- 1 Bali may be spelled Bally in other accounts.
1In February 2017, rumor went round that in the village called Amlamethi on Bali1 Island, seven wives had run away in the same month. In the neighborhood where I was based, it was said that there were 15, not 7 wives. For a few weeks everyone talked about the wives that had managed to escape, whom they literally referred to as “wives who had run away” or bau paliyeche.
2Intrigued by these rumors, the incessant gossip and wives and young girls’ future plans for elopements set against a surge in men’s outmigration, the ingress of cellphones and what was described to me as the contemporary “era of love” (bhalobhashar jug), I took a keen interest in the “runaway” wives. Why and what exactly were these girls and women running away from, where would they go and what freedom, if any, did escape provide? An elderly woman, the mother-in-law of a friend in the neighborhood, claimed that in the past women usually endured a bad marriage by praying for death to come quickly. Running away wasn’t an option. “Where would we run away to?” she asked rhetorically. Commenting on the village gossip that had reached her ears, she said (albeit rather disapprovingly) that now audacious wives (paka bau) were running away instead of waiting for death.
3Further investigation showed that the runaway wives had abandoned their roles within the household or shonghshar, that is the roles and responsibilities within the domestic sphere which includes cooking, cleaning and taking care of their husband, in-laws, extended kin, and the homestead. Unmarried girls were running away from being forced into arranged marriages. At times, they ran away with a boyfriend or lover and at other times on their own, escaping the imminent, pre-decided plans of their arranged marriage. Women who weren’t married for a number of reasons—ranging from infertility to widowhood—, also expressed their distress at being outside the confines of marriage.
- 2 The Lokkhi bhandar is a West Bengal government social welfare scheme that provides financial assist (...)
4When inhabitants—both men and women—were asked the reasons for a possible “escape,” their responses often pointed to two specific changes in the broader political economy of the Sundarbans. The first of these changes was the overwhelming use of cell phones. In the previous decade, if a household had a cell phone, it was often the head of the household, the husband or father, who used it, but since 2015–2016, wives have their own cell phone. This is partly due to the increase in male migration. With their husbands away, even on a seasonal basis, wives needed a cell phone. Another reason for the increase in the use of cell phones among women was the way in which several West Bengal government schemes targeting women—such as Lokhi Bandhaarand Kanna Shree2—were made accessible through online banking. During the Covid-19 pandemic and in accordance with government policies, girls in high school were also given cell phones for online learning. There was also an increase in the number of households connected to cable television, with mothers and daughters watching a lot more soap operas than before. Most of these were centered around the themes of love, marriage and romance-related scandals.
5Even in what was referred to as the “era of love” (bhalobashar jug), amidst a wave of romances and transformations in women’s desires and aspirations, I noticed that women in the Sundarbans did not create spaces or cultivate attitudes that challenged the norms associated with the household (shonghshar). Instead, their own reflections revealed the major importance and vital relevance of household norms and responsibilities: to be a woman meant being provided for by a man, being married and producing sons. In this sense, marriage and the setting up of a household were shaped by old and new contestations, longings and rejections. As Janet Carsten (2025:3) argues, marriage is “a crucible of transformation—of personal, familial and wider political relations,” and this article reveals one set of transformations in what is both the most intimate and public of realms.
- 3 I was living on Bali to conduct fieldwork for a PhD in Social Anthropology supported and funded by (...)
- 4 From 2023–2024, thanks to the support of the AXA Postdoctoral Research Grant, I returned to Bali fo (...)
6For a period of two years, from 2016 to 2018, I lived on Bali Island located in the Gosaba district of the South 24 Parganas, one of the last inhabited islands before the start of the Sundarbans forests of West Bengal.3 Since 2018, I have visited Bali and its surrounding islands two or three times a year, sometimes for a few days and other times for several weeks at a time.4 Conversations, events and women’s experiences of marriage over nearly a decade—concerning friends and acquaintances getting married, being unable to get married or wanting to escape marriage—motivated me to query what we make of marriage as an institution, its confines and the (im)possibilities of escaping it?
- 5 In a case I know well, a young Poundra girl eloped with a Muslim boy, non-endogamous marriages bein (...)
7The possibility and impossibility of mobility within marriage in rural Bengal, as is the case in much of South Asia, is closely imbricated with conditions of material poverty as well as long-standing patriarchal institutions which include not just patrilocal norms related to marriage but also patrilineal norms that impact land inheritance. In this sense, the West Bengal coastline is no exception; and a vast body of scholarship has already addressed gender norms in North India (see for example Gold and Raheja 1994; Lamb 2000; Palriwala and Uberoi 2008; Still 2017). Despite the fact that rural Bengal is no exception vis-à-vis patriarchal norms, it is worth mentioning that Bali residents, as well as coastal residents of several neighboring Sundarbans islands, belong to some of the poorest sections of society. Most inhabitants made these islands their home because of massive political upheavals such as the Partition of India in 1947, as well as the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 or ecological disasters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Eaton 1996). Joya Chatterji estimates that a total of 3.9 million people from East Bengal, later renamed East Pakistan, arrived in modern-day West Bengal between 1946 and 1970 (Chatterji 2007: 111). The majority of Sundarbans residents on Bali belong to Scheduled Caste (SC) groups—such as the Namasudras, Pods, Rajbongshis and Jalia Kaibartas—and come from households made up of farmers, fishermen or daily wage laborers. On Bali island, there are also approximately 50 adivasi families belonging to the Munda, Santhal and Oraon Scheduled Tribe (ST) groups. In addition, there are about 260 Muslim households on the island. The protagonists of this article belong to the SC group of Poundras and Namasudras5.
- 6 This means “coming and going” in Bengali.
