1Scholars have long recognized the subordination of women to men among high-caste Hindus in rural Nepal (Bennett 1983). Recent efforts to legally safeguard women’s rights and security may in some cases provide women with the tools for emancipation, compensation, retribution, and recognition for the injustices they suffered, but enduring conservative values can also result in these laws being only a partial or tokenistic solution to complex social problems. They can even be instrumentalized within local logics of conflict resolution, to the detriment of women’s safety and autonomy. In this paper, I argue that state laws around polygamous marriages in Nepal, along with associated punitive policies, can at times be counter-productive in their stated quest to redress injustices against women. This is especially so when considered in relation to the domestic and social contexts in which they are enacted and which play a significant role in determining the moral framing and long-lasting effects of prison sentences.
2I align myself here with a body of feminist works that addresses the question of how laws can be used to criminalize love and to control the choices and bodies of unmarried women and girls in South Asia (Mody 2002; Chowdhry 2004; Berti 2007; Baxi 2015). The cases detailed in these works share striking similarities to the stories I gathered in my own research in rural Nepal and follow a common pattern: accusations of rape, abduction and kidnapping—and I would add human trafficking—can be used by family members to “recover” (Baxi 2015:53) a girl who has entered a relationship deemed unacceptable for questions of caste, class or age, after which the girl is pressured into testifying against her chosen partner. As Baxi explains, if the father is considered the “natural” guardian of a daughter in a patriarchal context, he holds the authority to hand that responsibility over her to another man. The law then becomes a place “where the family articulates its power to discipline and punish [a girl]” (Baxi 2015:67). The trials detailed in these works demonstrate the extent to which the sexuality and agency of an unmarried woman or girl can be controlled by her kin group, using the law to that effect.
3More than just the family, in many contexts in South Asia, the wider community and the state intervene in matters of women’s freedom. For example, love-marriage couples in Delhi have used the legal process of registering their marriage “as the beginning of a longer and much more composite strategy towards obtaining social legitimation of the marriage” (Mody 2002:225). Here, the existence of a law in support of love marriage is not enough, and the “moral sanction” of the community is also sought by these couples. Mody helpfully draws on Veena Das’s argument that a community can “colonize the life-world of an individual” in the same way that the state can “colonize the life-world of a community” (Das 1995:17, cited in Mody 2002:239). While Mody’s research considers examples of couples seeking to legitimate a union, the ethnography I present in this paper enables me to investigate how both the law and the community are involved in the breakup of a marriage and the implications of this involvement for the shifting conditions of carcerality.
4I understand carcerality as extending beyond the confines of the prison. Following Foucault, who sees the carceral as coming to operate diffusely and pervasively through society (1977), more recent scholarship turns to the social and contextual dimensions of the phenomenon, going beyond a purely structural approach and thus focusing first and foremost on the qualities of the prison over a study of the prison itself as a discrete site (Moran and Jewkes 2015:167). These qualities of the carceral, including surveillance, coercion, and punishment, are relational in practice, and grounded in socio-cultural context (Moran et al. 2018:676). With this framing, we can turn our attention to the subjective experience of the systems of control, surveillance and coercion that govern all lives, rather than thinking of carcerality as something that happens to some people and in some contexts and not others. Approaching this phenomenon ethnographically enables us to see how the carceral manifests in practice at the nexus of the family, the societal, and the state, which is also where the institution of marriage resides.
5I will unpack some of these dynamics through the case of two women in the same bigamous marriage in rural western Nepal. One of the women had escaped an abusive first marriage by entering a second marriage. She now found herself in prison for the criminal offense of knowingly marrying a married man. Yet the first wife, while responsible for this incarceration, also ended up trapped in a web of varying constraints, from financial precarity and health problems to social ostracism. In this context, “the carceral” as an analytic category allows me to bring various forms of entrapment—from literal incarceration in the district prison to more metaphorical forms of constraint, such as restrictions on mobility, financial limitations, and punishing social norms—into the same conversation. I thereby highlight the common threads and divergences in how various expressions of entrapment come to be, from punishing societal norms to a patriarchal state system.
