- 1 I use inverted commas around the term “forced marriage” to signal that I am treating the term ethno (...)
- 2 This paper is based on fieldwork begun in the early 2000’s in the UK on the phenomenon of “forced m (...)
1In cases of “forced marriage,”1 kinship constraints frequently precede the marriage itself. This paper presents ethnographic cases of marriage among British women of South Asian origin in which interlocutors used carceral images to describe restrictions, constraints and abuse in the context of intimate relationships prior to marriage and in their relationship with the state.2 I describe these to explore what I call the carceral everyday within kinship: experiences that were framed as constraining but that took place prior, during or after marriage, and were folded into the fabric of everyday life, even though they were experienced by my interlocutors as forceful exceptions. They used words that invoked carceral conditions (e.g. being “locked up”, being prevented from going out, or being escorted home from school) to describe such events and their effects from an emic perspective. Following the call of the geographers Moran et. al. for an expansive definition of the carceral frame that includes key elements such as detriment, intent and spatiality, I also seek to “uncover the subjectivity and relativity inherent in the experience of carcerality” (2018:676, emphasis in the original). In this work, I use ethnographic methods to draw attention to the more diffuse and mundane constraints exerted through intimate relations, and, using a more flexible approach as suggested by Hamlin and Speer (2018:799), I expand the carceral frame to explore a range of “intensities and sites,” which include families, bodies and everyday subjective kinship relationality. Jefferson (2014:49) argues that to understand the experience of confinement, we need to look to practices and meanings through which confinement gets constituted—that is, the sites, social relations and subjectivity through which it is experienced. Following this, I will focus on intimate spaces of the carceral everyday; in other words, the ordinary lived experience of detriment, intent and spatiality within forms of kinship. As I have argued elsewhere (2015:194) in the context of South Asian marriage in the United Kingdom, “consent and resistance to marriage are part of the intimate coercions that parents and children exercise upon each other,” thus making the sphere of kinship a particularly potent space in which to study coercion. I draw on Veena Das’ discussion on the relationship between events, subjects and relations, to explore how violence and its “descent into the ordinary” capture the dynamic of exceptional events that reside in the everyday, or that get “folded into ongoing relationships” (2006:19). This paper examines the ripples of violence as they play out in mundane ways across the course of an individual life through kinship relations, but also across generations.
- 3 While I am conscious of the popularized notion of transgenerational connection and repetition of tr (...)
2In the context of “forced marriages,” I seek to reveal some emerging tensions and ambivalences that show “force” as a pervasive potential of kinship, alongside more well-studied and well-understood aspects of kinship such as marriage-making, social reproduction, love and care. Thus understood, I will argue that the carceral inheres within kinship relations, where force can be exercised in ways that are frequently invisible to those outside these relationships and where it is readily operationalized in ways that are different from our commonplace notions of imprisonment and physical prisons. In thinking about the carceral everyday, I also track its resonance across not just the life course of individuals and families, but also intergenerationally, in order to explore forms of violence and constraint that appear to unexpectedly “travel,” generating introspection and ethical reflection on why things turned out the way they did.3 Force within kinship—defined here as the power of relatives singularly or collectively to coerce or compel actions or life courses that are being refused or resisted—is deliberately marshalled to manage public shame, deflect crises or present an image of social control, serving as an extension of more stereotypical kinship values of love, care and nurture. Rather than providing a locale, a reason or an event that fulfills our stereotypes of “forced marriage” as constraint and unfreedom (though these of course exist), the paper argues for an emphasis on personal narratives that elicit an ethnographically grounded rearrangement of the constraining imaginary, paying particular attention to the ways in which informants describe the restrictive conditions that connect to everyday family life, subjectivity and relationships through time. Through querying the ways in which family members enlist or live with these constraints, this article will track responses that seek to dissipate or respond to kinship constraints at different moments and through time. I will show that the invocation of “force” within kinship is a means of managing internal everyday relations as well as public perceptions of the family, turning kinship on a dime or bringing family members or relations back into control.
- 4 Throughout this article I maintain the anthropological convention of anonymity for all my informant (...)
