Chapter 4
The “Bengali” Wife and Close-Kin Marriage among Muslims
The previous chapter argued that notwithstanding forms of bureaucratic rationality that are believed to structure state practices of which policing is a key component, the police depend on modes of seeing that often rely on intuitive assessments of who is inside or outside the law. We saw how these assessments were made on the basis of languages (un)spoken, textures of silence, and types of dress. Forms of documentary evidence for citizenship may be summarily rejected as being “forged” and therefore “inauthentic.” Paperwork is not always a guarantor of political belonging, a theme that continues into chapter 5. We saw how identification of the “authentic infiltrator” was often for the police just a matter of knowing “at first glance.”
In this chapter, I will broaden the scope of policing away from formal state institutions and include in it other forms of knowledge creation engaged in by institutions and persons outside of the state apparatus, strictly speaking, with a particular focus on the family. “Bengali” women migrants were threatened by exposure not only due to the work of the police who attempted to track them down using techniques of identification mentioned in the previous chapter but also through the activities of journalists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the anthropologist, and the family, each of whom demanded transparency and brought in their wake degrees of exposure, whether intended or not. My interaction with Bano—a “Bengali” wife who also operated as a matchmaker for other “Bengali” migrants whose marriages she networked and facilitated—will help understand how the presence of the anthropologist—as we saw with the NGO in the previous chapter—may even inadvertently threaten exposure; under these circumstances, her ethnographic mandate may end up mimicking more active forms of policing that are undertaken in pursuit of detecting the “illegal” migrant in this borderland. In the second half of the chapter, I will show how ways of seeing that are seen as particular to the police (e.g., suspicion and surveillance) are not discontinuous with modes of policing that operate within the family especially with regard to the reevaluation of close kin marriage within Muslim households.
The Reluctant Matchmaker
Mohamed Hosain, who was always courteous and eager to help me in all my research pursuits, was uncharacteristically reticent when I mentioned my intention to meet more “Bengali” wives. Eventually, he agreed to introduce me to some but shared his apprehensions: “Tell me [batao], they won’t face any problem or harassment afterward, right [hain na]? You will be observed visiting them at home; then the police should not land up at their doorsteps in pursuit [peechhe peechhe].” This section describes my interactions with Bano who, by making transparency the central theme of her narrative, used her conversation with me almost like a defense against charges of illegality that I did not make, but my presence may have triggered. My seeking her out for an interview brought her into focus in a way that was not unlike interrogation she may face through formal law enforcement agents (see, e.g., Garriott 2011, 138). Her narrative emphasized legality and transparency and was no doubt crafted for me but was also designed to reach beyond me, offsetting her vulnerability to exposure as a “Bangalan.”
I was taken to visit Bano and her husband, Haroon, by a mutual acquaintance who wanted me to meet an older “Bengali” wife—someone who had been in Kutch for over ten years. Bano was described to me by those who knew her as “very well settled.” She used her extensive networks in Kutch and West Bengal to broker new marriages with migrant women. Although this is technically what dalals (in this context, marriage brokers) do, she was quick to distance herself from the term. Reminding me of how the presence of the anthropologist produces encounters that may court exposure, Bano took charge of the narrative by choosing to talk of transparency and of how she and Haroon had “nothing to hide.”
According to Bano, Haroon visited her natal village in Bengal personally and “hid nothing from us.” He is significantly older than Bano and terminally ill, in need of palliative care. He had not divorced his first wife, someone described by Bano as “mentally unstable” (dimagi halat thheek nahi hai). Bano underscored the transparency that, according to her, was the bedrock of her marriage: “He hid nothing from us. The entire village [her natal village] knows [sara gaon janta hai)] that I have come to take care of him [seva ke liye]. There is nothing wrong in this [isme kuch galat nahin hai].”1
Bano thus begins by placing her marriage squarely within the scope of social normativity. Although she is her husband’s second wife, by attributing mental instability to the first wife, she is able to retain her primacy in the conjugal unit with her husband. Foregrounding care instead of sex and procreation as the bedrock of a successful marriage, she is also responding to the discourse that attributes women’s migration to trafficking and sex work (Kempadoo 2005; Kapur 2010). In her stress on public knowledge and transparency, she preempts the media and police discourse of young women being duped and trapped into marriage by unscrupulous men.
