When I got married this side [India], the BDR [Bangladesh Rifles] was asking me at the border, “you have gotten married from this side [Bangladesh] to that side [India], are you happy with it?” So, I said whether I like it or not, I have to follow what my parents have decided for me. Then they said, “Ok. But gradually the border will become kharap (bad, implying non-navigable); then how will you go back and forth?” When I got married the border was bhalo (good, implying easily navigable), it was not like this—one could go across the border whenever one wanted. But now it seems every day it is getting worse—one cannot cross the border, or you have to pay 5000 taka to cross over or bear the bullets; it's the good people who are being violent. Earlier I used to pay on both sides of the border and cross, this side [India] I had to pay more and that side [Bangladesh] a little less. That’s how I used to cross and came over to this side [India].

2Borders and marriage are both institutions which demarcate the lives of Bangladeshi women like Hena who move between India and Bangladesh to either get married or escape an untenable marriage. In this article, I explore how the institutions of marriage and border intersect to create a pervasive condition of carcerality as Bangladeshi women move between the domestic realm and the public sphere, and between Bangladesh and India. I argue that their gendered experiences of carcerality continue as they move across the border. While demarcating the transition from natal to marital family and/or from Bangladesh to India, cross-border migration in the context of the India-Bangladesh border, creates diverse forms of carcerality. Contemporary legal and political regimes in post-Independence India have reconstituted as “illegal” forms of mobility that were historically legal, socially normalized and integral to everyday life.

3In my 2018 book Women, Mobility and Incarceration: Love and Recasting of Self across the Bangladesh-India Border, I conceptualized incarcerated (im)mobility as referring to how the prison, border and society act as control points for a prism in which Bangladeshi women—the “other” of the Indian citizen “take[s] a center position in the discourse on security with a measured amount of vertical and horizontal mobility and often a perceived mobility” (Mehta 2018:140). By focusing on specific compact institutional sites such as prisons and protection homes, I more recently nuanced the conceptualization of incarcerated (im)mobility by demonstrating how Bangladeshi women who cross the India-Bangladesh border get caught in an institutional complex where “their mobility across borders is constantly met with one form of confinement or another, creating a mirage of freedom for them” (Mehta 2025:15).

4In this article, I extend the connection between the institutional complex and incarcerated (im)mobilities to analyze how carcerality is produced through the institutions of marriage and borders, as reflected in the narratives of Bangladeshi women I met in India as a part of two different research studies. The first focused on the experiences of Bangladeshi women who were on trial or charged for violation of Foreigners Act 1946 and who were in prisons in India. I conducted in-depth interviews with 40 young Bangladeshi women in two prisons in West Bengal between 2010-2011. The second research study focused on cross-border child and early marriage of girls and young women from Bangladesh in India. In this case, in-depth interviews in 2016 with 14 women in the borderland, about 200-500 meters from the India-Bangladesh border, added new layers of understanding of the issues at hand. Although the spatial context of the interviews for the two research studies was different, I found continuity in women’s narratives of carcerality experienced in everyday life at the hands of the state, family and community. Because I have written extensively about the ethics, epistemology and research methodology for the two research studies elsewhere, I do not elaborate on them here (Mehta 2014a, 2018, 2019).

5Drawing on the narratives of the women from these two research studies, this article will first articulate the institutions of marriage and borders in the South Asian context, then conceptualize the situation as a “marriage-border carceral archipelago,” adding a gendered nuance to Foucault’s (1979) conceptualization of the carceral archipelago. This involves analyzing how Bangladeshi women’s mobilities across the India-Bangladesh border around marriage are caught in the web of immigration policies, citizenship laws, labor market demands, family and kinship norms and affective ties, which can be seen as the individual “islands” of this “carceral archipelago.” Finally, I explore women’s accounts of resistance and negotiations with the marriage-border carceral archipelago as they move across borders, revealing how women navigate and subvert the entanglements of identity, labor and sexuality that play out on their gendered and sexualized bodies.

MARRIAGE AND BORDERS IN SOUTH ASIA

6Marriage in the South Asian context is “a structured and patterned set of social relations and practices. It is embedded in norms and values regarding what marriage should be and is. There are explicit social prescriptions and sanctions by public bodies, the state, religion, and community” (Palriwala and Kaur 2014:4). In the Indian context, as well as across South Asia more broadly, marriage serves as a means of creating, sustaining and overriding class, caste, and religious stratifications. Families forge endogamous alliances to consolidate social, economic and political status (Rao and Finnoff 2015). In effect, it is an “alliance in structuralist and political terms, entailing affinal relations,” and is not just a relationship between two individuals (Palriwala and Kaur 2014:4). Marriage is also a site of production and reproduction, imbued with varied forms of socio-economic and political inequalities (Rao and Finnoff 2015).

