditions of relocation stipulated by donors actively enforcing in global circuits of debt (Baviskar 2003; Bhan 2009; Asian Development Bank 2021), and these entanglements see whole communities confined in place by the expansion of land markets and stuck to spaces where they become more vulnerable. As Roy (2003) has shown for Calcutta/Kolkata that members of these communities land in cities in gender-specific ways directly related to the politics of handling crises, left uncared for but controlled by the state. In this context “rehabilitation” and “resettlement” policies are ultimate opportunities government agencies to enact dispersal and confinement according to a wide range of categories: of the urban poor, of migrants, of workers and as Mukherjee (2020) asserts successive displacements and resettlement plans have marred the lives of poor urban residents in Calcutta/Kolkata from partition onwards. Moreover, created as part of specific governmentalities resettlement policies are not fixed or predetermined: “They are flexible schemes which serve as the pretext for the functioning of the ‘informal’ state. This holds particularly true in urban contexts where land value is high and market forces of property work in collusion with the state … better understood through the concepts of informalisation … and grey-spacing …” (Mukherjee 2020:51).

34In terms of the affective and social dimensions of confinement, marriage and the specific legal status created by resettlement phantasies of a good life characterized by upward mobility, job security, equality, and long-term intimacies are frustrated and make way for “cruel optimism” in which conjugality may be desired against the backdrop of neoliberal restructuring (Berlant 2011). Ethnographically this terrain has been charted as living in a “mode of despite” (Raghavan, Schulz, and Vorhölter 2024) characterized by precarities including that of marriage in which meaningful agency is hampered by the effects of multiple crises and modes of governance addressing them.

35Under these conditions, everyday tactics left to women can be described as “bargaining with patriarchy” (Kandiyoti 1988) whilst managing precious relationships needed for survival: with spouses, kin and those in power in the locality, including those with middle-class neighbors and employers. In a wide-spread pattern, our interlocutors also maintained relationships with (ex-)spouses even where the husband was separated, remarried or brought home a second family. Some women found this necessary whilst pushing for recognition of a residence they inhabited as their home, but it also meant they used their marital status to claim power over the transmission of the properties. Here “bargaining with patriarchy” also often involves embracing deep-seated patriarchal kinship-related values when needed, including the customary rights of sons and their spouses to move into their parental home, thereby erasing the rights of married daughters. Conversely, everyday practices of “kinning” may be potent ways of disinheriting spouses and sons and promoting daughters’ interests in the flats. These practices are made more effective through the “property work” of chasing documentation, based on the insistence that the aftermath of marriage entitles a daughter. Lastly, such strategies also imply performing housework, being in employment, often as the main breadwinner, which has been shown to be a matter of immense pride and satisfaction to precarious women (Thapan 2003).

36Whereas Mukherjee’s “illegal,” paperless, interlocutors argued for their belonging to the site they occupied based on relations with those holding the right papers who lived locally too, in the resettlement colony the network of women that emerged was based on the collective struggle to make the papers they held stick, often against the backdrop of “othering” local squatters. As discussed in the examples, marriage as an institution is the framework through which ownership and citizenship rights as residents can be argued. For our interlocutors a hope was that their flats and the colony would become reliable sources of security in old age by being transferable assets for their heirs.

37As Indian neoliberal governance thrives on identifying marginal populations, often othered from the colonial period onwards, the state controls by evicting and resettling, whilst erasing the “urban poor.” Neighborhoods extend the enactment of such policies by enabling gendered forms of surveillance and moral vigilantism inside and beyond the home. Focusing on the two intimately linked forms of confinement in marriage and the neighborhood, which differ from that related to prisons, camps, or detention centers in some respects, brings the non-spatial aspects of carcerality to the fore: both, marriage and locality limit agency, futurity and thrive on regimes of enforced (im-)mobility. Working with their situatedness within processes of “accumulation through dispossession” through the commodification of land (Harvey 2005) poor women are kept as subordinate subjects based on their exclusion from, rather than insertion into, future-planning beyond the here and now of the Indian city.