Once she establishes for me a context of consent and transparency within her own marriage, Bano broadens the scope of the conversation to the more general question of cross-region marriages and the role of dalals in mediating these rishtas (relationships, specifically used to describe prospective marriage proposals).2 In the police’s understanding of such marriages, as presented in media and police reports, the Bangalan is brought in groups to Kutch by a typically unscrupulous male dalal who then “sells” her to the highest bidder, making a tidy profit for himself. Families with “Bengali” brides that I interviewed did not make a secret of the fact that there was a transactional element to the process of fixing a rishta with a Bangalan. Yasmin, one of my friends in Bhuj, accompanied an aunt to “select” a wife for the latter’s son; they went to the home of a woman known to them as a local dalal where they were presented with three or four “Bengali” women from among whom they were asked to choose. The woman’s family was paid about 15,000–20,000 rupees (in 2013) with the dalal taking the rest of the payment. Rates were higher for fair-complexioned women who were in greater demand.
Bano uses her networks in Bengal and Kutch to fix marriages for those Muslim families in Kutch who increasingly want “Bengali” brides for reasons that are explained below. However, she was very firm about distinguishing her work from the operation of professional male dalals who, according to her, were “real bastards [harami], telling all kinds of lies for the sake of money. They often hide the fact that the ‘boy’ [ladka] is mute or lame, or that he has a mental problem. In cases where the girl’s [ladki] parents cannot come down themselves to see the prospective groom, they send their daughter with the dalal; when she finds out the truth about the man she has married, her life is ruined. Some lose their minds [pagal ho jatey hain], some run away.” These dalals also engineered fake or “scam” relationships (farzi rishtey). It is not only the dalals who are duplicitous, she adds. People can also withhold the truth just to get their sons married. Bano is upset at her own husband’s sister. Their son is paralyzed, and his parents lied about his disability just to find a bride for him. “This is absolutely wrong [bilkul galat],” she emphasized.
Distinguishing herself again from a professional dalal, Bano indicated that the matchmaking she did was free of charge. Money was paid directly to the bride’s family. Bano has facilitated two marriages (do shadiya karwaiy hain), one of them for her neighbor’s son. She strategized and chose a childhood acquaintance from her own home village, who is now a friend and companion for Bano in Kutch. They plan their trips home together so they can have each other’s company on the long train journey. The other marriage she fixed was for her sister. Apart from these, she says, she is a reluctant marriage facilitator because she does not want to get too involved: “What if the marriages don’t work out? Then I will have to bear the blame.” She describes how a number of people, including Hindus, show up at her door asking for “Bengali” women to marry to their sons or brothers. “Some of them say we don’t care if the woman is Muslim or Hindu, we just care about the girl [hamein to sirf ladki se matlab hai].” But Bano is horrified at this proposition: “Who will be responsible for her if she is unhappy?” She firmly turns away Hindu “clients,” saying she is networked with only Muslim families in Bengal and will not be a party to what she sees as deception. “This is not a dandha [business; the term also colloquially refers to sex work]; it is a question of the girl’s life [zindagi] after all,” she says disapproving of professional dalals. On one of the occasions that I was visiting at her home, Bano was expecting a prospective “client” from Bengal: “They must be on their way here now. A family from [a village close by] was interested, so I arranged the meeting, which will take place in my house this evening. They have said if they like the girl, they will take her and pay, but not otherwise. I told them, ‘That’s fine’; after all, we are hardly dalals to strike a deal [hum dalal thodi hai ki sauda karne lage]” (emphasis added).