3I was in London attending a daylong event of a women’s organization that worked with South Asian women providing legal advice and support. We were sitting around in a side room of the office awaiting our transport with everyone dressed up and excited by the activities and food that were lined up ahead. I was looking at my notes from earlier discussions when a lady sitting next to me (whom I call Hema4) struck up a conversation. She assured me that she had not had an arranged marriage, let alone a “forced” one. Nevertheless, what Hema was about to say would initiate a growing sense in my mind of the carceral everyday setting out the conditions of “forced marriage” further down the line. In other words, pre-marital experiences tending towards authoritarian parenting or violent abuse could create the grounds for “forced marriage.” Catching a lull in the conversation, and to great mirth of some of the other women in the room who were avidly listening in, Hema pronounced: “I didn’t trust my parents to arrange a marriage because I didn’t think they knew me. I knew that they would write me off on a contract; marry me to a Punjabi professional. They would have found me someone. Between a top-end actuary and a bottom- end pharmacist!” Having been the “only Asian” in her school, she said, she was equally terrified of post-marital joint family living in the United Kingdom. She met a Bengali man at university whom she liked but who also pursued her and “wore her down” until she conceded to marriage. Her voice grew softer as she recalled: “I was in the marriage with low self-esteem, and low self-awareness.” Her own family was not affectionate and, growing up in a joint family, she says that the dominant message was that “daughters were of low value.” Her mother made it clear that all love was conditional and that children had to earn it through doing as they were told, performing housework and generally supporting the family. She went on to speak about being sexually abused when she was ten or eleven years old by her fifteen-year-old cousin in his family home. She said: “That is the 80% reason why my internal world was one of insecurity. It made me feel, I really am crap.” In this instance, Hema’s own marriage was one of self-choosing, but in her words, her confidence had already been destroyed. Child sexual abuse deeply damaged Hema’s life by depleting her sense of self-worth and forcing her to live with its reverberating consequences. As she went on to say, she felt like her whole life had been shaped by the abuse she experienced, and she felt she had “wasted” the next thirty years of her life just trying to come to terms with it. Although not literally incarcerated, she experienced the constraint and entrapment of this abuse upon her body as constraining her for decades. As Poore reiterates in a chilling account of sexual abuse and incest amongst South Asian families in the United States:
- 5 The title of Poore’s chapter captures the particular challenge of abuse in the South Asian diaspora (...)
[P]erpetrators understand very well and benefit from the high premium placed on family reputation, honor, and harmony to convince victims to be silent. They rely on being able to persuade the family to extend its protectionism in the event the abuse is discovered, where protectionism includes hiding or minimizing shame-creating incidents. This same protectionism becomes a double-edged weapon. It can be turned against victim-survivors who speak about the abuse and are seen to defy family loyalty and solidarity (2007:1235).
4The trauma of abuse by a kin member carries many more implications for both exposing that abuse, and dealing with any potential consequences, let alone the devastating implications for abuse that happens within the confines of the family home (Mulla 2008). These can range from fears of destitution for innocent parties like their mothers, racism if they expose family members to the “white” police, more familial violence and public shame. Although Hema is describing her abuse to me in the context of a woman’s group, she is nevertheless underlining that she felt as though she had destroyed her marriage and wasted thirty years while trying to come to terms with what had happened. The abuse by a cousin constitutes a carceral continuum (Wacquant 2001:95) that Hema carries across domestic spaces, institutions and time.
- 6 See Qureshi (2019) for an account of the embodied effects of unhappy marriages.
5This paper begins with sexual abuse because along with domestic violence, it is part of the kinship relations that I encountered in my study of “forced marriage” among British citizens of South-Asian origin. It is important to state at the very outset that such abuse is also present in the wider, non-South-Asian population, and I am under no illusion that it is any sort of “cultural” phenomenon in itself: sexual abuse, domestic violence and oppressive control are sadly features of all societies and have been so from time immemorial. Nevertheless, the ways in which it is experienced, addressed or responded to are undoubtedly shaped by socio-cultural values, and take distinct cultural forms. One of Poore’s interlocutors says: “[t]here are several adults in my family who know–my father, sister, uncle, stepmother. They pretend no one knows” (2007:116). Thus, forms of gendered and age hierarchy, respect for elders and especially the word of men (used as a counterpoint to disclosures about abuse) and the low status of both women and children make such abuse (and the experiences that come in their wake) less visible and more difficult to escape. I was not prepared that this would be a part of what I would learn when studying “forced marriage,” nor was I sure how to write about it. Indeed, I resisted writing about it for many years. The women (and in one case, man; see Mody 2020) I spoke to revealed that they had suffered a history of domestic violence or sexual abuse preceding their marriage in ways that were both mundane and undramatic (as Hema’s revelation above). I began to see the incarcerating effects of this abuse as surprisingly pervasive in my ethnographic material. With Hema’s account, I was struck by the ways in which familial spaces and homes were turned from spaces of flourishing into damaging spaces of secrecy and containment, where sexual, physical or verbal abuse at the hands of relatives or trusted family friends cast a despairing cloud over lives and lingered moreover without being addressed, exorcised or stopped—as Hema said, such experiences carried through—inflicting a continuous dose of pain over the next three decades of her life. The recurrence of these revelations prompted me to consider much more seriously the ways in which the conditions that we associate with unhappy or coerced “forced marriages” were sometimes already in play in the bodies of some interlocutors who had been violated as children.6
6In this paper, I want to consider these conditions as what I am calling kinship carcerality to explore dimensions of imprisonment that do not readily get summoned when we think about marriage and force. They form, however, a pivotal part of the kinship and marriage biographies of some of my interlocutors. The conditions of embodied abuse and constraint in the case of sexual violence are similar to those of “forced marriage,” which is by definition consummated through rape, yet what is striking is that these conditions sit alongside numerous other forms of less visible and more mundane controls that families exercise, sometimes actively—by threatening or coercing with force—but most often passively: by addressing such matters with stony silence or denial, withdrawing recognition, continuing kinship relations with perpetrators, withholding financial support, or abandoning kin. It is only by understanding such everyday forms of punishment and control that we can really understand the abusive potential of kinship.