6I will explore this in part by discussing the experience of marriage and its breakdown through the “pains of imprisonment” identified by Gresham Sykes in The Society of Captives (1958). These take the form of five deprivations that characterize, in his view, the condition of imprisonment: the deprivation of liberty, of goods and services, of heterosexual relationships, of security, and of autonomy. Since the publication of this seminal work, criminologists have extensively used Sykes’ “pains” to analyze the most direct ways in which detainees experience the punishing functions of imprisonment. Crewe (2011) and Warr (2016) add to and rework Sykes’ list to distinguish pains based on gender (see also Crewe et al. 2017; Maycock 2022; Walker and Worrall 2000), and on age (Cox 2011; Crawley 2005). Other scholars update Sykes’ categories to account for the specificities of contemporary imprisonment (Fleury-Steiner and Longazel 2013), also arguing that particular pains can both predate and continue long after imprisonment (Warr 2016), as well as affect prisoners’ relatives (Chui 2010).This framework will serve as a heuristic to explore the extent to which deprivations and pains of incarceration are also suffered by the women in my ethnography in their marriages, leading me to ask what is prison-like about their situation and where these conditions originate.
7The ethnographic data in this paper was gathered while I conducted fieldwork about a local district prison in the Karnali Province in 2018–2020. The prison held between 90 and 140 inmates at any given time, only ten to thirteen of whom were women kept in a compound separate from the men. I lived in the marketplace and conducted participant observation of the local prison and its surrounding spaces, including its wider social and economic networks. This included almost daily visits to the prison and semi-structured interviews with prison staff and prisoners. Through my own mobility and interest in the prisoners’ ties in the free community, I interviewed two dozen former inmates and their relatives. I was keen to understand how incarceration impacted prisoners’ relatives, mostly parents, wives, and young children. Many were my neighbors, who were therefore aware of my interest in the prison and its inhabitants. This is how I often met women in the marketplace through their husbands at the prison, rather than being introduced to prisoners by those outside. I became friendly with some as they confided in me about their worries and the daily struggles of having an incarcerated husband. Because my field of research encompassed both the prison and the community around it, I was just as concerned with imprisonment in terms of the wider networks of people affected by it, as I was with any spatially-bound site.
- 1 All personal names given are pseudonyms to preserve anonymity.
8The story of how I met the two women whose lives I share in this paper is entirely reflective of this fluid and dynamic approach I had to studying the multiple effects of incarceration. I first met both Samjhana1 and her husband Aman at the prison during their incarceration and saw them regularly in my visits to the prison in spontaneous and informal ways. This is how I learned that they had been convicted of polygamy and got to know more about their story over time. This is also how I met Aman’s son, who came to visit his father at the prison. Separately, I got to know Urmila as I walked past her house on my way to the prison. I had also met her briefly through another prisoner’s relative who lived nearby. While talking to her one day, I recognized Aman’s son sitting in her front room, learning in this way that he was also Urmila’s son, and consequently that Urmila was Aman’s first wife. As such, I got to know Samjhana and Urmila independently of each other, and kept visiting both, even after Samjhana’s release from prison. They were both aware of my interactions with the other, though I never discussed the content of our conversations.
- 2 Different ethnic groups across Nepal have varying family and social structures in which women’s pos (...)
9Although polygamy was abolished in Nepal in 1963, the practice lives on in the Karnali region of western Nepal, mostly among the high-caste Chettris and Thakuris. Polygyny in different forms has historically been widely practiced by different ethnic groups in Nepal.2 For the Chettris among whom I carried out my doctoral fieldwork, and who form the basis of this paper, it was historically not uncommon for men to keep up to four or five wives in the same house, as testified by the very large family homes still visible in rural areas. Nowadays, it is rare to see multiple wives living under the same roof, as the practice of polygyny is both illegal and held in poor regard in most instances. While in the past, a polygynous marriage might have been an indicator of wealth, and associated power, today it implies weakness blamed on either or both spouses, such as infertility or a conflictual relationship.
10Polygyny is nonetheless still practiced, and it tends to be accepted by the wider community if all families involved accept the arrangement. For example, if a couple cannot conceive a child (or a son), a man might take a second wife in the hope of having an heir. If a man has a child out of wedlock, he might agree to marry its mother to assume his responsibilities and avoid conflict–particularly if the mother is from the same community. Or he might simply fall in love with another woman. Commonly, separate living arrangements would be put in place, for example with one wife living in their home village to take care of the family land and in-laws, and the second wife living in town. The two women would then be referred to as jethi and kanchi srimati, the elder and younger wife.