8Most male members of households did not work only as fishermen or crab collectors but cobbled together a livelihood through wage labor in the village as well as working in India’s informal economy as seasonal migrants. In most cases, while the men were away either in the jungle collecting crabs for anything up to two weeks, or working in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka or Maharashtra for anything from 6 to 18 months, the women of the household stayed in the villages to take care of children, in-laws, livestock and the land around the homestead. Often, in addition to the relentless labors of social reproduction—depending on the material wealth of the household—women would also work on the land to cultivate paddy and venture into the mangroves to collect crabs and fish (most often on a daily basis or jawa-asha6). Most young boys and girls on Bali Island attended middle school and high school. However, from 2020 onward—a period that coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic and with two successive super cyclones, Amphan and Yaas, that battered parts of the Sundarbans in May 2020 and 2021 respectively—I noticed a steady rate of children dropping out of school. Boys in Class 10—a crucial year in high school education in India— or in classes above stopped going to school, some to undertake daily wage labor or to accompany their fathers in out-migrating for work. The economic pressures on households during this period meant that girls who would otherwise have been enrolled in school were being married off. Marriage was sometimes a euphemism for girl trafficking. West Bengal is one of the states with the highest rates of woman and child trafficking, with literature highlighting the interconnection between trafficking and socio-economic precarity compounded by environmental precarity (see Balasubramaniam and Sathyanarayan 2025). The Sundarbans coastline is by no means the only area on the South Asian subcontinent where material poverty is exacerbated by financial distress as a result of hazards such as cyclones, storm surges and erosion. Yet for certain groups of lower-caste landless women, patriarchal, patrilocal and patrilineal norms compounded by financial precarity in both their natal and marital households have led to a state of immobility, or what might be considered in some cases as a state of carcerality.
9This article explores marriage as a carceral institution that traps women, restricts their freedom, and compels them to escape, even if only momentarily. In societies where a woman’s worth hinges on a man, being outside the confines of marriage does not necessarily induce a sense of freedom. Being unmarried or outside the institution of marriage comes with a social stigma, exclusion, and diminished social personhood, often producing alternative forms of constraint (see also Lamb 2022). In such contexts, marriage remains central not only as a site of restrictions but also as a key source of legitimacy and belonging (Borneman 1997, 2001), complicating any straightforward opposition between constraint and freedom.
10Unsurprisingly, longstanding anthropological literature on carcerality has focused on the prison complex, with penal institutions acting as the focal point of the carceral (see Rhodes 2001). More recent scholarship (Moran, Turner and Schliehe 2018) has explored the ways in which carceral relations surpass prisons and filter into a range of social contexts, forms of relatedness, and subjectivities. Moran et al. (2018:679) identify detriment, intention, and spatiality as key features of the carceral, not as an exhaustive framework but as a guiding set of considerations. For Moran et al. (2018), a set of (im)material techniques and technologies of control can cause detriment by precluding possibilities and freedoms. Building on this, scholars of South Asia have shown how carcerality is sustained not only through formal institutions but through diffuse forms of social regulation. Ibrahim (2021), for instance, demonstrates how policing extends to kinship networks and everyday relations, where women’s mobility, sexuality, and belonging are continuously monitored through family and community, producing a dispersed but pervasive form of surveillance. Similarly, Bandyopadhyay (2016) conceptualizes carceral cultures as extending beyond bounded institutions into everyday practices of discipline and normalization. As the papers in this Special Edition suggest, marriage in South Asia is one such institution embedded in broader regimes of social control. Social control surrounding marriage in South Asia is so deeply entrenched that existing outside marriage offers little freedom.
11In the context of South Asia, several scholars have also worked on women’s experiences in prisons. Rimple Mehta (2018), for example, explores how poor Bangladeshi women who cross the Indo-Bangladesh border find themselves incarcerated under the Foreigners Act of 1946, and traces the intersections of mobility, state control, and confinement. What resonates with Mehta’s work is not only the experience of carcerality but also the salience of moral values, such as maan-shomaan (honor), which regulate women’s conduct both within and beyond prison walls. Srimati Basu (2015) similarly reveals how marriage is shaped by law and governance, and how legal processes turn marriage into a site of conflict, deprivation, and exclusion. She shows how, every day, alternative dispute resolution strategies used to empower women often end up reinforcing oppressive norms that by no means alleviate women’s suffering whether individually or collectively. In South Asia, the regulatory force of marriage must also be understood in relation to broader socioeconomic conditions. As Shah (2006) demonstrates in her work on migration and the “labour of love,” intimate relations are deeply entangled in structures of economic precarity, where marriage and romance often function simultaneously as an affective aspiration and a strategy for survival. Kodoth (2008) is one of several other scholars who show how practices such as dowry and female seclusion can intensify women’s economic insecurity, reinforcing dependence and limiting autonomy. In this sense, marriage is aspired to and valorized, and yet at the same time it does not simply provide stability but has the potential to exacerbate vulnerability.
12Weaving this “carceral turn” into longstanding literature on marriage in South Asia (for example, Grover 2009; Maqsood 2021; Mody 2008; Palriwala and Uberoi 1996), this article shows that even during discussions about runaway wives, it is not possible to escape the gendered and social relations that structure marriage and the household or the duties associated with shongshar. Indeed, expanded imaginaries of romantic love do not necessarily translate into viable alternatives to marriage. As Chantler (2005) argues, rather than challenging existing patriarchal frameworks, love is often incorporated into them. Moreover, domestic violence—widely documented in national survey data such as the NFHS and IHDS—remains a normalized feature of many marriages, shaping women’s expectations and limiting their ability to leave (see also Basu 2015).
13Naseem Jivraj’s conceptualization of “carceral escapes” points to “the recurring nature of carceral experiences that repeat unabatingly, both structurally and interpersonally, across time and geographies.” (2025:125). “Carceral escapes” serves to prompts us to think of “the embeddedness of the carceral in the fabric of the escape, whereby the notion of a true escape is negated, and an escape from one context simply results in another manifestation of the carceral in the next.” In doing so, it “points to the dynamic of successive, longitudinal carcerality and the acute vulnerability experienced in these events, leading to uncertain outcomes” (Jivraj 2025:75). Within this broader context, marriage emerges as a social formation that combines necessity, desire, and constraint.
14In the Sundarbans, as in many other parts of South Asia and the world, marriage is the institution that defines and perpetuates norms governing the household. As established by decades of scholarship, the household is created and sustained through its gendered forms of social reproduction and waged labor. Marriage produces and reproduces a patriarchal kinship system in which descent, inheritance and succession are all traced through the male line, where residence after marriage is patrilocal, and authority is usually exercised by the family’s seniormost male member. Women’s roles are always defined in relation to a man and are identified either as a father’s daughter, a husbands’ wife or a son’s mother. Women in the Sundarbans are transacted as part of their father’s house (baaper bari) and are married off to their father-in-law’s house (sosur bari). This movement of women away from their natal home often leads to a lack of autonomy and narrow options in terms of where women might “run away” to in the event of marital breakdown, domestic abuse or widowhood. Despite legal provisions by the state, it is usually impossible for women to inherit property in their husband’s village. Marriage can be detrimental—at times physically and socially—to women who have no financial autonomy. Yet remaining unmarried and continuing to live at one’s parents’ home is also frowned upon. Marriage, despite its detriments, is a necessity and aspiration for any self-respecting household and woman.