7Take for instance, Mrs. Arora, a middle-aged Sikh lady who was brought to the attention of the same organization that Hema worked with in London. Her husband had come to England illegally, abandoning her in the Punjab (India) for over 20 years. Her life, as she described it, was lonely and at the mercy of her in-laws, without any communication from her husband. Incredibly, at one point, despite his continuing case for asylum in the United Kingdom, he managed to smuggle himself out to India and then return undetected. This only came to light because he impregnated her with their youngest son at a time when he was meant to be in England. Nevertheless, once his asylum was granted, he brought Mrs. Arora and all their children to the United Kingdom, only for his wife to discover that he had another relationship, which he refused to surrender. He beat her and she was forced to survive on her own. After she had discussed her case for housing benefit with Hema’s organization, she asked if they might help her daughter. It turned out that when she and her children had come to England, his daughter fell in love with a Muslim man and ran away with him. The father was enraged and when the time came, he refused to apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain (a status that precedes citizenship and confers the right to remain in the country) for his daughter and only applied for his sons. Consequently, when her visa expired two years later (sadly, alongside her romantic relationship), she found herself living illegally in the United Kingdom, in limbo, without status or family support.
- 7 See also Jivraj (this issue) in which husbands hand over their wives to the authorities.
8This scenario is instructive because it adds a twist: the transnational context offers families more scope for authoritarian controls. Here, the father abandons his daughter and throws her to the mercy of the authorities who are unlikely to look kindly upon another immigrant without legal or familial sponsorship or support to remain in the United Kingdom. The father transfers his disavowal of his daughter to the state, which is co-opted into his controlling project, with excommunication from the kinship group coupling happily with excision from safe domain via the state.7 The restrictions imposed by kinship authority therefore need not remain within its inter-personal domain but get happily yoked to state projects as the carceral continuum is mapped across relationships, institutions, time and space (see the Introduction to this thematic issue and Hamlin & Speer, 2018).
9Sadly, this unusual life story turns out to be more common than one first assumes, but interestingly, it also connects with “forced marriage.” In an account of transnational marital abandonment, Anitha et al. (2018) collected fifty-seven life-history narratives of women in India who, like Mrs. Arora experienced marital abandonment. Fifty of these women reported that they learned only after marriage that their husbands had been pressured into the marriage by their families, causing thwarted hopes and expectations and no end of suffering to these women (2018:756). Interestingly, they go on to argue that the women framed their neglect and abandonment at the hands of their husbands “as violence” and “as a violation of their expectation from a relationship” (2018:758). This corroboration reinforces the carceral kinship frame in the context of “forced marriage” and draws attention to the perilous effects of such unions on both men and women.
10Kavya’s story had many twists and turns, but her life account was dominated by an extraordinary amount of violent excess at the hands of her family, especially her father. Kavya is a South African Indian with a Sikh background and when I first met her, she was in her late twenties, living with her two small children from her “forced marriage” and working for an NGO in the north of Britain. Her account of her kinship relations most clearly reveals the extent to which the carceral everyday punctured her life long before her eventual “forced marriage.” Some of this began when she was little and her family attempted to exorcize her, saying that she “used to have Mata” (i.e. she was possessed by the goddess). She grew up feeling different, rejected and stigmatized, both as a female child who was born prematurely and as someone whose mother said that she annoyed her. In Kavya’s discussions with me she cited violent beatings from her father in her teenage years so severe that they left her completely terrorized and traumatized. She ran away from this unhappy home to be with a non-Punjabi boyfriend in South Africa but was nevertheless recovered by her parents who scared her boyfriend by filing a police case, and once again, she was subjected to beatings in which she described being slapped, punched, kicked and having objects thrown at her. After this her father kept her under strict restrictions:
When he brought me back home, I was locked for six months in my bedroom. Everything I did was monitored. I was allowed to go to school until I finished my exams that year. […] I was in under lock and key. From my parents. My food was put on the doorstep in a plate, and I had to pick it up every time. Obviously, my bathroom needs were monitored as well. And that's how I lived for six months in my own house in my own bedroom and in … 1994 I started my A-Levels. And I did [them] in a very strict … routine; I will go, and I was picked up at lunch time, taken home for lunch, dropped back to school for my afternoon sessions. All my timetables were given to my parents.