11A bigamous marriage, which in some circumstances is accepted and practiced, can in other cases lead to a conviction for the crime of polygamy, prohibited by the National Civil and Criminal Code. It carries a sentence of one to five years imprisonment, and a fine of ten to fifty thousand rupees. Indeed, if a woman discovers that her husband has been having a long-term illicit affair, sometimes even living with another woman part of the time in a neighboring town, she might file a court case against them both. There are also instances in which a woman agrees to her husband taking a second wife, later changing her mind, sometimes years into the new arrangement. This change of heart usually stems from growing jealousy or a feeling that her husband neglects her and her children in favor of his second wife and their children. At the time of my research, more and more women were filing cases against their own husbands, emboldened by the examples they saw of other women doing so. Women’s rights NGOs also play a leading role in encouraging and facilitating the legal proceedings through information campaigns, and by funding legal support for women seeking to denounce their husbands. These are often funded by international aid, such as UN Women or bilateral aid agencies that consider polygamy to be a form of Gender-Based Violence (GBV) alongside other criminal offences including rape, domestic violence, sexual abuse, child marriage, witchcraft accusations, and human trafficking (Acharya 2024). Reports on GBV may even write of “perpetrators” and “survivors” of polygamy (WOREC 2023). By placing the practice in this way on the same plane as the other crimes, this rhetoric does not acknowledge the agency of women entering a polygynous marriage, or the different informal arrangements that, in reality, exist between spouses. This in turn leaves little room to recognize that polygamy is entangled in social values and historical practices, as well as being a symptom and consequence of a patriarchal order.
12The continued practice of polygynous marriages is not prevalent across all of Nepal. Its geographic distribution can perhaps best be illustrated through the varying rates of conviction for polygamy around the country. In the Karnali region, about 15 per cent of prisoners (men and women) at the prison where I conducted research were incarcerated for recent polygamous marriages. Court clerks and women’s rights advocates told me that police complaints and criminal convictions for polygamy were becoming increasingly common in the region. By contrast, in a more recent visit to a district prison in central Nepal, I found only five convictions for polygamy out of 300 prisoners (data collected at Kavre prison in April 2024). The prison’s administrators told me that these were old cases and did not reflect recent plural marriages. When I mentioned the continued prevalence of this practice in western Nepal, they told me with a nod that “uniharuko chalan ho (that is their custom).” This assertion reminds us that variations in social customs and marriage practices exist across caste and class lines, but also across regions.
13The case of polygamy in Nepal illustrates the possible discrepancy—but also the symbiosis—between state law and social norms, or what Merry (1988) calls “the dialectic, mutually constitutive relation between state law and other normative orders” (880). Changing views on marital practices and women’s rights led to polygamy being outlawed in 1963. The increasingly common enforcement of this law then contributed to filtering the practice out of society, or at the very least to turn it from a common occurrence to a rarer one that elicits disapproval. At the same time, state law is often challenged, bypassed, and reinterpreted in practice by those who wield it (Fuller 1994:10). The law can easily become a “personal tool that is instrumentalised according to localised logics” (Koch 2017:205). The two ethnographic cases below will illustrate how such instrumentalization can take place in different ways in the context of local marital practices and ask how the law and social customs meet to determine which practices and whose behaviors are deemed worthy of punishment.
14I first met Samjhana, a Chettri woman in her early 30s, at the district prison in the last few months of her two-year sentence for polygamy. Until she became entangled with the prison in the different ways I will explain further down, Samjhana’s life course exemplified the lives of many women in the region. She had been married to a boy from her village as a teenager. They had three children by the time she was in her early twenties. She took care of the household, and he worked as a laborer, doing odd jobs to earn money. She recounted that he spent their money on alcohol and playing cards with his friends. He was rude to her, easily lost his temper, particularly when drunk, and sometimes beat her in these moments. A decade before I met her, when her son was still a toddler, Samjhana’s husband was involved in a murder case. He was accused of helping to plan and carry out the killing of his nephew’s father-in-law, a crime for which he was sentenced to twenty years in prison.
15The incarceration of Samjhana’s husband gave her the space to leave an abusive, unhappy marriage. There are a number of reasons that make it difficult for women to leave their husbands in rural Nepal: their economic dependence on their husbands, the patrilineal norms that would mean relinquishing the care of their children to their in-laws in case of a separation, and the shame attached to all of this. But while her husband was in prison, Samjhana met Aman. He was a contractor from the region, himself married with two children the same age as hers. Meeting him was key to her emancipation from her first marriage, as it allowed her to move from the guardianship of one man to that of another. She decided to divorce her husband, who still had several years to spend in prison, married Aman as his second wife, and moved into a home separate from his first wife and their two children. In this case, incarceration is what enabled a woman to find the space to divorce her husband.