15After the wedding ceremony, the main role and responsibility of the new bride in a well-functioning marriage encompasses all the tasks of reproducing the household: cooking, fetching water, washing clothes and dishes, sweeping the homestead, putting fresh mud and dung paste on the house walls, taking care of the children and the in-laws. While women are engaged in waged work—whether it be crab fishing, farm labor, or shopkeeping—a woman’s foremost responsibility is to undertake all the generative labor (Bear, Ho, Tsing and Yanagisako 2015), which sustains each member of the household, as well as to maintain the homestead.
16What is particularly important is the role newlywed women play in easing the burden of labor for their mother-in-law. New brides obediently take over the household chores. Young girls grow up learning how to do these chores, helping their own mothers, preparing themselves to be the object of a transaction with their in-laws in order to pursue the work of reproducing the latter’s household. In fact, this transaction instituted through marriage can be seen as a form of labor migration that abets social reproduction (see Palriwala and Uberoi 2005). It was clear during my fieldwork, according to an often repeated saying, that “the cycle of life revolves around marriage and family” (biyer upore jeeboner chakro chale, shonghshar-dharma toh shabh kichu, shonghshar toh jeeboner chakro). Marriage was indeed everything. It was the ultimate aspiration and the goal most parents wished for their daughters, and what daughters and young girls expected and desired for themselves in their late teens, if not earlier. Every woman wanted the path of shonghshar-dharmo which refers to the duty of man and woman to have conjugal relations, to bear children, preferably sons, and manage family life. In what follows, I reveal the ways in which this aspiration and goal are often thwarted; in those situations, there is both a desperate desire to escape, but also the impossibility of total escape.
- 7 All the names used are pseudonyms.
17Sarika was 19 years old when I met her in 2016. She had a two-year-old son and was pregnant with another child. She was married to Anirban when she was fifteen years old. Anirban was a deadbeat husband. He had no work and constantly beat his wife. It seemed to me that Anirban suffered from an undiagnosed mental illness. He was hard of hearing and had a speech impediment for which he was often mocked by villagers. The one person he could wield power over was the only person weaker than himself, his wife. During her second pregnancy, the beatings became unbearable. She called her father, asking him to take her away, but her father gave her false reassurances on the phone. He said that he would come to collect her closer to her delivery date or a few weeks after her child was born. He counseled her on the phone, telling her that she needed to be patient and adjust because, as he put it, “a little bit of hitting was normal within marriage.” Similar to the “emotional fixes” described by Gardner (2022), and the reconciliation-oriented interventions analyzed by Basu (2015), efforts to resolve marital discord often center not on transforming structurally unequal or abusive conditions, but on restoring affective equilibrium within the relationship.
18Sarika insisted that she would not be able to wait, that the beatings made her fear for the health of her unborn child. There was barely any food for her and her son. She was tired, distraught and decided that she could not take it anymore. She told Anirban that she was going to the hospital but never returned that evening and ran away to her parents’ home (baaper bari) despite her father’s dissuasion. Her natal village was a full day’s journey from Bali Island and required crossing two rivers and taking several means of public transportation: a bus, a three-wheel motorized van, and then walking for the last hour before arriving at her parent’s home. It was a journey she had never done on her own. When she recounted it to me, she said she was conscious of how others saw her. She said, “everyone was looking at me…everyone was wondering whose wife she might be.” Pregnant women rarely traveled unaccompanied.
19Sarika’s parents were not pleased to see her. During the weeks she spent at her parents’ home, rumor was— in the village on Bali Island she had left—that she had run away with a man she had been speaking to on a mobile phone. At the time, I had only heard the village rumors about her escape. It was much later, after she had returned to Bali that I realized exactly where she had “escaped” to. She spent a few weeks at her parents’ home where her youngest, unmarried sister still lived. Because she had run away, not only was she impugning her parents’ honor—they were afraid of what her in-laws would make of her decision—, but after the third week she was seen as an added burden on the household. Her father suffered the worry of attempting to provide for two more members of an already financially strained household. Her parents were preparing to find an appropriate groom for her younger sister, and it would not play in their favor if one of the married daughters had run away. Sarika was forced to return to Anirban. Her father chaperoned her on the journey back to her-in-laws’. In a long conversation I had with Sarika upon her return, she repeated the words that are often associated with women in South Asia: honor (maan-shomaan), respect (izzat) and shame (lajja).
20On this occasion, I met the father, a man who was visibly devastated that his daughter had been married to a man who was clearly incapable of providing for the household or respecting his daughter. He felt helpless. He told me that Sarika was one of five daughters. They had tried to have a son but had only had girls. He had little land and provided for the family by doing daily wage labor on the paddy fields of larger landowners. Keen to limit expenses, he decided to marry off Sarika at the same time as her older sister. The groom who had been chosen had failed to show up at the last minute, and the village matchmaker (ghatok) had suggested another potential groom: Anirban. The marriage arrangements had been made and there was little time to make thorough inquiries. The two sides agreed. Sarika’s father felt guilty, but there was nothing to be done.
21Four years later, Sarika ran away another time. This time it was not to her natal home but to work at a potato cold storage facility in the neighboring Hooghly district of Bengal. This time she took her two children with her. The contractor, noticing her vulnerability, decided to pay her half of what the other women received (which was already less than the daily wage that men received). She very soon realized that it would be impossible to both survive on those wages and to work a full day with her children playing with each other, unattended, on a floor covered in unwashed potatoes. A few months later, when she eventually returned to Bali Island, she was beaten. This time not just by Anirban but also his brother and father. Neighboring men were outraged at Sarika’s behavior. They blamed her for not being able to maintain a shongshar. There were several accusatory lies and rumors about where she had escaped to and with whom, which alluded to her supposedly loose sexuality.