11This account makes clear that the school colluded with her parents to manage her every step and to ensure that she stick with their controlling injunctions. When she was twenty years old and definitively out of school, Kayva eventually escaped from her parents and had a registry marriage with her boyfriend, sending her parents a letter via her sister to explain that she was leaving home. Nevertheless, her parents persisted in their disavowal of her agency by arranging a gathering of elders from both families to intervene. When that was unsuccessful, they sent armed police to the home to arrest them, after which she was handed back to her parents. Her marriage was forcibly annulled, her passport recovered and she was flown to India where she was given tablets by her father to miscarry the child she was carrying. A few months later her parents began inviting proposals for her marriage, presenting their daughter Kavya as a good Punjabi girl visiting India on holiday. In addition to the school, Kavya’s imprisonment was supported by other state authorities such as the police, who colluded with the family and participated in this web of kinship carcerality.
12Subsequently, Kavya conceded to the “forced marriage” that her parents had arranged to a Punjabi man who was illegally working in the United Kingdom. Kavya and her family had British passports, even though she had never lived in the United Kingdom, and this made for an attractive arrangement for a Punjabi family seeking to “settle” their son who was already working abroad. She was married in India and applied, under pressure from her family, to bring her “forced husband” on a spouse visa to get Indefinite Leave to Remain in England. To do this, she was brought from the Punjab and put to work in England in a factory making cardboard boxing for windshields with her mother to earn enough money to sponsor his immigration application and enable him to join her in 1999.
13This marital and immigration trajectory merits some consideration. Kavya had been forced into the marriage in the Punjab, and by moving her from Durban, where she had already experienced kinship carceral conditions, into a space in which she was utterly reliant on her kin, she had not really been able to go against her parent’s wishes. Kavya’s movements were tightly controlled: in her terms, she was “imprisoned.” She described to me how her parents then introduced her to her future in-laws, whom she found kind and sympathetic, building her trust when she felt very alone. She began to recognize that she had no alternative but to go along with the life and kinship script presented to her by her mother, which included pretending to the immigration authorities in the United Kingdom that this was a marriage she wanted. Many years later, and again in a foreign country (England) where she had few connections or allies, her sadly violent “forced marriage” broke down. Eventually, the truth of her abusive husband came out, and Kavya found the courage to leave her intensely unhappy home with her young sons and seek help through civil society organizations and the support of refuges and lawyers in the United Kingdom. One striking conclusion from this ethnography is that transnationalism offers families more scope for exercising carceral control (see also Anitha 2011, Mirza 2016).
14Against this difficult and painful backdrop, I was excited when I heard from an upbeat Kavya one day sharing the news of her own impending (love) marriage. She said somewhat cryptically, “Next year, maybe you will need to buy a hat!” I took a moment to decipher what she was saying. She explained that she had found “someone” who had “settled in her life and her heart.” Thrilled to hear about this development, I pressed her for more details about the lucky man. She had met him on a trip home to Durban. He was an Indian-origin bachelor, running his own business and they had married and she was back in the United Kingdom and pregnant with his child. Kavya had two grown boys living with her in her home in England from her earlier “forced marriage.” She was keen for her new husband to join her family, but the Home Office was refusing to grant him a visa to join her, and she was having to look after her baby on her own through COVID-19 as they waited for him to get permission to come to Britain. When I next saw her, I was relieved to hear that her new husband was soon to join her after a long period of waiting for this family unification.
15Her new marriage then promised happiness and fulfillment. Sadly however, this promise was not to be fulfilled. She described what happened in this way:
I had been single for 16 years; I wanted a family–to move away from the clutches of my parents, the clutches of the boys’ father. [My son] thought I rushed into it. […] He was addicted to qat leaves, alcohol and smoking. The lies were terrible. If I asked him a question, he had four different answers. I caught him talking to a girl. Then he [her new husband] raised his hand on me when I told him I was going to leave him. Despite that I still gave him a chance and brought him here [to the United Kingdom]. He tried to hit my son; he behaved like an entitled person. […] I ended up in hospital due to the pain. They asked me what it was, and I just ended up crying. [I told them] I am in such an abusive relationship. They put me in touch with the authorities.