Bano uses her interactions with me to emphasize the lack of deception in her own marriage and the ways in which her matchmaking distinguishes her from dalals, whose existence she does not deny but distances herself from. By presenting her work as a reluctant matchmaker, she is also able to distance herself from allegations of corruption and monetary self-interest, as well as from failed marriages. In these conversations with Bano, it is clear that “detection” of the “Bengali” wife is not only at the behest of the police or intelligence services but may be enabled by the anthropologist’s probing. In this example, Bano uses the conversations to draw a picture of legality and consent, a far cry from the media and police discourse around “Bengali” women in Kutch.
Family Secrets
So far, I have discussed the play between the overt and the covert that structures interactions within and outside the family, especially when it concerns the exposure of the “Bengali” either as “trafficked woman,” “forced bride,” or “illegal infiltrator.” I have suggested that there are many interactions that can “expose” the “Bengali”; the formal institution of police are not the only ones who may “uncover” them. Here, I show how it is not just families with “marriage migrants” that are riven with suspicion and bear the burden of being transparent to others. An overview of a borderland society like this, saturated with multiple forms of police and military surveillance may suggest that women are under surveillance primarily by the police, but the view from the ground reveals that suspicion and surveillance permeate a whole set of relationships even within the family. Although at first sight, it may appear that allegations of deception and suspicion are attached only to those rishtas that are engineered by dalals or involve migrants from other regions, the regular—so-called normatively constituted family in Kutch—could also be thickly layered with suspicion. Information, its possession and trafficking, could create alliances and rupture others in ways that mirror forms of behavior and suspicion that attach to marriage with “Bengali” women. The idea is also to suggest that forms of practice that we associate with police work in the manner in which they deal with the apprehension of the “Bengali infiltrator”—suspicion, observation, and exposure—are also operative within closely guarded circuits of the family that is otherwise seen as the epitome of trust and understanding. Even though the “Bengali” wife was the object of policing for the state, the desirability of the Bangalan as a “good wife” is tied to modes of policing the Muslim family. In chapter 3, we saw how in rural families the “Bengali” woman indexed a certain kind of Islamic civility especially in a context of growing state Islamophobia where people like Hasham ruminated openly on what it meant to be a Muslim. In urban Muslim families, the “Bengali” wife became a preferred marriage choice in order to circumvent the hazards of too much proximity entailed in marrying close kin. Rumors, past misdemeanors, and the management of “poisonous knowledge” (Das 2007) were significantly amplified with consanguineous marriages that, because they were based on a “double rishta” (Charsley 2013, 108–111), entailed the collapsing of blood and affinal relations when first cousins married each other. This could have disastrous consequences for the family as it threatened to tear apart the familial order from within. The “Bengali” wife was the “outsider,” the affine who could be “made local” and thereby incorporated into the family (Carsten 1997). Due to pressures already alluded to—the dangers of speaking her own language, dressing or eating in culturally distinct ways—due to the possibilities of being “detected” by the police, “Bengali” women were said to make particularly docile wives, their “blending in” evocative of the “good old days” when women were more easily controlled and “adjusted” within the family.
Even though the presence of the “Bangalan” was an uncomfortable subject, usually glossed in conversation, marriage in general was a favorite topic, particularly with women. As an unmarried woman, I was constantly advised to marry and “settle down”; as I got to know families better and more intimately, older women did not consider the offer to find me a suitable match in Kutch to be intrusive; they felt this was their duty (farz) toward someone they considered to be “like a daughter” (beti jaise). Since I was received as a Memon of Kutchi origin (my father’s community), marriage to a locally sourced Memon was considered to be a highly feasible—and not in the least bit improper—suggestion on their part. Marriage norms as they operate among various Muslim communities in South Asia, although by no means homogenous, play out on a somewhat different register from the normative Hindu marriage system.3 The cultural ideal of endogamy and more particularly of consanguinity strongly discourages intercaste marriages among Muslims in Kutch.4 The normative Muslim marriage specifies the limits of endogamy as the caste (atak) or the family (as consanguinity), and in my experience, this was an ideal that was largely adhered to, discursively if not always in practice. The normative practice was explained in the following terms: “first we look for a son-in-law in the same house [i.e., a cousin marriage], then we turn to the next relative, then generally in the village, moving outside the village only if absolutely essential.”
