This article explores how marriage and the India-Bangladesh border function as carceral institutions, where familial, social and state structures intersect to restrict and regulate Bangladeshi women’s agency, mobility and autonomy. It begins by enunciating the institutions of marriage and borders in the South Asian context, followed by a conceptualization of the marriage-border carceral archipelago. I then analyze how Bangladeshi women’s mobilities across the India-Bangladesh border—either to get married or because of an untenable marriage—are caught in the web of immigration policies, labor market demands, citizenship laws, family and kinship norms and affective ties. The final section explores women’s accounts of resistance and their negotiations with the marriage-border carceral archipelago as they move across borders. These accounts reveal how women navigate and subvert the entanglements of identity, labor and sexuality that play out on their gendered and sexualized bodies.
Based on the cases of young women held in a “Safe House” in Dhaka, this paper argues that the label “marriage victim” is used discursively to discipline young women who have eloped against parental wishes. Whilst the Bangladeshi 2017 Child Marriage Restraint Act is used to accuse husbands of kidnap and rape, daughters who refuse to return home or divorce are incarcerated as “victims” of under-age marriage, their ages often falsified. Drawing on Hacking’s concept of “making up,” the paper argues that within the assemblage of NGOs, shelters and support centers providing services for women and children in Dhaka, different types of victim are “made-up” via bureaucratic systems and procedures. As the paper shows, the term “victim” allows out-of-place women and children to be sorted and placed in different institutions. Whilst victims of domestic violence are offered shelter, unruly young women who have eloped for love are classified as “marriage victims” and held in carceral institutions, where what Ticktin calls “armed love” generates containment and discipline.
This article relates the institution of marriage and the locality to the gendered implications of state-led politics of urban restructuring and their classed effects. It draws on Hage’s concept of “stuckedness” here created through urban resettlement and the institution of marriage, both enforced by the state’s informalization of rights in residences in marginal neighborhoods. The article discusses confinement in relation to feelings of being “stuck” in homes legally defined through marriage and in neighborhoods, each experienced as extensions of each other. Against the backdrop of “protracted displacement” into legal and spatio-political “gray zones,” the article shows how women are doubly entrapped: in marriage through patriarchal values and by urban restructuring in neighborhoods that are sites of extended collective patriarchal control and state-enforced temporalities of mobility/immobility. Given the legal insecurity of resettlement housing the carceral quality of the home is enhanced by entrapment in marriage, which extends into the street/neighborhood and the slow violence of threatened eviction. Women’s “stuckedness” is crucially entangled in the politics of resettlement and the paperwork that made flats available to families but only registered men as rightful owners of flats. The article argues that urban governance, including resettlement and bureaucratic erasure which create gray zones of informality, throws women back into marriage and “waithood” through gendered legal, spatial and political regimes marked by informality of differing degrees and scales.
Taking the home as the spatial epicenter where state and intimate forms of violence converge, this paper examines how urban planning and social housing policies in Sri Lanka have shaped carceral experiences within kinship and marriage for low-income working-class women living in Colombo. By mapping the historical continuities between mechanisms of constraint built into the architecture and urban planning of colonial and post-independence Colombo and the forced evictions authorized under the post-war Urban Regeneration Program from 2010 onward, I uncover how state power, exercised through urban planning, produced the “carceral geographies” of working-class neighborhoods. Drawing on ethnographic life histories, I show that urban planning not only spatially contains the poorest segment of the city’s working class, but that it also plays a constitutive role in shaping intimate relations. I argue that carceral geographies not only structure urban marginality but also create the conditions of possibility through which domestic violence engenders carcerality within marriage.
This paper uses ethnographic cases of “forced marriage” amongst British women of South Asian origin to explore the experiences within kinship relations that confine or restrict prior to, during and after marriage. I explore “force”—exerted by kin often within close domestic spaces—and seek to contextualize it within other experiences of abuse taking place long before (or indeed after) the forced-marriage event. Specifically, I argue that what is missing in analyses of “forced marriage” is attention to more insidious, mundane constraints exerted by loved ones within families and within everyday kinship relationality that do not necessarily fit conceptions of lock-and-key carcerality but that are nevertheless experienced as “force” and are damaging and restricting. In this paper, I call these everyday forms of kinship abuse and coercion “kinship carcerality”—exercised not within prisons but within South Asian family homes—to identify the potential whereby ostensibly loving ties interweave through kinship to entrap and curtail kin.
This article explores cousin marriages across the UK and South Asia. It challenges studies that depict consanguineous marriages as beneficial, arguing instead that they can produce carceral conditions beyond the physical, including social and psychological confinement for women. It investigates how strict UK immigration policies and consanguineous kinship obligations intertwine to produce carcerality in transnational cousin marriages. This may involve being forced to marry close relatives abroad, who exploit financial and citizenship privileges to dominate family relationships. The transnational aspect heightens these dynamics because UK-based in-laws take advantage of immigration laws to delay spousal visas, leaving women in limbo in their homelands. Here, brides’ natal families tolerate their daughters’ ill-treatment and conceal marital breakdowns and domestic abuse to maintain family honor, sibling ties, and social status. Some brides, for the sake of fairness, choose to escape their marriage, while others are reported to immigration authorities as a means of getting rid of them. Consequently, they face social stigma, familial disownment, and deportation. The article conceptualizes these processes as a “carceral intertwining” of coercive kinship practices and punitive law, resulting in isolation, mental distress, and precarity for these brides.