22I would often ask the women in the neighborhood why they or other neighbors didn’t intervene to stop the domestic abuse or the lies they knew were false. The women in my neighborhood thought that it was eminently reasonable for Sarika to “abandon” or “escape” this marriage. Their response was, however, that “all our husbands hit us a little bit; how can we intervene in other people’s shongshar.” In Sarika’s case, the women were clearly sympathetic in private conversations, saying things such as “who marries their daughter off to such a monkey (bandor)?” or “if I were her, I’d run away too!” But when the men bad-mouthed Sarika about having affairs with other men and blamed her for her moral depravity, or physically beat her to teach her a lesson, the women maintained their silence, sometimes even nodding in support. As a woman called Lokhi explained to me, her own in-laws had social ties with Sarika’s in-laws and, despite the beatings which she felt bad about, she and other young and fairly new brides like herself were obliged to remain silent.
23For months following the second time Sarika ran away, and as a form of punishment, she was forced to provide for her children and herself. She was unable to take any paid work in the village because her in-laws refused to take care of her two toddlers while she worked. The Covid-19 pandemic intensified Sarika’s distress, exacerbating not only her food insecurity but also the domestic violence she endured, echoing the situation of many other women in different parts of the world. In 2022, upon seeing me, she burst into tears, and the first sentence she uttered was “the hitting had gotten very bad.” She had bruises on her neck, back and forehead. She wore a torn sari and blouse. Her two children didn’t seem to have grown very much. She looked anemic and exhausted, and her children seemed visibly malnourished. What I found most striking about this situation was that Sarika and Anirban’s homestead was one of the nearest houses to the sprawling joint compound of the Goran Eco-Resort and the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI) office, which was perhaps in one of the neighborhoods most visited by nongovernment organization workers, government officials, national and international conservationists, and tourists. There was little awareness of and concern for Sarika’s distress; moreover, the structures and strictures of marriage where perhaps such that a solution to Sarika’s plight was far from clear.
24More recently, in January 2024, she was having “physical relations” with other men in the village as a means of providing for her household. Resigned to this, she said,
- 8 Swallowing pesticides or fertilizers is a common way of committing suicide in South Asia and the fo (...)
- 9 Translated from Bengali. Unless otherwise specified, the exchanges with respondents were originally (...)
this is what is written in my fate (kopal, or forehead), there is nothing I can do. I have no place of my own in this world. My own father won’t let me stay at home. He is getting old and there are debts to pay back, and he can’t support all three of us…my in-laws don’t help, they are just glad that their son isn’t their problem anymore. Even if I were to run away, where would I go with my two children? I tried… but it is impossible, other women run away leaving their children behind, but they know someone will take care of them, but I married into a family where no one cares even if they [referring to her children] haven’t eaten all day. Someday I feel I should just eat fertilizer8 and never wake up again.9
25Sarika had attempted to run away but there was no escape from the confines of marriage, some of these confines being affective and emotional as well as physical. Gardner’s (2022) “emotional fixes” describe a form of intervention—often enacted by marriage counselors, NGOs, or community mediators—where marital breakdown is framed as a problem of emotional misalignment, poor communication, or individual disposition, rather than as a consequence of entrenched gendered inequalities or material precarity. In keeping with Gardner’s findings concerning marriage counselors in Bangladesh, even though Sarika’s father and women neighbors tried to provide “emotional fixes” for Sarika, their efforts ultimately served to depoliticize her situation. According to Gardner (2022:301), “…emotional fixes are a form of antipolitics in that they make the political disappear while remaining profoundly political”. In such frameworks, women are frequently encouraged to cultivate patience, endurance, and emotional adjustment, effectively “fixing” themselves in order to sustain the marriage. These processes, as Basu (2015) also shows in legal and quasi-legal mediation contexts, tend to depoliticize marital conflict by relocating it from the domain of structural critique to that of personal responsibility and emotional management. Thus, even in situations like Sarika’s, marked by violence or profound dissatisfaction, the emphasis is still on reconciliation and the preservation of marriage as a social ideal. Within this logic, the continuation of marriage is prioritized over women’s autonomy or well-being, reinforcing the sense that remaining within even deeply unequal or harmful marital arrangements is both necessary and inevitable.
26The constraints of marriage must also be understood in relation to the normalization of violence within intimate relationships. Large-scale data, including the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) and the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), have consistently shown that domestic violence is widespread and often socially legitimized within Indian marriages. A significant proportion of women report not only experiencing violence but also, in some cases, accepting its justification under certain conditions. This normalization—both within households, neighborhoods and in society at large—shapes expectations of marital life and restricts the possibility of finding a solution to this problem.
27Rumpa is a 25-year-old who has a 9-year-old daughter. I first met her when she was 17 years old. She was married very young, aged 15, and her in-laws at the time of her marriage promised that they would let her continue her schooling, though they didn’t. A year later she fell pregnant. She confided in me how her husband—and this she said was the case with many of the boys in the village—didn’t like wearing a condom (nirodh) and refused to use one. If she insisted, there would be a fight. She was young and didn’t know better. She became pregnant right after their wedding. A few years into her marriage, she wanted to leave her husband. She was not in love with him. She didn’t feel a physical connection with him and everyday life, she said, was a form of daily torture. “He forces himself on me,” she would say. Several times she has left her in-laws and returned to her natal home. However, each time, her father has sent her back. In 2022 she ran away with her daughter Jyoti. Her husband, in-laws and her parents didn’t know of her whereabouts. She was gone for a few months. She worked as a maid in Kolkata, was employed for a month as a cleaner at a shop selling utensils, and did whatever other odd jobs she could find in exchange for food and shelter. She eventually returned home. After Rumpa’s return from Kolkata, her father agreed to initiate divorce proceedings. Her husband, however, refused to provide any maintenance allowance and expenditure for their daughter. She wanted to find work but there was none in the village and it was hard to leave her daughter or to take her with her to her workplace. Rumpa felt stuck, very much like Sarika. She echoed the same sentiment, “I have no place of my own, there is nowhere for me to go. I just wish I could earn on my own.”
28When I revisited Bali in 2024, a year had passed since her initial escape. Upon meeting her, I gathered that she had also found another man who was willing to marry her despite her having a daughter, but he too, she revealed, forced himself on her and abused her physically, just like the husband she had escaped. Rumpa is divorced and lives with her daughter and parents on Bali island.