As a consequence of this, many Muslim women do not leave the natal village after they are wed; in urban areas, consanguineous marriages combined with occupationally demarcated neighborhoods in the older parts of town meant that some women moved only a couple of houses up or down, effectively living on the same street their entire lives. Endogamy was also a measure of social status, used to evaluate relative position vis-à-vis others; the more effectively a caste group was able to police the boundaries of its marriage practices, the higher a social status it could claim. Thus, people like Hasham could talk disparagingly of the pastoralists in Banni who were said to be in the habit of “buying” women from other Muslim castes in the region, due to their “lalach [greed] for money.” Hasham’s sister, it will be recalled, had been married into a family in Banni because of a physical disability; such practices ensured the reproduction of caste hierarchy among Muslims in the region. Significantly, marriage with the “Bengali,” precisely because she existed outside of local caste hierarchies, could be engineered without the loss of prestige that might have been incumbent on an exogamous “intercaste” marriage within Kutch.
Although consanguineous marriage is the normatively prescribed form of marriage, these marriages do not preclude elements of choice, or indeed of “love” and self-arrangement (Charsley 2013, 75–77). Even within this genre of marriage, considered to be the most socially appropriate and morally legitimate form of marriage, I found that there was plenty of scope for the exercise of self-choice and individual agency that often mimicked the performance of illicit romances between young people.5 Further, not all consanguineous rishtas were those that accorded with parental approval. Knowledge of romantic relationships between cousins and “illicit” communication between cousins who were betrothed to other cousins became sources of information that could be deployed to maintain various forms of order within the family.
These knowledge trails operated as a means of “lateral surveillance” among cousins. They became a way of keeping track of others’ behavior, the threat of exposure becoming a key means through which familial order was maintained, not through a patriarchal diktat from older relatives but via lateral surveillance within a generation. My use of the term lateral surveillance proposes a modification to Mark Andrejevic’s (2005) concept. The latter is essentially a form of surveillance that is a product of the digital enclosure where, Andrejevic suggests, surveillance becomes individualized as people take charge of their own security and sever their dependence on traditional circuits of information management. Crucially, for Andrejevic, these forms of surveillance “amplify” and “replicate” forms of top-down surveillance that emanate from the state; the result is an “injunction to embrace the strategies of law enforcement and marketing at a micro-level” (Andrejevic 2005, 494). On the other hand, I suggest that these techniques of lateral surveillance operate as forms of policing that operate in conjunction with, rather than the supersession of, more traditional networks of information flow such as kinship flows. Here, it is not the democratization of technology that enables people to watch each other and have access to information about each other through Facebook or Google, for instance, but the social proximity that is engendered through consanguineous marriages, which makes people privy to certain kinds of information that may otherwise be compartmentalized (e.g., between one’s natal and affinal families).
More crucially, because of the doubled-up relationships (the “double rishta”) that are entailed through consanguineous marriages, proximity and trust are overdetermined, made more complex through the layering of relationships over time. In her ethnography of transnational marriage among British Pakistanis, Katharine Charsley (2013) writes that close-kin marriage among cousins is a way to offset the risk involved in arranging a transcontinental marriage. “Migration has introduced additional risk by undermining the trust based on knowledge of one’s kin” (Charsley 2013, 103). In her ethnography, marriage with close kin is desired not only to strengthen the bond between siblings but to also ensure that preexisting networks of trust and loyalty are strong enough to withstand the possible strains of a transnational marriage where one spouse migrates to another country. Thus, Charsley (2013, 103–104) finds that “transnationalism and close kin marriage may be mutually reinforcing.”