7Examining the institutional and contractual foundations of marriage reveals the complex interplay of control and power that shapes women’s experiences. Pateman highlights the importance of considering the “underlying institutional contract and the domination/subordination dichotomy” (Thompson et al. 2018:101), arguing that it is essential to understand the institution of marriage to grasp the full implications of any marital contract. As she notes, “you can’t understand what’s going on when there’s a contract between the two people if you don’t also understand something about the institution, because you’ve got to know what ‘marriage’ means, it’s part of one of the major structures of the society” (Thompson et al. 2018:94). Understanding the institution of marriage requires a recognition of the power dynamics it creates, granting the state, natal and marital family members, and community members control over a woman’s body and life choices.

8The institutionalized forms of marriage and its role in expanding kinship systems are integrally tied to the idea of the state. Pateman’s concept of “sexual contract” (1988) and Gatens’ description of a state as “contract entered into by men only” (1996:51) illuminate the power dynamics at the intersection of marriage and border regimes. The sexual contract guarantees men access to women’s bodies and provides men with protection from the state in ways that do not extend to women. This framework facilitates an understanding of how marriages in South Asia, when viewed in a cross-border context, can perpetuate gendered power imbalances with significant implications for women’s agency, mobility and autonomy.

9The historical context of colonialism also underpins the social and sexual contracts in the case of cross-border mobility of people between India and Bangladesh. The colonial legacy, epitomized by the partition of India, continues to shape the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in South Asia. The Radcliffe Line, drawn on paper by British barrister Sir Cyril Radcliffe—who had never visited India prior to this assignment nor understood the complexities of its settlements—served as the boundary between Punjab (now divided between India and Pakistan) and Bengal (now divided between India and Bangladesh) during British India's partition. This line arbitrarily sliced through neighborhoods and even individual homes, leaving parts of some houses in India and others in Bangladesh (Chatterji 1999). The enduring legacy of these hastily drawn borders continues to shape the everyday lives of people in post-independence India and Bangladesh, where kinship relationships have been fractured by geopolitical boundaries and legislations which penalize people for crossing the border without valid documents.

10Legislation also plays a role, such as the Foreigners Act 1946 in India (relevant to the experiences of women at the time of fieldwork), which has now been replaced by the Immigration and Foreigners Act 2025. These laws define the criteria for identifying foreigners and non-citizens, laying the groundwork for policies of inclusion and exclusion. The provisions of section 14 of the Foreigners Act 1946 indicated that a person arrested in contravention of this Act could be sentenced to imprisonment for up to five years, pay a fine or both. The onus of proof under this Act lay with the accused. Bhat (2019) has explored the shifting legal context defining who is and who is not considered an Indian citizen. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019 in particular increased the precarity of Muslim Bangladeshis in India, as well as Bengali Muslims from West Bengal in India, who are conflated with the former.

11Beyond these constructions and reconfigurations of “illegality,” Ibrahim’s (2018) research in the borderlands of Kutch, a district in the state of Gujarat in India, close to the India-Pakistan border, showcases how discursive narratives of “trafficking” and “rescue” usually frame the migration of single women from West Bengal to other parts of the country. Marriage migrants from West Bengal were perceived as “illegal” due to the possibility that they could be Muslims from Bangladesh. On the other hand, Hindu brides from Sindh, a province in southeast Pakistan, were able to convert “illegal” border crossing into citizenship and political capital. This observation emphasizes how the state’s border regime not only constructs the illegality of migrants, rooted in colonialism and sectarianism, but also discursively exacerbates the marginalization and broad patterns of the gendered oppression of women.

12In addition to the historical context of colonialism and the ongoing evolution of immigration laws and border surveillance technologies, the right-wing ethno-religious nationalist Hindutva ideology in India, which defines cultural identity in terms of an essentialized and homogenized idea of Hinduism, creates a complex landscape of citizenship and belonging for people navigating the India-Bangladesh border, making cross-border marriages even more multifaceted. On one hand, such unions may provide women with a sense of freedom, allowing them to transcend the social norms of endogamy related to caste and religious boundaries (Ibrahim 2018). On the other hand, cross-border marriages can further constrain women by subsuming them into their husband’s national and cultural status (Blanchet 2008, Roy 2023). Migration following a cross-border marriage therefore emerges as an aspirational category for some women, offering the potential to escape restrictive social norms and gain new opportunities. Yet, it simultaneously exposes them to new forms of control and marginalization, leading to incarcerated (im)mobilities, where women’s movement across borders is constantly met with one form of containment or another, creating a mirage of freedom (Mehta 2018; see also Jivraj’s conceptualization of “carceral escapes” in this issue).