29In the case of 22-year-old Kajal, also recently divorced, there were further embarrassments because she had insisted on marrying Bipul, a boy from school with whom she was in love. In the Sundarbans, as in most of South Asia, marriages arranged through parents or relatives, so-called “arranged marriages” (dekha shona) or marriages arranged through a village matchmaker, are the norm. The couple who is to wed rarely has any authority to veto the decision. The most obvious symptom of the “era of love” (bhalobhashar jug) on Bali island is that love marriages, as opposed to arranged marriages, are a growing and seemingly unstoppable trend. For the young, love marriages are both a fashion and internalized as a fundamental part of being an individual, a form of their self-expression and an exertion of young men and women’s free will (see also Grover 2009; Mody 2008).
30While, in a sense, love marriages express the individuality of the women and their choice, for many girls it was much more embarrassing to admit marital breakdown after a “love marriage.”
Kajal is one such case. For years her parents opposed her choice of husband and did not want her to marry Bipul. He was from a crab-collecting household and lived on the riverside. Kajal’s parents’ aspiration was to have her marry a schoolteacher, shopkeeper or someone with a decent job. Kajal and Bipul were banned from meeting each other but they talked on the telephone for a few months and, when she turned 18, they eloped on Saraswati pujo—Saraswati being the goddess of education—, a school holiday and a day infamous for elopements. The two went “toward Kolkata” (Kolkata dikey). A year later, pregnant, Kajal returned to the village to convince her father to accept their union. He agreed but, as soon she was married and back in the neighboring village, in the home of her in-laws, she was mistreated by her mother-in-law and her husband. When she became pregnant, her husband lost interest in her and fell in love with another girl. Soon afterwards, Bipul left for the Andaman Islands to work on a construction site. A year into the marriage, and miserable and alone, Kajal wanted to leave her husband. On one of my follow-up trips to Bali in 2023, she shared how distressed she felt because it had been her decision to marry Bipul against intense resistance from her parents. She had fought against all odds to marry a man whom she thought she loved but barely knew, and who now spent 11 months of the year away from the village in different parts of the country working as a construction worker. Nobody had accepted their union but now no one wanted to support her in seeking divorce. On my last visit, she was back at her natal home but at the cost of witnessing a daily dose of anger from her father and mother. Her father had taken out a loan for the wedding, which he had not managed to pay back. Kajal, like Rumpa, was desperate to find a job so that she was not a burden to her family. The only alternative was to be married off again, but this was complicated because she already had a small child from Bipul.
31Carcerality, the feeling of “being stuck” and women’s immobility in each of the aforementioned cases are related to women’s financial precarity. Despite West Bengal’s welfare schemes that provide small though vital cash transfers to women’s bank accounts, the majority of girls and women are entirely dependent financially on their husbands, fathers or in-laws. In their natal home, they depend on their fathers, and getting them married is their father’s last ritual act of handing them over to their husband and in-laws. Once married, they are the property of their in-laws. Patriarchal systems of kinship, inheritance and landownership mean that women do not have the financial or economic freedom their male counterparts enjoy. Marriage in rural Bengal, as in most of South Asia, is considered a key event—it is loaded with meaning, it is both financially and socially significant and it is this event that creates and sustains the cycle of life. It is precisely the weight of marriage and the incessant chatter around it from the time that girls reach puberty that makes it an institution that is both aspired to and socially difficult to escape, and also one that creates the conditions of spatial constraint. As in the case of Sarika, Kajal, and Rumpa, women are not welcome either in their own natal home or that of their in-laws’. In this sense, a combination of patriarchal norms and economic precarity makes marriage carceral. Escaping it equates with impugning the honor of one’s father, the entire household, relatives and the community at large. As Farhana Ibrahim (2021) reveals, policing exceeds the domain of the state and is embedded in kinship networks, neighborhood relations and everyday interactions. “Escaping wives” carry shame (lajja) with them. They often feel guilty about the fact that their actions also caused shame to their parents, especially the men in their family. In the case of Sarika, Rumpa and Kajal, getting pregnant and being mothers to young children restricted their possibilities of leaving violent domestic arrangements or their ability to do paid work. Pregnancy and young children also become part of a carceral cycle which takes away their bodily and financial freedom and creates attachments and obligations of care that force women to de-prioritize their well-being over that of their children.
32The combination of no financial independence, unsympathetic parents and in-laws, and young children—the latter being regarded as the mother’s entire responsibility—, creates conditions of immobility. For women such as Sarika, Rumpa and Kajal, there are few ways of escape. Yet the spectrum of defiance—temporary escape, attempts to leave, demands for divorce and alimony—vis-à-vis marriage, husbands, in-laws and parents has created subtle yet significant changes in the household dynamics. These stories resonate with the findings of Camelia Dewan (2025) from across the border in Bangladesh who conceptualizes kinship as an “affective assemblage” where women’s attempts to leave a marriage do not necessarily result in stable forms of belonging but instead involve movement across shifting precarious relational worlds. Carcerality is not confined to a single institution; given that marriage relations extend across kin networks, neighborhoods, villages, and workplaces, the restrictions they impose also extend well beyond the household.
33Women and men have very different opinions of runaway wives. Men often launch into long monologues about the hardship they suffer to provide for their families. Men feel that these runaway wives have “no shame left” (lajja nei) and are “too ripe” (paka), a phrase that carries derogatory connotations, and implies that they have become too bold for their own good. Alongside this, men’s main concerns pertain to who’s going to cook, clean, and look after the kids and the in-laws now that their wives have “escaped.” It is a matter of grave public ignominy for both individuals and the household, if a married man had to “cook his own rice” (nije bhaat ranna kore kachchhe).
34Women, on the other hand, depending on whether it was a private gathering or a semi-public one, had ambivalent views. After initially commenting on how terrible and shameless it was to abandon one’s household and family, the women in my neighborhood judged the runaways on their individual merit and, under specific circumstances, felt strong sympathy for others who abandon their shonghshar. Though women kept silent in semi-public spaces, privately they believed that the “runaway” wife’s motivation was not to escape to a lover but rather to escape from an unkind husband or in-laws. Often the women in my neighborhood did not know these runaway wives personally but their opinions often expressed something of their own personal marital distress. Women’s sympathy was couched in terms criticizing the husband’s ability to uphold the norms of the household or shonghshar. These women did not necessarily question the norm but reflected on who was to blame—husband or wife—for disrupting it. These conversations often struck me as a form of communal catharsis for the women, one in which they vented their anger, projected their worries, shared their own insecurities and anxieties by recounting stories and anecdotes from the lives of their neighbors, relatives and sometimes what seemed to be phantom women from other islands.