16Aman’s first wife (and his only legally recognized wife), Urmila, initially agreed to the union. She admitted to me that the idea of this new arrangement suited her: for years there had been no more intimacy or much mutual interest in their marriage. She also tired of the verbal abuse to which he subjected her when drunk, having to stay awake late into the night to serve him his dinner when he returned home, and being constantly criticized for her way of running their household. He would come and go, and while longer absences for jobs as a contractor provided her with some peace, they came hand in hand with anxiety concerning his whereabouts, when he would return, or how to cover day-to-day expenses. She liked the idea of having her own space; being distanced from him, while still being married and provided for. Aman agreed to build her a house, in which she and her two children could live on the upper floor and hold a small shop on the ground floor to keep busy and earn some money.
17Aman, however, behaved differently with Samjhana. He did not beat her or speak badly to her, and he brought her gifts from his work trips outside of the district–he was in love. The wives lived in two separate houses, but Aman spent most of his time with Samjhana, and according to Urmila, he invested more of his money and time on his new wife than on his first marriage. Further, the community started seeing Samjhana, who as the kanchi srimati was supposed to be subordinate to the first wife, as his ‘main’ wife, and Urmila had no intention of being displaced from her position. Two years into this arrangement, she filed a police report of polygamy against them, which led to a court case. By then, Samjhana’s first husband had recently left prison on early release. Their children kept going to the prison on Saturdays, their father’s imprisonment having been seamlessly followed by their mother’s when both Samjhana and Aman were imprisoned.
18Samjhana remembers being very afraid at the beginning of her time in prison. “There are women inside who have killed people, and all I did was to get married,” she reasoned. She spoke about a cellmate’s outbursts of anger as quite intimidating, and wondered how her own softer, more placid inclinations would carry her through her sentence. By then, she knew that she would spend two years in prison. While most people tended to appeal their guilty verdict, she and Aman decided not to. It was only two years, and an appeal process sometimes lasted even longer than that. Besides, neither of them denied having married each other. She decided to sit out her relatively short sentence quietly, not causing any trouble or getting involved in the internal politics of the prison.
19In prison, Samjhana sought to maintain an image of respectability expected of her as a woman and as a wife. Aman gave her money, which she used to buy vegetables from people who came to sell their home-grown produce. She cooked nice meals for both of them, and had his portion passed to him through the gate. He then returned a clean bowl later in the day. It has been noted elsewhere that in prison, sharing food is crucial to relationships, because through the act of cooking and sharing food with their loved ones, women could practice the “mimicry of external life” (Comfort 2008:123; see also Sharma 2022).
20Perhaps more than mere mimicry, Samjhana carried with her into the prison certain specific aspects of her external life that helped her through the ordeal of imprisonment. Most imprisoned women were soon abandoned by their husbands outside of prison. Incarcerated alongside her husband, Samjhana remained a married woman. Moreover, Aman was well respected among the men and the administrative staff. The young security police and the convict officers referred to Samjhana as bhauju (sister-in-law, specficially the older brother’s wife). Her marriage to Aman allowed her to retain a certain social standing that most women lost when incarcerated. In some ways, while Samjhana’s first marriage had been a source of suffering and constraint, her second marriage gave her access to a degree of social and economic security, though within the other constraints imposed by the prison.
21Meanwhile, Urmila remembered the time after she filed the police complaint as very stressful. She was accused by Aman’s relatives of turning against him, the father of her children, making her a bad wife and a bad mother. Filing a police complaint, going to court, and suffering financial strain while needing to continue taking care of her children and sending them to school all weighed heavily. Sometime after the trial, she lost her voice and the mobility in half of her body: her left leg and arm had become paralyzed, making it even more difficult to run her household and her shop on her own. Urmila was trapped in her own body, unable to speak out or move. When I met her, she had recovered her voice to a whisper, so she spoke very little and walked slowly, with difficulty. Medical exams did not provide any diagnosis and she herself directly linked this ordeal to the stress of the court case. It also emerged that her mother-in-law had cursed her for sending her son to prison. Upon consulting an oracle (dhami), the family’s tutelary deity (kul deuta) manifested and announced that for the curse to be lifted, Urmila’s mother-in-law would need to perform a particular ritual to free her of the constraints placed on her body. The mother-in-law categorically refused, leaving Urmila to slowly, painfully, regain her mobility and her voice on her own.