Here, we will see that bonds between siblings may grow deeper—but may also be torn asunder—when they become affines. As Janet Carsten (1997, 196) says about her fieldwork in Langkawi, her Malay interlocutors told her, “We like to marry relatives, but if they quarrel, it’s finished, everything goes sour.” She describes how the possession of potentially harmful information about others may circulate within the kin group, showing up the fundamental “fragility of affinal groups” (222). It will be recalled in chapter 1 that one of the reasons why the visiting inspector general of police did not think Kutch needed a separate border police force was that people living along and across the border were Muslims who were related to each other. This kind of society, he believed, was a self-regulating one because of a degree of internal coherence and trust that would derive from kinship ties. In the following sections, I argue that consanguineous marriage—although traditionally a preferred form of marriage due to the familiarity of all parties concerned—can also jeopardize the social fabric precisely because of this familiarity. In these circumstances, the Bangalan is preferred because she is a stranger.
“Bengali” women are often chosen as preferred marriage options for a number of urban Muslim families. Yasmin who, it will be recalled, accompanied an aunt to “select” a wife for the latter’s son to the house of a dalal, said of the aunt, “She is very happy with her daughter-in-law.” The “Bangalan” had fit right in; “You would never know by looking at her today that she was not born here,” she added. Yasmin’s mother-in-law chimed in: “And you should see how she takes care of her parents-in-law! She does real seva [care], takes care of all the housework, the cooking and cleaning without a single complaint [haste haste, literally, with a smile]. They just don’t make them like that here anymore,” she sighed. Although some of this was doubtless meant for Yasmin’s ears, it provides an instance of some of the ways in which “Bengali” women are seen as more attractive daughter-in-law material than women chosen from within the family whose proximity to the family could become a reason for familial conflict. “Bengali” women are seen to be more docile and accommodating. The distance from their natal homes means they cannot go home at the drop of a hat, making it incumbent on them to make the marriage work at all costs. Women within the family were more likely to “stalk off” to their mothers in the event of an argument; these marital tiffs inevitably spread across the generations and could not be confined to the conjugal couple alone, as the examples below will indicate.
Ashfaq, the oldest son of a middle-class family liked Maliha whom he first saw at a mela (fair), the annual celebration at a well-known dargah in the city.6 She belonged to the same Muslim subcaste, but the two families were not known to each other and were not linked through previous affinal connections. Ashfaq and Maliha conducted a clandestine romance facilitated through love letters that were exchanged with the help of one of Ashfaq’s female cousins on his maternal side (his mother’s sister’s daughter), Sameena. Although the match was not in strict violation of the social code (the two families belonged to the same subcaste), it violated an unspoken moral code because of the manner in which the young couple conducted their romance.
Nonetheless, knowledge of the young couple having met at a fair and thereafter written letters to each other was not made public. The rishta, when it happened, was proposed through one of Ashfaq’s uncles (his father’s older brother), who in turn had been approached through an aunt who had overheard her daughter “happen to mention” Maliha’s name as a potential prospective bride for Ashfaq. Ashfaq’s parents were not thrilled at the prospect of a marriage with Maliha for a number of reasons. The latter’s family was not personally known to them, and Maliha’s father worked in the Middle East, her mother raised the children singly in Kutch. Nevertheless, the marriage took place and the self-chosen aspect of it was more or less seamlessly converted into a socially approved arrangement (see, e.g., Mody 2008), eased along by the fact that they belonged to the same subcaste and no real endogamous boundaries were breached.
Two years into the marriage and after the birth of a daughter to the couple, however, Maliha had an altercation with her mother-in-law and left her marital home to return to her mother’s house. Her father-in-law suspected that Maliha had been provoked by his younger brother (Ashfaq’s uncle) and sister-in-law who lived next door. The father-in-law alleged that his brother was jealous of their success and relative prosperity and wanted to ruin their family. He suspected that this brother was the key figure with whose abetment Maliha’s brothers filed a police case against Ashfaq’s parents, alleging harassment for dowry. Some years after it had become clear that the older generation was embroiled in a stressful situation vis-à-vis each other, Sameena revealed, under dramatic circumstances, the history of Ashfaq and Maliha’s love affair. Maliha’s parents threatened Ashfaq’s parents (Sameena was his maternal cousin) with defamation: “we have already filed one case against you; we will add one more to it”). Sameena cited “evidence” of the letters she had once ferried, claiming that she could produce other witnesses to support her. The case was eventually resolved with the intervention of extended family members, but it revealed a lack of connect between the generations: Ashfaq’s parents were helpless in the face of allegations of “love letters”; for them, this was a scandal greater than the fact that their daughter-in-law had walked out of her marital home. The secret knowledge of the letters was leveraged by Sameena to balance another scandal as it began to float like scum to the surface.