35Conversations and stories were generally about husbands who beat their wives, who drank too much, who didn’t earn enough or men who disrespected their wives. For example, Anita di, a very hard-working middle-aged mother of two sons and a daughter, said to me in defense of one of the “runway” wives whom she didn’t know well at all: “But what do you expect…I hear her husband was a bekar (unemployed, wasting away).” She herself was married to a man who seldom worked. Or, in the words of another married neighbor Pushpa di, “I hear she lives close to Kolkata and is now earning enough money to send her daughter to private school.” Pushpa di had three daughters herself and often openly expressed her anxieties about her children’s education. Her aspiration for her oldest, a girl, was for her to go to school in Kolkata too. Her husband fished for crabs and neither he nor she knew how to read or write. For her, the idea—whether rumor or reality, I don’t know—that one of the runaway wives had managed to put her child in private school was a source of accomplishment. Their comments show, if not outright approval, at least empathy with the logic of running away under certain circumstances.
36Marriage has a carceral dimension, just as being unmarried, divorced or widowed does. With no independent source of income and with fathers who view unmarried or divorced daughters as a burden, women who leave a bad marriage can find themselves in a situation of unfreedom, especially when there are young children. Remaining entirely outside the institution of marriage, that is never marrying, is not a solution either. In a context where the worth of a woman hinges on being married, being unmarried carries not only a deep social stigma but also social, material, physical and ritual exclusions.
37It was late at night, past 2 am, Piyali’s three sisters, her two nieces, and our neighbors, Bimla and Lolita, had just left. It had been a long day of chopping vegetables, cooking, cleaning and decorating. A green felt carpet with a cloth tent over it had been set up in an area that otherwise served as a vegetable garden. Hired loudspeakers hooked up to a kerosene-powered generator had been playing music all day. Now, with most of the arrangements in place, everyone had left. It was just the two of us. I had been living as a member of Piyali di’s household for the past 16 months. We were sitting on the veranda of our homestead, taking a break from the cleaning, when she started crying inconsolably. At first, she didn’t say a word. She just sobbed. Violent, wet, heaving sobs. The full moon shone on her wet face. When she started speaking in between sobs, she said, “I have no one in this world. No mother, no father, no son, no brother. No husband. I’ll never have grandchildren. I’m alone. I have no one in this world, no one who is mine.” Her sobs getting louder, she kept repeating, “I’m alone in this world.”
- 10 Another name for Lord Krishna is Hari. Bhakti music or devotional singing, and Vaishnavism—a Hindu (...)
38It was the night before Piyali’s homestead was about to host a Hari pujo, for which the entire neighborhood would gather to hear all-night devotional songs in praise of Lord Krishna and his consort Radha.10 Over 300 men, women and children would assemble for 24 hours, singing, dancing and joining in a meal of rice and vegetables (khichuri). The Hari shrine, a small nondescript mud hut, was beautifully adorned with garlands of flowers and leaves. It had been 15 years since Piyali’s parents had died and she was missing them terribly on the eve of the pujo. Among other grievances, she shared what it meant to be unmarried in the context of her neighborhood and village. She said,
What do I tell you about those days, there was nothing to eat, we would go to sleep hungry…they [referring to her parents] did their duties, they got all my sisters married…but because of my operation no one would marry me… it was the biggest curse for my parents to have no son… I used to think I will live in a brick home, I will have sons, I’ll send my sons to school, that they will get government jobs. This pujo is so important to pass on. But none of this was in my destiny (kopal)… isn’t it true that the cycle of life revolves around marriage…but no one would marry me without being able to bear children and now no one will be there to take care of me when I am old. Who will do this pujo when I am no more? Who will take care of this homestead? This pujo has been taking place for generations.
With sadness, she said, “isn’t it true that the cycle of life revolves around marriage?… Even this pujo, to do it alone is not right, to do it as an unmarried woman, it doesn’t feel good.”
39Piyali was in her early 30s and unmarried because she was unable to conceive children. For the past 15 years she had lived with Jatin da, an older man in his late 50s, who had been married with two grown children. There was a third member of their household: Mridul, the son of Piyali’s sister, Sunita, and her husband, Ashok da. I was initially struck by the apparent acceptance of Piyali and Jatin da’s live-in relationship, and its non-conformity with shonghshar.
- 11 Piyali would simply say “I had to have an ‘operation that cut my stomach’” (pet kata). Many years l (...)
40Over time I realized that Piyali suffered terribly from her inability to fulfil the expectations and responsibilities of a woman and shongshar. She was one of five sisters. Massive costs had been incurred for her three sisters’ weddings, and the family lived a life of anguish, poverty and constant indebtedness. Piyali had been forced to drop out of school after Class four. In addition, she had had a sickly disposition throughout her childhood. On one particular occasion when she was in her late teens, she fell ill and, following the recommendation of others in the village, she underwent an “operation” at the village nursing home, which left her infertile.11 As news of her infertility spread throughout the village and surrounding villages, it became clear that no one would marry her. This was a huge blow to her parents and shattered not only her own hopes but her prospects for a secure life.
41Jatin da was originally from a neighboring island where he was the owner of a successful khoti or fish landing center. He had invested in a group of five boats which were attacked by pirates (dakaat) that had crossed over the border from Bangladesh. He was financially ruined. He couldn’t pay back his debts. A few months later his wife abandoned him, taking their younger son and leaving the older son with a relative on the outskirts of Kolkata. Totally bankrupt, and with the ignominy of his wife leaving him, he decided to join a relative on Bali Island and to start afresh. As luck would have it, this happened to be in Piyali’s neighborhood.
- 12 The words “stays close” or kache thaake were always said slightly disparagingly for they imply, as (...)