13Furthermore, cross-border marriages facilitate kinship ties on both sides of the Indo-Bangladesh border and have specific implications for women. Research in the Bangladeshi enclaves in India demonstrates how families used marriage to maintain good relationships between enclave residents and the residents of India (Roy 2023). Dowry for the bride was often justified as necessary for preparing citizenship documents and negotiating with state officials such as police and visa officers. Navigating the border through marriage meant women had to get married at a young age and/or pay dowry (Roy 2023). These dynamics highlight the intersection of border regimes and kinship systems in controlling, surveilling and invisibilizing women through the institution of marriage, particularly because many of these cross-border unions have social sanction but no legal recognition.

14Many scholars have explored how inequalities are often exacerbated in the case of cross-border marriages, taking the form of violence, economic abuse, labor exploitation and social isolation (Anitha et al. 2018; Raj and Silverman 2002; Chiu 2017; Friedman and Mahdavi 2015). Cross-border marriages are embedded in a context where androcentric border control policies and practices, immigration laws, family and community norms intersect (see Constable 2005; Ghosh 2017; Ibrahim 2018; Roy 2023). While some women perceive mobility and agency in the act of “crossing” the border, the act may also lead to heterogenous forms of carcerality, particularly when viewed through its intersection with marriage.

CARCERAL ARCHIPELAGO

15Cassidy et al. (2020:1082) explore carcerality as a social construct defined by a set of spaces and practices, aligning with Foucault’s definition of the “carceral continuum,” which describes not just overlapping and “compact institutions but also distinct methods that diffused penitentiary techniques into the most innocent disciplines, transmitting disciplinary norms into the very heart of the penal system and placing over the slightest illegality, the smallest irregularity, deviation or anomaly, the threat of delinquency” (Foucault 1979:301). Tazzioli (2024) draws on Foucault’s understanding of the carceral continuum and argues that carcerality can be imposed even within a perceived mobility from one space to another and does not necessarily need to be characterized by fixity or immobility in an enclosed space. The understanding of carcerality must not therefore be limited to spatial confinement, as “it can consist in modes of spatial disruptions and diversions, legal impasses as well as temporal suspensions that can entail direct physical restrictions or not” (Tazzioli 2018:2768). I am arguing that this understanding of the carceral continuum facilitates an understanding of how modes of disciplining and confinement are intertwined and often reinforce each other beyond compact sites in the lives of Bangladeshi women such as Hena, who move across the India-Bangladesh border.

16The carceral continuum follows women like Hena, transcending the boundaries of the home, community and state. Such a continuum of surveillance and control, as discussed in the subsequent sections, perpetuates carcerality even within spaces presumed to offer freedom or protection, such as the home. It is enforced through various forms of sexual and labor governance, resulting in a combination of spatial, social and/or psychological confinement. Foucault (1979:298) also examined this pervasive control mechanism, arguing that “the prison transformed the punitive procedure into a penitentiary technique; the carceral archipelago transported this technique from the penal institution to the entire social body.” The penitentiary techniques operate through institutional and normative “islands” and shape the lived experience of women across multiple domains.

17The carceral has, therefore, increasingly been referred to as “spatial, emplaced, mobile, embodied and affective” (Moran et al. 2018:6), extending its understanding in terms of its relationality across sites, practices and subjectivity (Jefferson 2014). Further, scholars have argued that carcerality is co-constituted with race, gender, class, colonialism, and capitalism (Gilmore 2017; Wacquant 2009; Rodríguez et al. 2020). Moran et al. (2018) locate carcerality as relational and embedded in social context, defining it through the interplay of detriment, intention, and spatiality. My work builds on this relational framework and on scholarship within border criminology that explores relations between border regimes, mobility, law, citizenship, and sovereignty (Stumpf 2006; Bosworth et al. 2024). By situating carcerality as inseparable from gendered social control and violence, I further draw on abolitionist perspectives that envision new gendered social relations (Davis 2003). I call attention to the gendered, embodied, and affective impacts of carcerality, which is frequently practiced through the containment of bodies constructed as “deviant,” “dangerous,” or “unwanted.” Because of the multifaceted nature of carcerality, I use a nuanced vocabulary, in which confinement here refers to physical limitation of movement, containment to management of affect, and constraint to structural or normative pressures that shape women’s actions. In conjunction, they function as components that cause detriment on multiple registers and shape women’s carceral experiences. In what follows, I bring these streams together to explore how the marriage–border carceral archipelago produces relational and gendered forms of carcerality in the lives of Bangladeshi women who cross the India–Bangladesh border to get married or to leave an untenable marriage.

MARRIAGE: ESCAPE FROM AND ESCAPE TO CARCERALITY?