16Kavya provided a letter saying that her marriage was no longer subsisting and the Home Office sent her husband a letter saying that his marriage visa was cancelled. He was forced to leave the country and leave Kavya alone. She reflected: “I went into this with genuine feelings. I wanted a family; I wanted to have people to support me. I have never had that, and that’s what I was trying to create.” She said another time: “I have tried so hard with my boys, they are the outcome of a forced marriage, and … I loved them, but I knew I had no choice. With Daman [her baby daughter from her “love marriage”], I wanted to experience her birth as my choice.” Kavya’s telling of the story of her relationship, beginning with the excitement of finally meeting someone with whom she wanted to make a life, followed swiftly by a tale of immense sadness at how abusive it had turned out, nevertheless poignantly rested with the observation of Daman as a baby of her own choice.
17To eject her lying-loving husband, Kavya uses the immigration apparatus to deprive him of the right to live in the United Kingdom. The Home Office did not appear to need very extensive proof of her complaint: a letter sufficed and she was relieved of her marital torment not through a divorce but through the withdrawal of his visa, and his consequent departure. Just as Mrs. Arora’s daughter is denied citizenship by her father, Kavya uses the state to excise her abusive husband from her country and her life. As we saw earlier, immigration regimes can extend confining conditions but can also offer relief and rescue from an unwanted abusive marriage. In identifying the abusive and authoritarian upbringing that Kavya experienced, I have shown how parental violence unleashed upon a rebellious child was repeatedly normalized and presented as an almost inevitable aspect of kinship. The everyday carceral in kinship is thus not just about violence per se, but, as Anitha et al. (2018) put it in the context of women married to men who had been coerced into their marriages, it is also an expectation of violence that is normalized within some forms of marriage and kinship. Furthermore, these constraining conditions extend outward and frequently connect to other institutions, regimes and states to either constrain or offer relief for my interlocutors.
- 8 See Poore (2007) on the silence following disclosure of abuse by kin or family friends within South (...)
18Similarly, another interlocutor, Hawwa, a British woman in her twenties of Muslim-Bangladeshi origin who lived in north London, recounted experiencing sexual molestation and abuse from around the age of six or seven onwards at the hands of lodgers who lived in their family home, then by an “uncle” when she was nine who was made to “babysit” all the children in the family while their mothers went out together for respite from their chores. Hawwa says that when she told her mother about the sexual abuse, her reaction was to ask how long it had been going on (two to three years), to ring her own mother and then to say to Hawwa with vehemence that she was lying. She told me: “It was basically something said, mentioned, and never mentioned again.”8 After Hawwa left home, a Bengali neighbor tried to molest her younger sister. Despite Hawwa phoning a female relative to alert her to what was going on, the family closed ranks, threatening Hawwa by saying they were going to come and “sort her out.” The younger girls had to “fend off” the pedophiles themselves (her words). As Hawwa tried to make sense of it all, she reasoned that she was targeted by the abuser because she “wasn’t his kin.” It was clear that by telling me about these events as a prelude to a discussion about her “forced marriage,” she was drawing connections between these awful traumas, her subsequent disillusionment and rebellion and the family attempt to “sort her out” with a “forced marriage.” As one colleague described it in the context of gay people being forced into unwanted heterosexual marriages, marriage can be used as a form of “the ultimate conversion therapy.” It is striking that in both Kavya’s and Hawwa’s cases, “forced marriage” was meant to domesticate the will of an unhappy and abused child and transform her into a maritally encased adult.
19When Hawwa’s father sent her off to Bangladesh, it was because he wanted to “calm her down.” She did not think that marriage was an option at that point, rather that they wanted to get her out of “this Western girl thing.” She described events preceding that trip, explaining that she began to get attention from boys around the age of thirteen. The first time she got chatted up, she thought to herself, “Oh Allah, let someone ask me out!” She began skipping school and having an exciting social life because she was not allowed to do anything of the sort once she was home from school. She was caught ditching classes during school hours and her parents were told. This resulted in her “life ending,” because her father dropped her off and picked her up each school day. Her parents despaired and were told by members of the community (in unambiguously racist terms) that their daughter was “acting like a black girl,” and that she should be sent back home (to Bangladesh). All the while, she was aware that her grandmother would say that she would marry her father’s eldest brother’s son. When she landed in Bangladesh, she was taken to an adventure park with cousins and relatives and one relative informed her that she was there to get married to this cousin. She immediately called her father who dissimulated and convinced her that there was nothing afoot and that she should just enjoy being in Bangladesh.
- 9 Early marriage was prevalent in Bangladesh at the time, when the age of consent was 14. In a politi (...)