42Seventeen-year-old Piyali decided to start collecting crabs on a boat with Jatin da. About 15 years ago, when Piyali’s parents died, Jatin da moved into her house. In a patriarchal village that follows a patrilocal marriage rule, this was unique. Moreover, though romantically involved, the two never got married. During my time in the field, some ten years since they had been cohabiting, people still criticized this subversive living arrangement, saying “Don’t you think it’s wrong for an unmarried woman to live with an older married man like that?” However, on being questioned further, even those who had initially criticized them were rather sympathetic toward their relationship. Later, during the same conversation they would equivocate, “but she was unwell (ashushtho), no brothers even, no one would ever marry her, how would the household run (shonghshar ki kore cholbe). It’s good that he ‘stays close’ (kachhe thaake).”12 The two were both well respected, dearly loved and at times fiercely criticized, like anybody else in the village. Though contrary to the rules of a normative shonghshar-dharmo, this “modern family” seemed like an acceptable solution, given the circumstances. While this was my optimistic impression over long periods of fieldwork, a conversation on the eve of the Hari pujo changed my understanding of how Piyali felt about her situation.
43On the night of the Hari pujo, I realized her distress at being unmarried. She cried quietly for a while. Now very late into the night, still weeping softly, she brought up another topic that had always been difficult for her to broach. This was her awareness of the way people talked behind her back and passed snide comments about her relationship with Jatin da. Being an unmarried woman (dhari meye) was a swear word in village slang, one of the most derogatory slurs. In our more mirthful moments, Piyali would direct this swearword at me—as someone who was as old as her and unmarried, as I was at the time, and everyone present would burst into laughter. Now she recalled earlier years when her life embodied an insult. She had been sworn at openly and was the butt of village rumors and gossip. From her telling these stories, it was clear just how hurtful merely recollecting these memories was for her. These were injuries lodged deeply in both her body and psyche; they were not only related to how others perceived her, but also to how she perceived herself.
44I consoled Piyali, reminding her that she had Jatin da, that her sisters lived close by and that she had brought up her nephew Mridul, Sunita’s son, as if he were her own. She retorted that none of this counted. Her sisters had their separate shonghshar with their own household worries, with in-laws, children and relatives. She worried about her homestead and the future of the Hari pujo when she would no longer be there. She repeated again that if the biggest curse for her parents was to fail to have had a son, her biggest curse had been to fail to bear children. While the norms associated with shonghshar had made way for another form of companionship, Piyali still felt an inalienable sense of loneliness as an unmarried and infertile woman, unable to fulfil the scripted roles of men and women in the village. For her, the ultimate aspiration in life was to have a child, preferably a son, who would take care of her in her old age as well as her homestead, and continue this pujo alongside other household traditions. It was only family, one’s own husband and one’s own children, and people of one’s own blood (nijer rakto) who could reproduce the future. Without the usual logic of leaving a legacy through an heir (santan), there was no point in marrying or establishing a household (shonghshar kora). This terrified Piyali. While she and Jatin da cared deeply for each other on a daily basis, theirs was an unscripted relationship and their future commitments to each other were unclear.
45In 2021, youth groups affiliated with the Bhartiya Janata Party in the village had begun putting pressure on Piyali and Jatin to get married. Mirroring a pan-North Indian phenomenon, young Hindu men in the Sundarbans began to promote a particular moralizing code where any relationships based on companionship or alternative living configurations in the Sundarbans defied Hindu “culture.” If the two wanted to live together, they were to get married. What the village wanted, it seemed, was for Piyali and Jatin da to throw a wedding feast of goat meat for over 200 people. Due to this pressure, Piyali wears markers of a married woman, red vermillion and conch-shell bangles (sindoor and shakka). Every few months, local politicians come to their door and pressure them into throwing a wedding feast. Piyali has tried to explain that there are no funds for this because all their savings have been spent on medical treatment because Jatin da had been diagnosed with cancer. They had spent more than two years seeking different treatments for his condition.
46Over the years I noticed that Piyali’s situation was not uncommon. There was indeed a pervasive and deeply normalized social stigma toward women who were unmarried. These were either women who had undergone marital breakdown, had abandoned their husbands or had been widowed at a young age, most often due to tiger attacks. Deepali is another middle-aged woman who left an abusive and alcoholic husband, and for over 20 years has been living on her own in a little one-room home on a no-man’s-land. Her own daughter was married to a man who beat her, and when she left her husband to come to live with her mother, her mother sent her back for fear of her ruining her own reputation and, much like the case of Sarika, forced her to return to her violent husband. A few months later Deepali’s daughter committed suicide by swallowing pesticide. Deepali, a woman without a husband and with a daughter who killed herself, is seen as a social pariah. She says, “for years I have not been invited to any social events in the village. People think I will bring ill luck …after all, there has been such bad luck in my life that I understand why people avoid me.” Deepali’s life has been marked not only by severe financial hardship—having been deserted by both her in-laws and her own parents—but also by daily social stigmas that are exacerbated due to her daughter’s tragic death.
- 13 Every year there are 7–15 human deaths due to tiger attacks in the Sundarbans forests. Many of thes (...)
47A large group of women in the Sundarbans, who are consistently considered inauspicious, are young widows whose husbands have been attacked and killed by tigers13 (see Mehtta 2023). They are not invited to weddings or religious celebrations and if they are, they are expected to stand at a distance, away from the ceremony and festivities. Sarah Lamb’s (2022) work on single women in India illustrates how those who remain unmarried, divorced, or widowed often face stigma, exclusion, and low social status. While widows across South Asia face this type of social stigma, what distinguishes them from women who lose their husbands in old age is that the majority of women whose husbands have been attacked by a tiger are in their prime, often with young children to care for on their own and with no source of independent income. Like Piyali, some of these “single” women have entered into various types of arrangement with their companions. However, many of these setups are closely monitored by the village community and depend entirely on their approval by the local male elite and politicians. Being single does not necessarily guarantee freedom from patriarchal norms; it may generate new forms of precarity and marginality.