18I turn now to narratives of Bangladeshi women who married in India—whether by “choice,” necessity or coercion—and the forms of confinement, containment and constraint those marriages imposed. I intersperse these with the accounts of other Bangladeshi women who escaped an abusive or otherwise untenable marriage and were trafficked or smuggled into India. Together, these narratives reveal how marriage can generate carceral experiences that both drive women to cross borders and result from such crossings, tracing a continuum of carcerality that spans women’s lives both within and beyond their marriage. Bangladeshi women highlighted several reasons why their families coerced them into marrying across the border in India, including the concealment of cases of sexual violence, the management of property disputes, the maintenance of kinship relations and the expansion of social networks across the border.

19Hena’s family was involved in a property dispute in Bangladesh. Her family had filed several cases against individuals they alleged were appropriating their land, and these individuals had also filed cases against her family in return. She said:

My father was reduced to nothing and towards the end of his life he had to beg for money on the roads so that he could continue fighting the case. They also started filing cases against us. We had 19 cases against us. Whoever came forth to help us also had a case filed against him. They were not letting me get married. My marriage was fixed with a boy . . . The people we were fighting with told the groom’s family not to marry me as I had filed a rape case. Then the groom’s family came and said they wanted the marriage to take place next month and not the month when it was scheduled . . . My brother decided that he would not get me married in that house . . . In that very month I was married here [in India].

20Hena’s family feared that the property dispute would interfere with her marriage prospects, and any delay in her marriage created the possibility that it might not occur at all. Hena’s marriage became entangled in the property dispute between the two families, with the rival family seeing the stalling of the marriage as a means of revenge. Hena became a pawn in the conflict between the two families, as her marriage migration to India emerged as the only viable option for her brother to “preserve their honor.” The issue of rape, which Hena did not elaborate on, seemed to be what threatened both her natal family’s and her prospective marital family’s “honor,” prompting them to postpone the marriage. Both families displayed concern for Hena’s well-being—her brother worried that she might never marry, while her prospective marital family preferred to wait until the crisis in Hena’s family settled and the rape case was resolved. Their overt concern barely masked their covert fear of losing “honor.” Arranging Hena’s marriage in India would alleviate these honor-related fears by obscuring the family dispute, the possibility that Hena had been raped, and the prior marriage arrangement. The latter two conditions were especially taboo because of the questions they raise about the “purity” of the bride. In Hena’s case, migration across the border to West Bengal in India ensured a sufficient physical distance from her immediate context without too much social and cultural disparity for her Hindu family.

21Hena did not fully understand the implications of crossing the border. Her marriage took place in a haste, and she did not have an opportunity to think of the impact it would have on her life. She said:

Before I came here, I did not know what a border is or what India is. I had never heard about a border—that there are Border Security Force (BSF) and police at the border who will arrest us or that it will not be possible to move back and forth across the border.

22Criminalization of her entry to India without valid documents was not obvious to Hena. The border and its limitations were revealed to her only when it began to constrain her movement. She said that increased security at the border affected common people like her. She was able to negotiate the limitations of the border if border guards on the two sides would accept bribes, but in the absence of such complicity in the last few years due to stringent border regulations, she found herself confined to her marital home and within the Indian state. Hena was unable to visit her natal family and extended social networks in Bangladesh due to the immobility created by the border regimes and the circumstances under which she was married. She had become the conduit for her family’s “honor” which, the family believed, depended on whether Hena got married and to whom. Her family’s decision to marry her across the border to save their “honor” created a particular form of carcerality, where the underlying intersections of marriage, family and social norms were further strengthened by the border regime, confining and containing Hena in India.

23While Hena was unaware of the consequences of a cross-border marriage, Latika did not even know that she was going to be married across the border. Latika had siblings living in India, including a married sister. She enjoyed her studies in class VIII in Bangladesh when an incident changed the course of her life: her sister in Bangladesh fell in love with someone who was supposedly below their social class. Latika’s family members were distraught that her sister, who taught in a college, wanted to marry a man they considered unsuitable. The incident had a significant impact on Latika, although she could not explain what exactly disturbed her. After this incident, Latika decided to leave Bangladesh and continue her studies in India where her eldest sister lived. Upon arriving in India, no one showed interest in her educational ambitions. She attempted to enroll in school but was denied admission mid-session and was forced to take a year off. During this year, Latika lived with the family of her eldest sister’s in-laws and was compelled to take on numerous household chores, leaving her feeling harassed and suffocated. She wanted to return to Bangladesh, but her relatives in India arranged her marriage to a Christian man twice her age. She was 16 years old when she got married and became pregnant with her first child. Before the marriage took place, she did not know that the groom was twice her age and belonged to a religious group different from her and her family, who were Hindu.