20She believed him, but when she got to their village, she realized that her father did in fact want her to marry his elder brother’s son, and that he in turn expected to come to the United Kingdom as her husband. She was just fifteen years old, and she says she “accommodated this” by deciding that she would marry a different cousin (her father’s middle brother’s son Adil) instead. The relationship with Adil was more natural because he was “just a cousin,” unlike the now formal and staid relationship she had with the cousin whom she was expected to marry. Adil and she would “just sit and talk” and there were no limits to what she could say to him. She told him that if she was going to marry anyone, she wanted to marry him: “He was always smiling, he looked trendy and fashionable; the other one just looked like a horse! I was thinking that there is no way I’m going to let this guy touch me.” Hawwa said it made her angry that anyone could be okay marrying someone who did not consent to the marriage. When her mother’s relatives, whom she described as more religious and also more educated, tried to intercede on her behalf and reported to her father that his daughter was not willing to marry his elder brother’s son so he should give up on the project, he responded by laying down an ultimatum. Hawwa had a week to marry the elder brother’s son, or else his wife (Hawwa’s mother) would not be coming back to the United Kingdom. Shocked by this turn, and by the way in which her gentle and kind mother was being dragged into the authoritarian conditions of the patrilineal village in the homeland, Hawwa also heard an implied threat that her father might also decide not to bring her back home to the United Kingdom if she refused to marry. Being abandoned and left behind in a Bangladeshi village without a passport seemed a realistic prospect to her fifteen-year-old self.9 The transnational context again gets operationalized as a kinship resource, keeping people vulnerable and contained in places where they do not want to be. Jonathan Parry points out that far from a rural idyll, many of his interlocutors—male migrants to the Bhilai Steel Plant in Chhatisgarh—spoke of “the village as rural prison” because they had to conform to strict caste and conservative village customs that had been relaxed in cities, towns, and in the steel plants (2003:237). Hawwa felt like she would have to marry this cousin if she wanted her father to agree to fly her back home, even though she felt loathe to accept him. Transnational travel allows the “forced” conditions to “travel” with Hawwa so that she finds herself both dependent upon and exposed to new forms of kinship curtailment in foreign lands.
21Hawwa was living in conditions that she pointedly described as “lockdown” in Bangladesh, a term we are familiar with post the COVID-19 pandemic, but which she used well before this time to describe precisely the constraints imposed on her in her grandparents’ village. It is worth noting here that norms of purdah (female veiling/seclusion) and female immobility are very strong in Sylhet, the region of Bangladesh where Hawwa’s kin resided. Not only that, but her mother Jameela was also in veritable lockdown because of her recalcitrant daughter. The controlling conditions begin to escalate within the family, with one threat bringing on another. I was struck by how serious the threat to Jameela was, because Hawwa had told me that despite her father sending money to Bangladesh every month, her mother did not return for many years, until she accompanied Hawwa on this trip. So, in effect, on her first visit back to her natal family after nearly two decades, soft-spoken Jameela was being told that her husband expected her to “convince” and force her daughter into a marriage she did not want to save her own marriage.
22Threats of transnational (and marital) abandonment and geographical rupture were made to demonstrate just how much it mattered that Hawwa did as she was told. Her mother explained it to me in broken, Bollywood-learnt Hindi with the phrase used to indicate a need to bring a person back into control (“kabu main aa jaana”) of the family. At one point during her time in Bangladesh, her father came to see her and asked her to agree to the marriage for his sake. She said that at the time, she did agree and “say yes” to him because she felt an obligation to her father, as someone who had given her everything. She mused to me: “OK, he hasn’t given me my freedom, but I know in the Asian community freedom is not what one is given, it is what is earned when you get married.” Of course, despite this perception, paradoxically, anthropologists know that marriage may involve radically less freedom for women (see Jivraj in this issue). Her father freely said to everyone: “I don’t know why you all said it would be a hard task, I didn’t even have to ask her and she said yes.” Wedding invitations were issued for Hawwa to marry the older cousin she disliked (and to whom she had apparently been betrothed by her grandmother). Hawwa’s mother’s family were watching their son-in-law building his alliance with his elder brother’s family on the back of their daughter’s will. Resonant with Geschiere’s analysis of witchcraft, modernity and kinship in Cameroon (2003), they said he had been bewitched by the elder brother’s wife who was known to do tawiz (the harnessing of magical power through an amulet or locket encasing verses from the Koran to bring about changed circumstances) so that he would see through the marital destiny for her son, carrying the further promise of immigration to the United Kingdom with Hawwa as his wife.