The threat of jail functions in specific ways in Indian divorce courts. While marriages are contested and dissolved in courts governed by civil law, these spaces are routinely intertwined with the temporalities and sanctions of criminal law: punishment for recurring recidivism in alimony payments, and criminal domestic violence charges filed alongside divorce negotiations. I focus on two principal ironies of carcerality in the field of marriage law that highlight the gendered precarities of marriage and the uneven application across class-caste structures. Firstly, the paper will address the threat of jail for maintenance recidivists, where imprisonment cuts off payment, and is least effective as a deterrent for the most economically precarious. Secondly, the argument will turn to the putative economic advantages of filing and then withdrawing domestic violence charges in the process of divorce, which neither improves structural dependencies in marriage nor addresses domestic violence, while it does attract prominent backlash. The paper draws on my fieldwork in two projects: Family Courts and police stations, and the antifeminist Men’s Rights Movement. I use these ironies to demonstrate that carcerality is an ineffective tool of reducing domestic violence and of mediating economic equity in marriage dissolution.
In the Sundarbans of West Bengal, a rumor circulated that several wives had “left everything and run away” from a village next to where I was conducting long-term fieldwork. This was in February 2017.” Amidst an increase in men’s outmigration and what was described to me as the “era of love” (bhalobhashar jug), I became interested in these “runaway” wives. Why and what exactly were these women running away from, where would they go and what forms of freedom, if any, did this escape provide? Since 2017, I have returned to the same region every year. This paper follows the conversations, escapes, returns and journeys of girls and women, over the past decade, in relation to the household, the institution of marriage, and the (im)possibilities of escaping marriage. Married women, it seemed, were “escaping” the relentless responsibilities of social reproduction within the household. Unmarried girls were running away from being forced into arranged marriages. Women were also escaping to urban and peri-urban areas in search of better work opportunities, superior schools for their children and better healthcare. Many women returned, finding that their escape had proved just as hard as the situation they had attempted to run away from. Women who weren’t married for various reasons—ranging from infertility to widowhood—also expressed their distress at being outside the confines of marriage. In a context where a woman’s worth hinges on a man—a father, husband or son—this paper explores how the institution of marriage in rural Bengal is equally oppressive for those within it and those outside of its social and ritual structures.
Scholarship on carcerality has focused predominantly on prisons, penal institutions, and the state’s punitive apparatus, leaving the carceral dimensions of intimate and familial life, the “subjective qualities of confinement,” comparatively underexplored. In this Introduction we argue that marriage in South Asia and its diaspora can itself function as a significant carceral site of intentional detriment, confinement, and control, through the interweaving of kinship, law, gender, and migration. Drawing on the ethnographically grounded contributions to the Special Issue from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom, the introduction explores how carceral logic operates within and intertwines with marital relationships and legal structures. For example, legal reforms intended to protect women, alongside immigration regimes, family law, and precarious housing, can generate new forms of surveillance, dependency, and constraint. Not all coercion or confinement is carceral, but only that which is inscribed within patriarchal skinship and the state’s punitive structures.
A growing body of literature considers carcerality as a “condition” (Moran et al. 2017) that extends beyond the physical confines of the prison and includes practices of coercion and surveillance that operate in a diffuse way. While constructive in bringing attention to the individual experiences of coercion, perhaps casting the net of the “carceral” too wide makes it difficult to know where to limit its scope. Bearing this in mind, this paper will discuss a case study of two women in the same bigamous marriage in western Nepal, to consider different possible expressions of carcerality (one of which is incarceration in a state prison), through their marriages and in their experiences with state law. It will draw on the literature exploring the “pains of imprisonment” (Sykes 1958) as a heuristic to unpack the many constraints and punishments faced by these women in the so-called “free community.” What emerges from a study of state punishment for polygamy in its wider social context are the many sources of punishment and coercion that may become prison-like in some ways without necessarily being linked to the state, but which stem from long-standing punitive societal norms. In the present case study, in a reversal of what one would expect, it is the woman whom the law on polygamy is supposed to protect who ends up suffering the most from the shame and financial burden of both state punishment and social condemnation.