24In the cases of Hena and Latika, we observe two different pathways that lead to cross-border marriage. The embodied experience of marginalization, violence, harassment leading to migration and marriage, in a context where their status was not legal, was overridden by families who wished to reinforce gendered norms of “honor.” My research has shown that Bangladeshi girls and young women like Hena and Latika who were married in India often did not meet with their natal family members for years or even decades because they were unable to enter Bangladesh. They lacked the necessary documents to return to India, and this generated fear of being apprehended by the border guards. Their “illegal” status confined them to their marital home and to India, where they were engaged as farm or domestic laborers. When combined with their dependence on their marital family to procure “legal” documents, their status as “illegal” in India pushed them into zones of invisibility and led to covert constraint and containment. In such cases, the enmeshment of gendered norms, the institution of marriage, and border regimes created forms of carcerality without a clear demarcation of cause and effect.

25In other instances, coercion to marry, violence or abandonment in marriage prompted women to leave Bangladesh in search of freedom and in the hope of breaking away from gendered societal norms. Salma had been married to a Bangladeshi man twice her age even before she reached puberty. Her in-laws had agreed to raise her in their home because her family was poor, and the children often went without food. Soon after the marriage, Salma discovered that her husband was involved with another woman, prompting her to leave him. In an unusual act, defying the codes of “honor,” her father escorted her back home, supporting her decision to end her marriage. Living at her father’s house proved to be difficult for Salma because everyone knew about her marriage, which would hinder her chances of marrying again. She then moved in with her brother and sister-in-law who allegedly harassed her and engaged her in arduous household labor. Desperate to get out of this situation, Salma asked a friend to find her a groom in India. Her friend, who was Indian and married in Bangladesh, had a social network in India that could assist Salma. With her help, Salma came to the border village in West Bengal. She explained:

unable to bear the torture, I told that girl to take me out of there (Bangladesh) at any cost . . . my father’s house was just on the bank of the river . . . right on the bank . . . no one will be able to differentiate between Bangladesh and India there . . . house, river, police, BSF camp, bus stop . . . there . . . that is where I got married . . . my husband had gone to Bangladesh to get me . . . when I came here [India] I was very young.

26Salma accepted the fact that her prospective groom had two children from his previous marriage, saying:

Everyone there [Bangladesh] knew that I had married once . . . so it would have been difficult there . . . getting married there would have been difficult . . . that is why in this desh [India] . . . my husband here already had two children . . . he had also married once . . . so he knew about me and we got married.

27It is possible that Salma had a financial arrangement with her friend, but she did not elaborate. If money was exchanged, it did not play a significant role in her account. Salma’s narrative emphasizes that her primary goal was to escape the violence and harassment she faced. Marriage across the border was imagined as an escape from drudgery, and she sought support and security through it. Migrating to India provided her with the anonymity she needed to rebuild her life, which she expressed would have been difficult in Bangladesh where community members knew about her marital status and would have perceived her decision to leave her marital home shortly after marriage as “dishonorable.” In this context, she agreed to take on the role of a mother for her husband’s children and to provide her labor on the farm.

28The conditions imposed by the institution of marriage and the untenability of Salma’s first marriage necessitated her movement across the border to escape stigma. The escape initially imagined as a liberation ultimately led to varying forms of carcerality such as spatial confinement in India, constrained by cycles of reproductive and productive labor roles, and containment within the marital home. Women often agreed to these conditions of cross-border marriage, even though it led to different forms of carcerality, because it held a promise of escape from stigma, which in turn can be conceptualized as a gendered psycho-social form of containment.

29Escape from marriage was also evidenced in Hasina’s narrative. I met her in a prison in West Bengal, India. She abandoned her husband in Bangladesh soon after the wedding because she had been coerced into it by her natal family members. Realizing the untenability of the marriage, she sought the “help” of a “friend” in the garment factory in Dhaka. The “friend” reassured Hasina of her support in seeking employment opportunities in India, but in turn manipulated her vulnerabilities and facilitated her trafficking into a brothel in India. Hasina was arrested from the brothel under the Foreigners Act 1946. Rumpa, another Bangladeshi woman I met in the same prison, was abandoned by her husband for reasons unknown to her, soon after she gave birth to their daughter. In the absence of any financial support, she left her daughter with her parents and decided to come to India to look for work to support herself and her child. She was also arrested by the police under the Foreigners Act 1946 for not having valid documents soon after her arrival in India.

30Women like Hasina and Rumpa crossed the India-Bangladesh border to escape their marriages in search of education, employment opportunities, safety, or a sense of freedom from gendered socio-cultural norms. However, they found themselves moving through a spectrum of carcerality as they moved from one country to another. Their vulnerabilities were exploited by smugglers and/or traffickers who sold them in India for marriage or brothels or conditions of forced labor in factory, farm or domestic spaces. Identified by the Indian state as “illegal” migrants, they were arrested and lodged in prisons while their trials ensued. Some women who were identified as trafficked and had been rescued were housed in protection homes in India. The regulations of the protection home prohibited the women from leaving the premises, acting as a de facto prison. In the instances discussed here, irrespective of the pathways to migration, the aspired escape from marriage ironically confined women within the state, brothel, prison or protection home. Often the confinement also extended to the domestic space and included conditions of labor in a garment factory or a farm. In all such cases, their everyday lives were governed and controlled by gendered social norms in varying ways.