22Cut off from her in-laws and with her husband as her main provider now in prison, Urmila found herself in an even more precarious position than before. Because of their conflict, Aman rarely sent money from savings he had at the bank. On occasion, Urmila had to ask neighbors for food, sending her young daughter on her behalf to mitigate the embarrassment. One evening, while I was having dinner at the home of another prisoner’s mother, Urmila’s daughter appeared into the candlelight from the darkness of night. She was out of breath from climbing the rugged, shrubby slope from her house down the hill, and asked for some rice in a barely audible voice. My host gave her two handfuls of rice and lentils from her own meager stock, and she went back out into the night without another word. My host was living off charity too, a widow whose rifts with her in-laws were irreparable and whose only remaining male relative, her son, was also in prison. Although they were not related or even friends, she told me she always gave what she could when Urmila’s daughter came to ask for food, as she felt a bond of solidarity and even kinship with other prisoners’ relatives, who shared the double bind of precarity and social ostracism.
23Imprisonment did of course mark a rupture in Samjhana’s life. Importantly, it prevented her from being with her young children, though they were fortunate enough to live nearby and visit their mother regularly, as they had done with their father when he was in prison, but the continuity in other aspects of her life was made possible through her relationship with Aman across the bars. When her children came to see her, she told them to also greet Aman, whom she called their “father (buwa),” in an effort to encourage family unity. On the other hand, while Urmila received a legal recognition that she had been wronged, she was still very limited in her own mobility and resources. Furthermore, rather than re-establishing her social position, the court case occasioned the scorn and rejection of the community, since state law is localized and integrated into social processes and dominant morality.
24A week after their release, I went to visit Samjhana and Aman’s tea shop. Aman had pointed it out to me from inside the prison, a red brick building to the left of a large peepal tree on the hill facing the prison. I was so used to seeing Samjhana sitting in the dim light behind bars that it took me a moment to recognize the woman behind the counter smiling at me. Aman had enough savings from his work as a contractor to keep paying the rent while they were incarcerated, so they had not had to give up the shop. They had dusted and opened it for business within days of their release. Samjhana made sweet milk tea and potato samosas for customers, who slowly started coming back over the next few weeks. Wrapped in a red shawl, she would sit in the winter sun on a prison-made stool that had been a parting gift to her husband from his cellmates, chatting with the women from neighboring shops. Meanwhile, Aman came in and out throughout the day, running errands and reconnecting with the community. He bought a flatscreen television that he mounted on the wall of their shop so they could watch wrestling, cricket, and wildlife documentaries. He bought cartons of juice, snacks, and ingredients to make samosas and tea to fill the many empty shelves in their shop. The children came and went seamlessly between the homes, all within walking distance of each other.
25Perhaps it had been Samjhana’s first husband’s incarceration that had been the catalyst for change in her life, more than her own, as it had opened space for her to leave him for a better relationship of her choice. After her release, she remained married to Aman, they reopened their tea shop, and their reputation had not been damaged by a conviction widely considered as unfair. Bigamy between consenting adults was not always perceived as a crime, even though that was the law, so it was Urmila who carried the weight of public judgment, and the anger and disapproval of her in-laws.
26To my surprise, this whole ordeal did not necessarily mean that Urmila and Aman would divorce, and the future of their relationship was left open-ended. A conviction for polygamy does not automatically imply a divorce, even if brought forward by the legally recognized wife. Practically, this means that men are serving their sentence while still legally married to the women who put them behind bars. Divorce proceedings tend to be initiated while they are in prison. From behind bars, Samjhana was adamant that Aman would file for divorce as soon as they were free, because, “how couldn’t he? She did this to him,” but Urmila was ambivalent: “I don’t know if we will divorce. Maybe. Let’s see what happens next.” I was struck by her passivity, since she was the one who had taken the steps to initiate a rupture in her marriage. Aman awkwardly evaded the question. While incarceration was a violent rupture from the status quo in some respects, in other respects it placed fundamental questions about their marriage on hold, for better or for worse.
- 3 Basu makes similar observations about carcerality in divorce being potentially detrimental to ex-wi (...)