Some years after the Maliha-Ashfaq fracas and after Maliha had returned to stay with her in-laws, Ashfaq’s brother Bilal became engaged to his father’s sister’s daughter Yasmin at a ceremony in the latter’s home. Ashfaq and Bilal’s parents said they had had enough of self-chosen marriages and the experiment with Maliha had not gone particularly well. Yasmin lived three doors down the same street; Bilal’s father was extremely fond of his younger sister, Yasmin’s mother. The rishta was fixed and a simple engagement ceremony conducted. Almost exactly a year after the engagement, the nikah was performed and Yasmin moved to her mother’s brother’s house as the new daughter-in-law. Although Bilal and Ashfaq’s family had suffered significant losses in the devastating earthquake of 2001, many of their savings diverted into the repair of their house, no expense was spared on the wedding. The bridal couple had a newly renovated private bedroom and attached bathroom to themselves on the upper story of the old family house, which had been specially painted and decorated in honor of the wedding. I returned to Bhuj after a year’s absence just two days after the wedding only to find Bilal’s family steeped in gloom. Nobody was talking about the wedding. I had attended the engagement ceremony a year ago and could not fathom what could have transpired to convert the euphoria of that event into the funereal atmosphere of the present. Bilal’s mother—whom I had never seen offer namaz (prayers) in the past—practically did not stir from her prayer mat, her fingers telling the beads of her tasbi (prayer beads) constantly. It felt like a house that had suffered a recent bereavement rather than a wedding.
As the days passed, I pieced together the story from various members of the family. Bilal, it turned out, was in love not with Yasmin but with Fariha, also a first cousin but from the other side, his mother’s sister’s daughter. The two had liked each other for some time but had not made their desires known to anybody. Fariha was already engaged to a young man outside Kutch who belonged to the same caste but was not a cousin. Bilal confessed to his father, the day after the nikah ceremony that he had wanted to marry Fariha instead of Yasmin. This confession, a mere twenty-four hours after the nikah, erupted into a diplomatic war of tremendous intensity between Bilal’s and Yasmin’s families. At the center of the crisis were Bilal’s father and his very own sister, Yasmin’s mother. Bilal’s father said he had “lost face” with his sister who in turn threatened him with ruining her only daughter’s life. She further alleged that it was all Bilal’s mother’s (her sister-in-law’s) fault; she accused her brother of being controlled by his wife who was not well intentioned and that she had always been suspicious of her intentions (neeyat). Bilal’s father confessed that his son had not done the right thing. “I have raised him with good values; I have never denied him his wishes. If he wanted to marry someone else, he should have only said so. Even if he couldn’t say this in public, he could have confided in me at least.” It was one thing to have ruined young Yasmin’s life from the first day of her married life, but he added with tears in his eyes, “My relationship with my sister is ruined forever.”
While the parental generation bickered on and off, Sameena—who was Fariha’s sister—decided this was the moment to reveal the clandestine correspondence between Maliha and her cousin Ashfaq. This was a way for her to get back at Bilal’s family for the way in which the two brothers evidently conducted their romantic lives to the detriment of others’ interests and reputations—her sister Fariha’s reputation was at stake—and to deflect the public eye away from Fariha’s complicity in the scandal (of being in love with Bilal).