31Prisons, protection homes and family homes are not mutually exclusive spaces, but it would also be a gross error to conflate them as equally prohibitive or restrictive. The state functions beyond the walls of the prison as a larger, all-encompassing entity enclosed by political borders. The impact of the broader practices of the state on women is different from the effects of the prison as a state institution. In the same way, a protection home and a prison may both be spaces that confine, but the impact that each has on women’s sense of freedom and security cannot be conflated. It is important therefore to conceptualize carcerality without making false equivalences. I am arguing that the nature and form of carcerality should be seen as contextual. A distinction must also be made between marriage as a social institution and national borders as a political institution. They may both be underpinned by a sexual contract, but the nature of carerality in the two institutions must not be conflated because women’s negotiating power and ability to exercise agency is shaped differently in the two institutional contexts.

32As we have seen, both cross-border marriages and cross-border migration to escape marriage create the mirage of movement; in reality, they limit the movement of women like Hena, Latika, Salma, Rumpa and Hasina. Carcerality takes many forms in their lives, causing detriment by containment through sexual governance and forced marriage; constraint through restriction on mobility, gendered socio-cultural norms and marginalization; and confinement in protection homes, prisons, India, or through trafficking and forced sex work. The institution of marriage—along with border surveillance, technologies to monitor and immobilize, anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobic nationalisms—participates in the carceral archipelago that shapes women’s experiences.

NEGOTIATING WITH AND RESISTING THE MARIAGE-BORDER CARCERAL ARCHIPELAGO

33Women nonetheless negotiate with and subvert the marriage-border carceral archipelago through their everyday acts of resistance. In the absence of legal documents in India, Bangladeshi women found different ways to transgress the India-Bangladesh border to fulfill their desires to meet their natal family in Bangladesh and be present with them at least in times of birth, death and celebrations. Koli, for instance, at the time of the interview, had not visited her natal family in Bangladesh for two years. She was coerced into marrying an 18-year-old boy in India when she was 13 years old. Her father arranged this marriage to maintain kinship ties in India. She said that negotiating with the border guards in the context of a changing political regime and heightened border surveillance and security had become difficult. She did not want to risk crossing the border without valid documents. She mentioned with a sad face that, previously, when she missed her parents, she called them to a plot of land that her in-laws owned on the Bangladesh side of the border. She would tell the border guards that she was going to work on the plot of land, then meet her parents there. Earlier, when she could successfully negotiate with the border guards, she even took her son and daughter to meet their grandparents on the other side of the border. She said:

Earlier I used to take the help of a dalal (intermediary) . . . depending on what kind of service we needed we would pay the dalal accordingly . . . sometimes 1000, sometimes 500, and a number of times 2000 . . . we used to walk and go across . . . I went by boat once . . . that time my son was very young . . . actually not even on a boat . . . that time the river level was really low . . . that time I took my son with me . . . I took him in a kadai (a large deep vessel used for cooking) . . . (laughs) . . . there was water . . . so how would I take my son across the river . . . the dalal who helped me cross the border he only took my son in a kadai . . . I swam across the river . . . (laughs) . . . I think this was in 2009 . . . before that I had taken my daughter with me to Bangladesh . . . there was no problem when I took my daughter . . . that time the border was bhalo (good).

34She added that throughout the journey she was worried that her son would catch a cold or fall sick, but she wanted to take him to meet his grandparents. Koli resisted the confinement and containment in India and took these risks to fulfil her desire to meet her family.

35While a majority of the women were ready to negotiate with and resist the border regimes by crossing through clandestine means, it seemed that they adapted to socio-cultural norms of their marital homes and Indian society so that they could preserve their negotiating power to secure their day-to-day lives in the context of their ‘illegal’ status. Among the many changes women made while living with their marital families in India, clothing was an important strategy. Kaberi adopted the sari or nighty, discarding the burqa she wore in Bangladesh. She said:

the burqa is prevalent in Bangladesh . . . this side the burqa is not in vogue . . . this side women wear nighty . . . or this sari that I am wearing . . . it is not like this that side [Bangladesh] . . . that side some of them wear salwar kameez and burqa . . . so nighty it is . . . there is no other option apart from that . . . that is what is in vogue here . . . I have understood that this is the norm here.