23The threat that Jameela, Hawwa’s gentle mother, will not return to the United Kingdom if Hawwa does not marry was meant to prevent the spiral of chaos that the whole family was experiencing due to Hawwa’s unwillingness to bend to their will. In her own mind, and despite her coerced agreement, she rearranges the conditions of marital “force” so that she can countenance a marriage to a cousin whom she can accept. Nevertheless, on reflection she describes her situation as one in which she chose the least bad option, describing her affection for the younger cousin as one she had been “forced into.” As she saw it, she had only two choices: marriage to the cousin she disliked, or marriage to a different cousin even though her father explicitly prohibited this. Choosing Adil over the cousin she disparaged allowed Hawwa to resist some (but not all) of the conditions of her kinship incarceration by re-arranging (and tweaking) her father’s demands to make her life more bearable. If she must marry, then maybe she could marry the cousin whom she did not object to. Meanwhile, even though she thought she was brokering a tolerable solution, Hawwa’s father advanced the marriage arrangements with the older cousin. She recalls that she was lying down in her eldest aunt’s home; food had just been cooked, her mother had just gone to pray namaz (obligatory daily prayer said five times/day), her aunt and sister were somewhere in the house when Adil came with a rose and said to Hawwa that at that very moment, she was being married to her other cousin in a ceremony taking place in her grandfather’s village in the presence of witnesses. She said that on hearing that her Nikkah (marriage) was being read to her older cousin, she felt utterly betrayed. Adil said if she wanted to be with him, they had to leave straight away. So, Hawwa eloped with Adil. Her aunt’s children who were there said that Hawwa had been bewitched via Adil’s rose. As soon as she touched the rose, she was under his spell and followed him to a waiting tempo (a public autorickshaw). Hawwa says: “I had been in Bangladesh for four or five months now and I had never before seen an empty tempo.” Her ten-year old cousin ran to the grandfather’s village shouting, “Hawwa has run away, Hawwa has run away!” She further explains that her father jumped on his Honda bike and came after them. The couple took shelter at her mother’s brother’s house before they were shifted to Dhaka where they could be kept safe. Adil bought her some new clothes with purple embroidery on them and said they would need to get married, as she put it, “legally, in the eyes of God,” beautifully revealing the conjoining of state and religion as pre-eminent authorities with the power to deflect familial pressure to marry her other cousin. Despite the many search parties sent out to find them, Hawwa and Adil went to a house where an Imam and two unknown witnesses married them. The same night, she awoke to a loud banging on her uncle’s “street door” and found armed personnel (“the army”) with her father. They dragged Adil and her uncle out of the house. Hawwa was put into a police van, and her father tried to sit next to her, but she told him not to. When she asked the policeman a question, Adil tried to answer, and the policeman slapped him across the face. Despite a “legal marriage” we can see here the ways in which it is unable to stop the cycle of kinship violence once it has been activated.
24Hawwa closely observed the interactions between her father and the police, and in her observations, we can see the ways in which the state’s carcerality goes hand-in-hand with that of kinship. The military/policeman in charge was very sympathetic and kind to her, but when her father appeared, he immediately began to shout at Adil, making clear in her mind that he was corrupt and only there to do her father’s bidding. When they went to the police station, they took her statement and did not charge her, offering to send her home to her parents whereas Adil would be arraigned on kidnapping charges. She refused to be set free on these terms and made a statement to that effect. She was put in a van, handcuffed and taken to a prison from where she made regular court appearances.
25Hawwa spent her time in prison seeing the world from a very different perspective. She was made to line up and squat to say prayers. She met a woman who had killed her husband, who was having an affair. The woman had lost her daughter because of this. She met a girl who had made a home in the prison, with mirrors on the wall, and little hooks to hang her few possessions: a comb, toothbrush, oil and towel. Just fifteen-years old, she was taking everything in. She asked a jailer, “how often do you see cases like mine?” The jailer replied: “You foreign girls, you always come and take our men. When you are 18 you will go on trial.” Taking the rebuke of the jailer to heart, she decided that she would not abandon Adil and his father (her paternal uncle). When the case eventually came to court and she was asked to give testimony that she had been kidnapped, she refused to fulfill the jailer’s prediction that she too would leave these two men to rot in prison. A few days later, she was called to court, and they were all released to go back together to her grandfather’s village. Adil’s mother initially spat hatred at her for destroying her son’s life, but then slowly relented and treated them as a married couple.
26After months of staying in her “marital home,” Hawwa was summoned to her mother’s brother’s place to see her parents. When she arrived, she was put on the phone and realized for the first time that they had all left Bangladesh and were back in England. It dawned on her that she had been left behind, without her passport and without the means to get back to the United Kingdom. She pleaded with her family to help her, and they said that she could only leave once the court case was finished. Eventually, after months of going back and forth to the local town to attend the court case that her father had begun—and for which he now sent money so she could pay the lawyers—the case finally concluded. At some point during this period, she became so ill that she began to shiver, and everyone said that she was possessed by a bhooth (spirit). A man was called to exorcise the bhooth, and Hawwa says she saw it as an opportunity to find a path back to her family. She said, “I thought, if I go along with this, my dad will hear, and they will take me back.” Following her possession, her parents asked her to go to her mother’s brother’s house where it emerged that she was pregnant. Her mother’s family spoke to her with love and care and asked her if she wanted to have a baby so young. She spoke to Adil and agreed to have an abortion which the family arranged. She left for England the next month, promising Adil before she left that she would send him money, call every night, get a job and get him out of Bangladesh. She remembers turning to see him at the airport, and thinking to herself, “I am never going to see you again.” She felt bad because she had changed him and, in her words, “messed up” his life and beliefs along with many others in his family, and when she got home to England, she was relieved to be back and realized that she did not want to spend the rest of her life with Adil and was therefore happy to move on. Imagine her surprise when a few months later her father asked her if she would marry another cousin, her mother’s brother’s son, instead. When she said no, he shouted at her: “Who the fuck do you think you are? The Prime Minister’s daughter?”