This paper examines the effects of organizational centralization on two key dimensions of Indian politics within the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP): the descriptive representation of marginalized social groups and the configuration of local party systems. While comparative research, particularly from Western democracies, suggests that centralized candidate selection can promote inclusion by bypassing local elites, we test this claim in the context of India’s increasingly centralized ruling party. Using a dataset on candidate renomination from 1984 to 2019, we show that the BJP became significantly more centralized in the post-2014 period. We assess whether this organizational shift led to greater representation of women and lower-caste candidates, particularly in seats where sitting MPs were replaced. While some individual substitutions suggest a modest attempt at broadening representation—such as replacing upper-caste male incumbents with lower caste or female candidates—these changes were neither systematic nor widespread. Further, aggregate analysis of turnout, electoral volatility, and party-system fragmentation at the constituency level shows little evidence that such representational shifts had major systemic effects. Nevertheless, constituencies—where both caste and gender of the BJP candidate changed in more inclusive directions—did exhibit reduced party system fragmentation, suggesting some consolidation of voter support. Our findings challenge the assumption that centralization inherently promotes inclusion, and they highlight the need to theorize intra-party dynamics and representational outcomes within the specific institutional and social contexts of the Global South.
This essay introduces a collection of articles that explores the idea of federalism and its discontents in contemporary India. It exposes the central concern of the special issue, namely, why what might be considered federal values are being contested in India because of the return of a one-party dominant system presided over by an ethnic nationalist party. On the one hand, as articles in the special issue demonstrate, we see the vigorous defense and promotion of the idea and significance of federalism by regional political actors. On the other, the rise of a more unitarian majoritarian nationalism has brought India’s status as a federal system, and what federalism in the Indian context entails, back into essential contention. This introduction presents the institutional and ideational contours of federalism in India, provides an overview of the articles in the special issue, and offers a discussion into how political changes to the landscape of federalism—the main focus of the special issue—must be seen within a wider political economy context of widening regional economic inequality and the (un)sustainability of the existing framework of fiscal redistribution.
This article addresses the differential “federal dynamics” implied by the idea and practice of asymmetry in Indian federalism by examining the particular cases of the National Capital Territory of Delhi (NCTD) under Article 239AA, Nagaland under Article 371A and the hill areas of Manipur under Article 371C. Drawing on extant literature on “federal dynamics” that posits a distinctive authority relationship between different territorial units within federations, we contend that the “frictions and tensions” inherent in the three cases stem from overlapping and contending interpretations of the sources and the extent of powers assigned to each constituent unit. We emphasize how competitive populism and inter-party competition between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Aam Aadmi Party in the NCTD, and intra-party factional contests in Manipur since May 2015 and February 2017, respectively, use “frictions and tensions” in ways that underline the “misfit” between federal institutions and the centralizing idea of ruling parties. We contend that this, and the ability to forge inter-party deliberation and a consultative mechanism in Nagaland mitigate and offset violent conflicts in multilevel federal interactions, and reinforces the imperative to underscore the mutually reinforcing relationship between federalism and democracy in India and beyond.
This interview assesses the political economy of federalism in contemporary India. It begins by discussing the idea of fiscal federalism in its historical context and what has changed in the last decade with the abolition of the Planning Commission, the introduction of the GST, the recent politicization of the Finance Commission, and their implications for vertical and horizontal devolution. In their discussion with Louise Tillin, Kalaiyarasan and Roy assess whether these changes have squeezed the fiscal autonomy of states. Roy argues that Centre-State fiscal tensions are driven by competition over the ability to finance, and thereby claim electoral credit for, compensatory welfarism. The interview moves on to offer insights into the reasons for stubborn and widening economic inequality which underpins the political need for compensatory welfarism. It considers the drivers of economic growth and the perverse migration of capital and labor from poor to rich regions. Finally, it looks at how regions are integrated into a federal economy, and how migration, the failure of assimilation, and the limited portability of welfare have contributed to a low-equilibrium trap. It ends with reflections on why economic convergence among regions has failed in India and what this implies for the premature decline of the wage share and for the distribution of growth and productivity.
This paper seeks to explore the implications the changing party system in India has for the unique federal relationship with the Northeast State of Nagaland. Nagaland is granted de-jure federal asymmetry (omnibus article 371 of the Indian Constitution) that acknowledges Nagas’ “unique” cultural identity as well as the historically specific conditions under which the state was incorporated into the Indian Union. Since 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has managed to create a political base, albeit small, in this state through strategic alliances as well as by tweaking its ideological moorings to fit a predominantly tribal and Christian population. Drawing on Chandan Sharma and Wilfred Swenden’s (2022) framework on federalism and party systems, this paper argues that Nagaland’s federal bargain—despite it being a small and heavily revenue-dependent state—persists in a BJP-dominant system because key conditions that typically enable centralizing behavior by a dominant party are weak or absent. These conditions include a highly centralized internal party structure, a unitarist ideological orientation, and weak constitutional safeguards for state autonomy. The paper thus posits that Nagaland’s special status within Indian federal architecture needs to be understood in the context of the Naga nationalist movement animated by ideas of Naga people’s “unique” history and “distinct” identity, which resulted in a political compromise of “negotiated sovereignty” between Nagas and the Indian state. State actors—and influential non-state actors—effectively use negotiated sovereignty as a political tool, enabling Nagaland to maintain a relatively favorable federal bargain and degree of autonomy within the BJP-dominant system.