48In August 2024, Piyali called to say that Jatin da had died. He had been ill for two years, and after several visits to doctors, including a trip to Pondicherry and Vellore, and to a temple in North Bengal where they had hoped he would be cured of his cancer, he had finally succumbed to it. Both sad and angry, Piyali was crying on the phone. Between the sobs, she said “they won’t let me do the last rites” (shraddo kaaj), they won’t let me but there is no one else…you think his sons will come.” As Hindus, the last rites have to be performed by the son, or otherwise another man—a brother, a nephew or uncle. They are not performed by women and certainly not by an unmarried partner. Due to pressure from local politicians in the village, Piyali had begun to wear the customary bangles worn by a married woman in the last few months of Jatin da’s illness, even though they were not officially married, because they had lived together. This liminal state was a source of embarrassment even in times of grief and loss. The same local politicians were reluctant, even in death, to allow her to act as a rightful, lawful wife who had the authority to conduct all the rituals for her partner’s funeral. Jatin da had been very ill for several months. Once he had passed away, her sadness and distress were not only due to the loss but also to not being ritually conjoined with him and being denied the right to perform the funeral ritual.
49Although there were many heated arguments, a few days later at a village conflict resolution meeting, known as a bichar, the decision was taken—by an all-men committee—to allow her to perform Jatin da’s last rites. Even if the two had not been officially married, Piyali was his next of kin. His two sons were estranged from him, and it was ultimately Piyali who was his de facto wife. This was a victory for her and provided her immense solace, even though it meant that she would have to bear huge financial costs. She would have to feed 200 people. It was these ritual roles and their importance that marriage conferred on two people which she was deprived of.
50I arrived in time to attend the last rites. A priest was reading mantros, surrounded by a set of ritual accoutrements. Sixty-four paan leaves and betel nuts were all laid out on banana leaves. Piyali and Jatins da’s names were repeated by the priest several times. There was group of bhakti musicians singing songs in praise of Lord Krishna or Hari (naam gaan dol) accompanied by a harmonium, mridangam and manjeeras or cymbals. The priest read out from the Bhagavad Gita. The neighbors and family members present were fed and the shraddo kaaj ended with one of Piyali’s brothers-in-law accompanying her to the riverside as she submerged an earthen pot full of Jatin da’s ashes in the waters of the Ganges. She then entered the water to perform a few circumambulations of the place where the earthen pot had been immersed, and returned to a group of us waiting at the edge. In the afternoon, over lunch, while her sisters consoled her, Piyali shared how satisfied she was to have performed this ritual labor. As someone who had not officially been Jatin da’s wife, even this had been a struggle and a fight. Understanding the way women navigate these contestations requires us to rethink agency beyond resistance. Saba Mahmood’s (2005) influential critique of liberal feminist frameworks argues that agency should not be equated solely with opposition to norms. Instead, individuals may exercise agency by inhabiting, negotiating, and reworking normative structures. This perspective is particularly useful for understanding cases in which women appear to uphold or participate in the very institutions that constrain them. Even though Piyali was oppressed by the fact that she had never been considered a respectable married woman, she negotiated her way through the possibilities and impossibilities of marriage. In her case, the desire was not to escape marriage but to embrace its obligations even though it created its own conditions of constraint. Women do not always seek to exist outside marriage and shongshar; instead, they negotiate, endure, and at times remake these institutions from within. Such an approach shifts the analytical focus from escape alone to the complex ways in which carceral relations are lived, reproduced, and transformed in everyday life.
51This article explores the motivations of women and young girls to escape a whole host of restrictions in order to follow a range of material, emotional and social desires. These desires are often shaped by wider shifts in the political economy and permeate some of the most intimate, and yet political, aspects of women’s lives. Abandoning one’s shonghshar has become an increasingly viable possibility for some women and girls due to recent economic and technological changes. While it was not something that women condoned in public, and especially not in front of other husbands, they had an acute and very pragmatic sense of its justification under certain circumstances. “Running away” was an attempt to protest against the confines imposed upon women within marriage. This was akin to what Holly Wardlow (2006) refers to as an act of “negative agency,” that is, acts that disrupt women’s role in social reproduction. In the case of rural Bengal, such acts of defiance remain embedded in gendered structures rather than existing fully outside them.
52If marriage represents an aspiration, for some women it is also a condition from which they seek escape. I did not personally know the runaway wives from Amlamethi, but over the course of my fieldwork and repeated trips to the same villages for nearly a decade, I came to know several wives who had run away. For the women I had the opportunity of speaking with, it was clear that their escape was at best partial, reflecting what has been described as the recursive nature of “carceral escapes” (Jivraj 2025). We also see how movement or escape, as Dewan (2025) notes, does not undo constraint but reorganizes it across different sites of labor, intimacy and kinship. In following women who had attempted to run way and had then returned, I noted that there was little if no escape. Employers pay women poorly, especially those who have toddlers and are therefore visibly vulnerable. Among their natal kin and at the home of their in-laws, women are conceived of as a burden, a commodity that is a liability—“an extra mouth to feed”—or an inefficient householder, reflecting broader kinship and economic logics in South Asia (Borneman 1997; Kodoth 2008). For most women, there was no genuine escape because of their having no financial independence.
53Many of the “runaway wives” were forced to return, though some ran away again, and others are back in the very situations they had attempted to escape. The opportunities for wives who attempt to run away are bleak, ranging from very precarious working conditions on construction sites or factory shop floors to undertaking sex work, to remarrying into situations that are exactly the same as their first marriage, which they had attempted to flee. This underscores how movement does not necessarily overrule constraint but often reconfigures it. However, the importance of marriage and establishing shongshar not only shows that women cannot run away from marriage but that remaining unmarried carries profound stigma in contexts where the worth of a woman depends on being married, a point echoed in studies about single women’s marginality and exclusion in India (Lamb 2022).
54Piyali felt an inalienable sense of loneliness as an unmarried and infertile woman, unable to fulfil the scripted role of married householders in the village. We see how society’s accommodations do not prevent unmarried women, such as Piyali, from experiencing a sense of painful alienation in a village setting where a woman’s worth is measured by her having a husband and sons. Women who are unmarried, divorced or widowed, and those unable to bear children are social pariahs, occupying positions of diminished social personhood. While Piyali creatively negotiates other ways of finding companionship and care, she ultimately chases after shonghshar-dharmo. In her case, akin to what Mahmood (2005) reveals among women in Cairo, a sense of freedom is found by inhabiting rather than rejecting normative frameworks. This article has ultimately shown that the carcerality of marriage extends beyond being married, but its burden operates as a diffuse set of social relations sustained through patriarchal kinship, community surveillance, financial precarity and normative expectations. Marriage is an institution that women want to enter, aspire to and at the same time run away from, reject and escape. It can be carceral for those within, while also stigmatizing those who remain outside it.
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