27When Hawwa’s father arranged for her to go to Bangladesh, she says she was taken to his ancestral village in Sylhet and was subjected to curtailments that women and children sometimes experience in the village, including mobility afforded only by responsible male kin or the supervision of sociality assured by vigilant female elders. Additionally, her father controlled access to money so that Hawwa was unable to make any plans independently of him. If Hawwa was behaving like an entitled and privileged young lady who repeatedly repudiated her father’s coercive intentions in marrying her, then her father may be partly responsible for this sense of privilege that led her to behave like an independent-minded Prime Minister. When I met Hawwa’s mother Jameela some years later at a time when both mother and daughter were safely back in the United Kingdom, I spoke to her at length about what she thought of her daughter’s dramatic and difficult experiences. She placed the blame very squarely on her mother-in-law. She revealed her own marital history, which adds context to her husband’s relationship to his mother (Hawwa’s paternal grandmother).
28Jameela’s brother had come to Hawwa’s father’s village to arrange her marriage with a man there. Hawwa’s grandmother (nani) dismissed the groom-to-be and told Jameela’s brother that he should consider her London son instead (Hawwa’s father’s older brother, ie. Hawwa’s sassa/chacha). However, Hawwa’s father, who happened to be back in Bangladesh saw Jameela and declared that he liked her and wanted to marry her. Hawwa’s father was meant to marry his maternal uncle’s daughter. By choosing Jameela, he upset the family’s plans—especially those of his mother—and his family boycotted his marriage. After marrying Jameela in her village, he took her to England, where she remained for nearly two decades, never once visiting home. She was only accepted into the family after Hawwa was born. Jameela describes her husband as having painfully suffered a real loss of love from his own family. She says that he tried to hold on to his childhood and the relations of affection he once enjoyed. In a profoundly ironic turn, Hawwa and Jameela feel that he has spent most of his adult life trying to compensate his mother in kind through extensive financial and other forms of support, as well as in respect and care for having ruined her plans for his own marriage.
29Social anthropologists do not typically track back through family relationships to understand how marriage decisions reverberate across generations, but as this paper has tried to show, even when an exasperated father berates his daughter, he in fact draws attention to the ways in which he broke the mold himself. He served as a model for the agency exercised by his daughter, as well as reactivating the incarcerating spirit of his mother in relation to his own child. This is not to pretend that kinship scripts are inevitable nor that individuals lack agency or self-determination. On the contrary, my informants who have experienced “forced marriages” have proven just how much agency they exercised within their constraints, and nowhere is this more evident than in the choices young Hawwa made in prison, learning from prison guards about the plight of young Bangladeshi boys who eloped with foreign girls and standing by those who were more vulnerable than her until they too could be set free. Marital carcerality then is as much about reconfiguring the imaginary—taking the tough scripts of one’s life and repurposing them towards one’s own future.
30One reading of Hawwa’s life is that in pivoting her “forced marriage” from one cousin to another and evading a police manhunt and being returned to the village, she was subjected to a complex network of coercion at play between families and the state. Nevertheless, I would argue that by returning to her home and her life in the United Kingdom and by remaining connected and engaged with her family and kin on her own terms, Hawwa forced a reimagining of the carceral conditions inflicted upon her. The everyday in these marriages, families, homes or villages is peopled by social relationships that have long histories and inconsistent trajectories in which agency coexists with restraint. In moments when people are felt to be doing the wrong thing, kinship relations can sometimes turn constraining, unleashing the violent potential they have within. Such constraints cannot be sustained indefinitely, however, so they often “travel,” serving as a response to containment in particular moments or as acts of agency in others. By showing the ways in which the carceral emerges throughout the course of kinship rather than just at the point of marriage, I have tried to show the ways in which carcerality can be mundane and everyday. It can take the form of acts of kinship omission–the things that kin neglect or fail to do and abandonment–as well as acts of kinship commission–active forms of control or confinement, violence and abuse. In a very real sense then, carcerality is relational and is relationally enacted. Studying “forced marriage” ethnographically allows us to see the ways in which “prisons” are relationally constructed long before they are materially manifest.
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