27This particular example shows that a single conviction, here of polygamy, can serve one purpose in the eyes of the law—punishment—while meaning something more to the person filing the case: discrediting a husband’s second marriage and thus reasserting her own position as his only legitimate wife. A prison sentence for polygamy serves as retribution rather than as the resolution of an issue, a resolution that needs to happen separately from and regardless of the prison sentence. There can be many contradictory consequences to legal provisions. There to protect the interests of one woman (the first wife), the law ends up acting to the detriment of another (the second wife).3 While a formal divorce entitles a wife to a share of her husband’s family property since a new law was put in place to that effect in 2017, Aman would likely stop providing for Urmila if she divorced him and she would carry the stigma of being a divorcee. Laws in place to protect women had here led to Samjhana’s imprisonment, while Urmila remained in a precarious position despite the court case and judgment in her favor.
28Both women were, in some different and in other very similar ways, subjected to limits and constraints on their mobility and on their ability to make choices. The sources of these constraints varied, ranging from the implementation of state law to moral judgment, to domestic violence and interpersonal disputes. They combined in different ways to produce subjective iterations of a carceral approach to women’s transgression in marriage. In this section, I contend that the “pains of imprisonment” identified by Sykes also characterize the experience of the two women whose stories form the ethnography in this paper, both in their marriages and their lives in the community. I will focus more specifically on three of Sykes’ categories: the deprivation of autonomy, of heterosexual relationships, and of liberty. My intention is not to add to an ever-growing body of work expanding, updating, or redefining the parameters of Sykes’s list of carceral pains. Rather, in the context of my ethnography, Sykes’s findings can provoke useful reflection to advance the argument that some people live in prison-like conditions outside of the physical confines of the prison itself, speaking to the existence of deprivation, hardship and constraint in so-called “free” society.
29One of the pains inherent to imprisonment is the deprivation of autonomy. Sykes cites the arbitrariness of bureaucratic rule as particularly difficult for inmates to accept, as it infantilizes them, continually reminds them of their subordination, and defies reason. This style of bureaucratic rule has been repeatedly noted by prison scholars over time. Megan Comfort (2002) observes it as extending even to the treatment of relatives visiting inmates. She details the shifting rules imposed onto visitors, through dress codes or visiting times that seemed to change at the whim of those in charge and served to humiliate the visiting women and remind them of their complete dependence on the authorities to see their loved ones. For Comfort, this is one of several ways in which the free women and incarcerated men are “doing time together,” as it characterizes the nature of power relations in the institution.
30This form of deprivation of autonomy can in some way be observed in both Urmila and Samjhana’s accounts of their first husbands’ movements and assertion of domination over them. The husbands came and went as they pleased, leaving the wives to wait for them for hours on end to eat dinner, not knowing where they might be, or whom they were with. They suffered unprovoked verbal and physical abuse and still depend on them financially. Like the behavior of the administration towards inmates identified by Sykes and with inmates’ relatives studied by Comfort (2008), this form of power play is arbitrary too, reminding the women of their subordination and defying reason. The absence of autonomy does not necessarily entail an absence of agency, as has been helpfully pointed out by Laidlaw (2013). For Urmila, filing a police complaint, and for Samjhana, leaving her husband, were two brave and great acts of agency, but the social configuration of carcerality precluded them from ever gaining real autonomy. The deprivation of autonomy experienced by these women in their marriages was qualitatively not unlike that of prisoners.
31To better qualify these pains, Crewe (2011) notes a conceptual distinction between pains that are inherent features of incarceration and those that are consequences of policy changes and institutional practice. For example, with the introduction of new modes of governance in English prisons, more responsibility of self-regulation is devolved to the prisoners themselves (520), with greater punitive consequences for transgressions. Crewe describes how this leads to what he terms “tightness,” defined as “feelings of tension and anxiety generated by uncertainty […] and the sense of not knowing which way to move, for fear of getting things wrong” (522). This “tightness” is a very particular feeling of dread and entrapment echoed in Samjhana and Urmila’s lack of autonomy in their abusive marriages too.
32Another pain Sykes identifies is the deprivation of heterosexual relationships. He suggests that in addition to the sexual frustration that results, this deprivation calls into question the inmate’s “status as a man” (1958:71). I propose to expand this to include the deprivation of love and intimacy, which prison researchers have often identified as one of the greatest pains of incarceration, both for inmates and for their loved ones. The inability to perform one’s role as a partner or a parent or to be with one another along with the denial of physical touch can chip away at an inmate’s “status as a man” (or woman). Scholars have described inmates’ inability to fully fulfill their role as fathers to their children from behind bars (Moran et al. 2017), or husbands to their wives (Comfort 2008), as a great attack on their sense of self.