Peer Surveillance
Young urban Muslim women in Bhuj were governed by an unspoken set of norms that dictated the extent of their participation in the urban public sphere as “modern” women. Thus, although driving two-wheeled “scootys” was socially acceptable, driving a car was not considered to be “proper.” When I visited on fieldwork and stayed with families I was acquainted with, one of the ways in which their gradual upward mobility was reflected was in their offers to use their car for my out-of-town visits across the district. In previous years, I would have rented a car for the day and driven off with the driver and Mohamed Hosain in tow. Now more people I knew owned cars; they only lacked someone to drive it. Young men who were capable of driving were busy at their workplaces during the day. Older men did not know how to drive, and it was not seemly for the women to be seen behind the wheel. So it came to be that I was often exhorted to drive and to take them along for company, an offer I never took up but was regularly encouraged to do. Regardless of the fact that many upwardly mobile families owned cars and had moved into well-apportioned houses filled with every conceivable gadget at their disposal, younger women tended to not be as fluent as their husbands or brothers in the use of electronic gadgets such as iPads and phones, relying often on their young children to translate these techniques to them. Those who were well versed with these electronic gadgets tended to downplay their expertise in “public” family interactions especially in the kitchen or living room, reserving their use in the relatively “private” sphere of the bedroom when they went to lie down for their brief afternoon naps.
Similarly, the range of clothing and forms of self-presentation that were considered “socially acceptable” were quite narrowly defined in my experience. Although school and college-going girls had begun to wear jeans and leggings—the term for the figure-hugging tights that had come to replace the looser tailored trousers (shalwar)—young mothers all wore the more traditional shalwar kameez, their upper bodies draped with a dupatta at all times whether at home or outside. Similarly, the use of makeup was not socially acceptable. These rules, although not spelled out in any obvious way, were taken for granted, part of the habitus. One time, Yasmin offered me a couple of brand-new bottles of nail polish. She commented that they were gifts brought for her by her husband’s foreign colleagues when they had been invited over for a meal at home. “You know how it is,” she said, removing them from the kitchen shelf on which they had been sitting, offering them to me while I waited for the water to boil for tea, “we can’t use such things here, but you can.” I urged her to keep them; perhaps one day she might feel tempted to try? But she was adamant. “It would be different in another city.… If I was in Mumbai, maybe, but even there, it is difficult.… We would visit our relatives and then people would start talking. It’s better to not start such things. Here, you take them.” The fact that they had been stored on a kitchen shelf, in full view of anybody who cared to notice them, indicated that even to put them away in the privacy of her own bedroom or bathroom, where she stored toiletries for her personal use, was considered inappropriate, perhaps inviting comment from her husband or mother-in-law. Good manners compelled her to not refuse a gift, but in the same spirit, by leaving them on the kitchen shelf, accessible and in full view to the entire family, she was able to distance herself from the moral implications of having “accepted” such a gift.
As it turned out, she was right about the forms of lateral surveillance young women indulged in. I had been privy to a long-winded saga that had to do with Yasmin’s cousin Zainab. It was generally held by the extended group of cousins (that also included in-laws because of their consanguineous marriages) that Zainab had “abandoned” her domestic responsibilities—cooking and looking after her husband and children—and was possibly having an affair. Her husband was a salesman who traveled out of the city most days, staying at home at the most three days a week. In his absence, the only male relative holding the fort at home was her father-in-law. The elderly gentleman was regarded as ineffective in keeping a watch on his errant daughter-in-law. “He clearly can’t see what she is up to, but it’s all there for all the world to see,” they whispered together. In support of these conjectures, Zainab’s cousins always drew attention to the fact that she took too much care of herself: “Her eyebrows are always plucked, and she gets herself waxed [to remove body hair]; she is always lipsticked and powdered,” they declared as ultimate proof of her “wayward” behavior.