36The choice of the sari as opposed to the usual burqa worn in Bangladesh may be seen as an act of negotiation, for fear of being made visible. Bangladeshi women I met through my research discarded their burqa and adopted the sari to meld into the folds of the much-hailed sari-clad Bharat Mata (Mother India), projected as the archetype of an Indian woman. Jingoistic forms of ethno-religious nationalism and information provided by the dalal reinforced the image of an Indian woman as sari-clad. To comply with this image and to conceal both their Bangladeshi and Muslim identities, the women preferred the sari over the burqa, even though the former and latter need not be mutually exclusive for Muslim women in India. Nazma read namaz (Islamic prayer) and took an orna (stole) whenever she went out, but she did not wear a burqa. Each of the women I spoke with found a way to comply with the norms of dressing acceptably in their marital family and conducted themselves in such a way that they would not attract too much public attention, particularly given their “illegal” status in a country where Hindu majoritarian politics predominate. This invisibilization of the self through adopting strategies for clothing is an act of resistance provoked by the intersection of marriage and border regimes: the women avoided calling attention to themselves through their choice of clothes, understanding the subtleties and politics of clothing and negotiating with them in an embodied way. Such choices helped protect them from being criminalized for crossing the border without valid documents.

37The Bangladeshi women I met in prisons in India, who were either charged or on trial under the Foreigners Act 1946 for being in India without valid documents, were less concerned however about invisibilizing themselves in an institution that already made them invisible. For these women, prem (love) played a prominent role in their everyday life in prison (Mehta 2014b), becoming another form of resistance to the marriage-border carceral archipelago. Prem referred to a range of practices such as exchanges of looks, winks, body tattoos with names of the beloved/s, writing of love letters, friendships, and other romantic engagements that women had with men and women in the surveilled space of the prison. Moumita’s story below illustrates these alternative adaptive strategies.

38My discussion with Moumita took place in a prison in India where she was detained under the Foreigners Act 1946. Moumita’s brother, who was from Bangladesh, was married to an Indian woman. Moumita had come to India to visit them. A dalal on the Indian side, known to her sister-in-law, and a dalal known to her brother on the Bangladesh side facilitated her movement to India. During her visit, some neighbors identified her as a Bangladeshi in India without valid documents and informed the police who then arrested her. Moumita, like several other women that I met in the prison, had a prison love story to share (Mehta 2014b, 2018). While referring to an Indian man she met in prison, she said:

He asked me my name and then I asked him his name. We started talking. He asked me if I loved him. I told him that there was no point in falling in love in the prison because if he is released, he would forget about me and if I am released, I would find someone else and go ahead with my life. One cannot love like this. We were talking about such things, and I realized I fell in love with him. I am the mother of a son, and I fell in love again.

39Although the women were aware of the contingent and fragile nature of the relationships they formed, they entered into them because they generated moments of hope and excitement, an escape from the monotonous and highly regulated conditions of prison life.

40These intimate relationships can be understood as acts of resistance to layered forms of carcerality that extend beyond the prison to include marriage and national borders as institutions that confine, contain and constrain women’s lives. In my book Women, Mobility and Incarceration, I argue that:

[i]n the broad social milieu of India and Bangladesh, romance and love fantasies are suppressed if they do not serve the function of marriage or are imagined outside an existing or possible relationship of marriage. Non-procreative relationships between same-sex couples in India are dismissed as a social taboo, either criminalized or their existence silenced (Mehta 2018:123).

41Marriage as experienced by the Bangladeshi women in the two research studies functioned as a carceral formation, binding them to patriarchal authority, reproductive obligation, and affective labor through coercive norms. Through expressions of love within prison, the women disrupted the containment of their sexuality imposed by imprisonment, while simultaneously resisting the constraining and untenable marital arrangements they had left behind in Bangladesh. Paradoxically, imprisonment opened a liminal space in which they could momentarily escape the moral, domestic, and reproductive discipline of marriage and normative mothering roles or heteronormative relationships, allowing them to imagine intimacy and desire beyond gendered expectations. By engaging in romantic relationships with Indian men and women in prison, the women also unsettled the border regimes and ethno-religious nationalisms sustained through political and media discourses in both countries. Affect thus emerged as a form of everyday, embodied resistance, which fractures the carceral logics of marriage, borders, and prison, even while remaining confined, contained and constrained by them.

42For the Bangladeshi women in the two research studies, the spatial socialization and social memory (Ferdoush 2019) from their early childhoods were located in Bangladesh. This created a fraught sense of belonging, for, as adults, they had to adopt the citizenship, socio-religious norms, and sense of belonging of their marital family in India. Social memory, according to Ferdoush (2019:85) becomes “the bearer of traditions, identity, culture, and language . . . [I]t integrates the individual to the society and eventually creates a sense of belonging to a place or a region”. Ferdoush’s discussion of acts of belonging demonstrates how individuals make connections between micro-institutions such as the family and macro-institutions of the state through their everyday acts of belonging and citizenship. The sense of uprootedness, the experiences of carcerality and the fraught nature of belonging are entrenched in the context of cross-border marriages and undocumented migration, often exacerbated in an untenable marriage. Women are territorially confined within the borders of the state and unable to cross back without clandestinely transgressing the immigration law of the Indian state and/or negotiating with the border guards. Socially, they are constrained and contained by the gendered norms, national and religio-cultural status of their marital family. They make meaning of their everyday lives by moving in and out of zones of visibility, negotiating, resisting and/or enacting practices within the institutions of marriage and the borders which together impose carceral conditions.