33The significance of this deprivation points to the centrality of interpersonal relationships, and more specifically the role of kinship ties in preserving or eroding a sense of self for the incarcerated. By extension, these same interpersonal relationships also determine the experience of families in the orbit of the carceral institution. More recent scholarship has argued for the need to bring familial relationships to the center of analysis to understand the “depth” of isolation engendered by the “referred pains of imprisonment” for families (Lanskey et al. 2018, see also Condry and Smith 2018). Rather than being passive “collateral damage” of the carceral, relatives suffer in plural and subjective ways because the family, the prison, and the socio-economic pressures interact to create “symbiotic harms” (Condry and Minson 2020). At times, the lines between those on the outside and those who suffer from the carceral become further blurred as people from criminalized backgrounds move back and forth between the two sides of the walls, in a “carceral continuum” (Wacquant 2001) that encompasses the prison and entire communities outside who are over-represented in prisons. The responsibilities, disputes, grievances, and affection born of kinship become determinants of how imprisonment and its aftermath are lived by those who are both—at different times or simultaneously—prisoner and prisoner’s relative (Cunha 2008).
34The deprivation of love and intimacy central to the experience of the prison is one of the conditions of an abusive marriage too, in that it denies the spouses a true partnership and instead results in pain, loneliness, and feelings of rejection. For both Urmila and Samjhana’s marriages, the absence of love and intimacy came in part from the violence they were subjected to by their husbands, unsafe in their own homes and with their own spouse. They suffered the “tightness” engendered by uncertainty and insecurity, and they felt the “depth” of isolation. These restrictions are in no small part what shaped Urmila’s marriage to Aman, and Samjhana’s marriage to her first husband. It also led her to find comfort, love, and partnership with Aman. In these women’s stories, the figurative sense of entrapment entwines with literal incarceration into a carceral continuum of its own, extending and changing over time and space. As Samjhana broke out of the grip of an abusive marriage, she found herself directly imprisoned. Urmila’s enduring deprivation, isolation and punishment had their source in the patriarchal values of the wider society rather than stemming from state punitive structures.
35Sykes also notes the deprivation of liberty as one of the five pains. Certainly the most obvious of imprisonment’s deprivations, it nonetheless goes to the very heart of the condition of imprisonment. The single most defining characteristic of imprisonment is confinement in space and the restriction of mobility that goes along with it. This restriction causes isolation from one’s relatives and community, therefore marking a social exclusion as well as a spatial one. Importantly, Sykes emphasizes that the symbolic significance of this imposed exile is just as pertinent and painful as its material consequences: “what makes this pain of imprisonment bite most deeply is the fact that the confinement of the criminal represents a deliberate, moral rejection of the criminal by the free community” (1958:65–66). Here, Sykes recognizes that the effects of incarceration not only stem from the inherent features of the prison but are intertwined with morality and social judgment. Indeed, I observed through my research that prisoners often suffered deeply from the rifts that their incarceration created with their relatives if they cut ties with them out of shame or anger or if they took their distance for fear of judgment from the community. Prisoners continued to attempt to call loved ones who stopped answering the phone and rarely came to visit. They also feared the loss of a family safety net when they left prison.
36Looking at polygamy in relation to other crimes in Nepal and within the wider social setting reveals that the relationship between state law and morality is not straightforward. Samjhana endured punishment prescribed by the state for committing the offence of bigamy in a country that had outlawed this practice on the grounds of women’s rights, but she did not suffer the moral rejection of the wider social group for her imprisonment. The stories and status of prisoners cannot be homogenized into a single, shared experience, but rather carry strikingly different consequences depending on a number of factors, including the nature of their conviction. Samjhana’s transgression, in the form of her own infidelity and subsequent divorce, was somewhat mitigated by her first husband’s own loss of status for being a convicted murderer.