43Women’s negotiations and resistance reinforce that borders and marriage are not “total institutions,” nor are they all-encompassing and never-ending carceral forces. Carcerality differs in terms of varying combinations of constraint, confinement and containment, ranging from the restricting effects of the border and gendered social norms, which can sometimes be overcome, to the total spatial confinement in the prison. The intersection of these three components creates the carceral continuum and (im)mobilizes women as they move from one carceral space/situation to another. Carcerality, therefore, cannot be viewed as contingent only on the moments when we can locate specific spatial coordinates. A more complete understanding of carcerality needs to be situated in women’s experiences of social and psychological (im)mobilities. The longing and the wait for the border to “open” indicate that there is a form of confinement which is not visible or spatially contained. Similarly, the coercive gendered norms that require women to follow the marital family’s religious views or their expectations around clothing may not be overtly carceral, but when viewed through the lens of the way they curtail women’s agency, the grids of containment and constraint become clear.

BY WAY OF CONCLUSION

44The criminalization of movement across the India-Bangladesh border and its increased securitization have changed kinship relations since the end of British colonial rule in 1947. Cross-border marriages function as a way for the kinship system to counter the border regimes. Bangladeshi women coming across the border into India, whether for a new marriage or to escape an existing marriage, are forging a new history of the relationship between India and Bangladesh, challenging existing norms and structures while also being constrained by them.

45As demonstrated by the narratives of the Bangladeshi women discussed here, the intersection between the marriage and border regimes creates various degrees and forms of carcerality. In some instances, marriage creates constraints that compel women to cross borders that give rise to new forms of carcerality. In other instances, cross-border marriage itself functions as a form of constraint and confinement. What emerges is a continuum of carcerality with moments of rupture. Bangladeshi women who “agree” to marry in India or who are coerced to do so negotiate with the border and feelings for their loved ones on the “other” side, all the while navigating their “illegal” status. They are often denied agency over their own bodies and do not enjoy complete rights within the Indian state, particularly if they do not possess valid documents. Disciplinary norms prevalent in India and within their marital families influence how they make themselves visible. Their everyday behaviors, the way they dress, and their religiosity are surveilled and scrutinized. Carcerality, in the lives of these women, is marked by waiting—waiting for citizenship, waiting for border guards to allow them to cross over, waiting to meet their loved ones across the border (see also Zhang et al. 2015).

46In this context, everyday forms of negotiation and resistance emerge to navigate and subvert the regimes of border control, sexual governance and the pervasive systems of oppression. A focus on resistance invites us to map the coordinates of carceral power as organized through the marriage and border archipelago. Resistance in the context of marriage and resistance within prison are distinct in terms of affect. Resistance within marriage carries the persistent threat of losing intimate familial and/or community relationships, whereas resistance within prison is shaped by different affective registers tied to estrangement, denied intimacy and national identity. The affective power exercised by both marriage and borders produces specific and overlapping forms of carcerality. Defining carcerality in terms of its embodied and affective effects allows us to apprehend it not merely as spatial confinement, but as a mode of governance that operates through emotional control. In this context, Moran et al.’s (2017:678) emphasis on intention, referring to the agent intending detriment through “calculative governance”, requires further nuance to account for the regulatory force of affect, which can be elusive. As shown in the accounts of the Bangladeshi women, while the overt intent of affect within marriage is framed as protection and the extension of kinship ties, its covert function lies in containment and constraint of women in the name of “honor,” stigma, and taboo, all ways to control women’s sexuality and behavior. I argue that bringing this affective dimension to the fore is essential for analyzing carcerality, particularly within South Asian contexts where marriage operates as a social institution that extends beyond the two wedded individuals.

47The Bangladeshi women I interviewed, however, are not passive victims: they subvert the social and sexual contracts underpinning the marriage-border carceral archipelago to create alternative pathways for themselves. This subversion is not straightforward but rather involves a continuous process of negotiation. Border regimes and the institution of marriage are, therefore, in a constant state of flux. Despite their seemingly enduring nature, they are continuously defined and redefined by everyday practices and negotiations of people who interact with them. A critical question nonetheless remains: to what extent do women’s subversive practices within these institutions create spaces of safety and security for them and facilitate their participation in society based on principles of equity and gender justice?