37Urmila, on the other hand, betrayed her own husband after having agreed to a bigamous arrangement. In a move that was strongly condemned, she involved state systems in what was considered to be a family dispute. She punished her husband, embarrassed herself and her family, all for resisting a practice that had existed for centuries. In the eyes of the law, she was the victim of this situation, but in the eyes of the community, she was the perpetrator of an immoral act and a betrayal. She thus suffered the condemnation that not only ostracized her socially, but also restricted her own mobility in a very literal way through her resulting paralysis and the loss of her voice. Urmila’s example thus illustrates Sykes’ idea that “it is the moral condemnation of the criminal that converts hurt into punishment” (1958:66).
38Looking at the pains of imprisonment in the wider social context is essential to understand not just the dialectical relationship, but also the different origins of state punishment and social condemnation. Sykes acknowledges that, “perhaps it might be argued that the inmate in prison is not much worse off than the individual in the free community who is regulated in a great many aspects of his life by the iron fist of custom” (1958:73). While he recognizes that social norms and values are constraining and form an obstacle to an individual’s full autonomy, this deprivation is qualitatively distinct in prison, “felt far differently than regulation by custom” (Sykes 1958:73), as seen in the example of the arbitrariness of bureaucratic rule discussed earlier in this section. The example of Urmila in particular suggests that perhaps the effects of “the iron fist of custom” are not always that different from those of the prison. For Urmila, the strict rules of morality and codes of behavior imposed on women were an intransigent fist with longer-lasting punishing consequences than actual incarceration had had for Samjhana and Aman.
39In recent years, scholars have studied the expansion and multiplication of practices of containment and punishment, starting with the prison and extending to a range of other institutions, including migrant detention centers (Mountz et al. 2012), halfway houses (Allspach 2010), and secure care facilities (Schliehe 2021). They have drawn links between them using the concept of carcerality, which helps to reveal how state systems of control and punitive logic underpin this phenomenon, even as it extends beyond the spatial confines of these institutions. In this paper, I have considered the dynamics of the carceral in relation to the institution of marriage in rural Nepal, engaging with debates on law, gender, marriage, and punishment in South Asia through a grounded, ethnographic approach. In such a context, far from the centers of state presence with which the studies cited above are concerned, it is strikingly evident that formal institutions often become the stage on which family and community disputes play out informally. As such, the carceral logic of state systems converges and competes with other, non-state rules and morality to create multiple, subject-specific lived realities of coercion, control, and punishment.
40I have considered some of the effects of the criminalization of polygamy in Nepal as a practice that exists in an ambiguous position in relation to dominant morality of the wider society in the Karnali region, examining the plural ways in which the law, morality, state and society meet and diverge, inform and resist each other. Urmila’s situation reminds us that mechanisms of control, coercion, surveillance and punishment also exist outside of state systems and are perhaps most evident in places on the so-called periphery of the state. While Urmila’s entrapment in her own body, her poverty, and the shame she experienced were certainly all forms of constraint or punishment, they were not directly linked to state power and institutions. Samjhana’s varied experiences of the prison over time—first as the wife of a prisoner, then as a prisoner herself alongside her second husband—both echo and contrast with the coercion, violence and sense of entrapment engendered by an abusive marriage.
41Imprisonment is an ordeal that brings shame, loss, grief, and financial burden to entire families, often for protracted periods of time. But the degree and quality of the long-term effects of imprisonment on a person’s life are highly variable based on the nature, length, and circumstances surrounding a sentence, as well as a person’s social status, which includes their caste, class, and gender. In the case of bigamy presented here, the prison sentence seems to have had a comparatively small impact on those concerned, since in the long run, the imprisoned couple emerged relatively unscathed from their experience, both in their marriage and in relation to the wider community. Rather than marking a definitive end to a situation of injustice, incarceration marked one moment in a set of ongoing personal and community relations that long preceded and continued after their incarceration. In a great discrepancy between the law’s stated aims and its real effects, it is paradoxically the woman whom the law on polygamy is supposed to protect who ended up suffering the most from the shame and financial burden linked to the prison. This raises legitimate questions about state systems of punishment, and whether or not the recourse to incarceration is an effective way of bringing about justice, however defined, when abstracted out of the social context in which it exists in practice.
42Lastly, I have sought to demonstrate that the five “pains of imprisonment” identified by Sykes are useful metrics to reflect on the defining characteristics of not just life in prison, but also the life of women in abusive marriages in a patriarchal context. As with imprisonment in Sykes’s proposition, in the present ethnographic context a woman’s marital situation can have a defining impact on her material condition as well as on her membership in the wider social group. The greatest punishment of all resulting from the deprivations is the erosion of a woman’s integrity as a social being.
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