In the vignettes sketched above, I want to draw attention to the forms of surveillance and watching that are not the hierarchical protrusions of a mechanism of watching that emanates from a source that is construed as above those being watched but as forms of lateral surveillance that nonetheless are not amplifications of the work of the state, nor are they only dependent on the democratization and privatization of technology as Andrejevic suggests. Previous chapters have discussed ways in which the work of watching is dispersed through society, rendering the state as one among many others who participate in the work of information gathering and rendering their interlocutors transparent for a variety of reasons. However, here I would like to push further to suggest for an anthropology of policing that the community engages in: lateral policing (keeping an eye on each other), not only as a way of expanding the sphere of police practice (Garriott 2011) or as a means of replicating the state’s security practices (Andrejevic 2005) but to suggest that these forms of practice within the family mimic the state’s but do not share in the vision of social order that the state seeks to enforce. The “Bengali” wives are policed as “outsiders” by the state; forms of life that are detected as “deception” by the police allow them to transition into valued “insiders,” allowing for a new kind of socially sanctioned marriage among Muslims. In the context of work that draws attention to modes of policing that emanate from the patriarchal state in South Asia (Chakravarti 1996; Baxi 2006; Mody 2008), the ethnographic examples here indicate lateral rather than top-down hierarchical policing in collusion between the patriarchal family and the state (fathers and police, for instance, as in Baxi’s examples), but refer to the manner in which the sharing and withholding of information and the deployment of secrets become aspects of familial governance but not only within the rubric of a patriarchal discourse of honor, which is the more usual trope for South Asian ethnographies of family and marriage.
Suspicion and the Family
I have been arguing that a study on policing as a form of governmentality needs to reintroduce the idea of the family and the state as coproducers of the well-ordered society. However, the relationship between the state and the family that I propose here is not necessarily based on “tactical collusion” or “strategic alliance,” nor of an intervention by the state into the family (Donzelot 1979; Das 1995). Practices of policing that we identify with the bureaucratic state—suspicion, surveillance, or forms of knowledge creation that emerge from documentary and statistical practices—are also evocative of similar practices that constitute policing at the level of the family. In this more expansive consideration of policing—“police as governance” (Garriott 2013)—it is concerned with the production of a well-ordered society and the social, economic, and moral management of its subjects. Governance concerns itself not just with questions of sovereignty but also of the welfare of the population, which also constitute its primary resource, hence they are to be preserved and managed (Foucault 2001). It is clear that the family is the first line of management of these subjects; the policing of families by the state was also about policing beyond the family (Donzelot 1979). However, this ethnography cautions us that the family is more than just a site of intervention for the state. It does not only govern through the family; the family is an active agent of policing, but there is no consensus on the moral order that is a desired outcome of successful policing.
The migration of “Bengalis” into Kutch is not only subject to policing by the state for reasons discussed in chapter 3 but is also a consequence of practices of policing that are internal to the family. These two trajectories of policing do not have the same consequence for migrant women in this borderland. The “Bengali” bride is welcomed into Muslim families because she is the bearer of a certain Islamic civility that is seen as a desirable form of moral upliftment not only among rural Muslims (chapter 3) but also among urban, upwardly mobile Muslim families because as a stranger, she is not privy to too many secrets in the family. The practice of marrying cousins—although lauded for the fact that there is familiarity all around and everyone knows the family background—can disrupt everyday relationships that are also based on the selective management of information across the family. Ethnographies on the lived experience of marriage in South Asia relate to transnational marriage migration (Kalpagam 2005; Gardner 2006; Charsley 2013), cross-region marriages due to sex ratio imbalances (Kaur 2012; Mishra 2013), the affective and aspirational dimensions of marriage as a lived experience (Grover 2011), and marriage and the law (Mody 2008; Basu 2015). With very few exceptions (Das 2007; Mody 2008; Grover 2011), these ethnographies do not give us enough of a textured sense of how marriage and family structure the flow of everyday life—of how trust is created and withheld, of how marriage is both a keenly desired social status and a potential means to lose status and self-worth. Taken together, chapters 3 and 4 have addressed the question of how distrust and suspicion attach themselves to migrant wives not only as a consequence of policing by the state. These affects are central to the manner in which relationships are structured between young women and their families, regardless of religion or social class, especially around the subject of marriage and its inevitability. The following examples explain this in more detail and also dispel the impression that suspicion, distrust, and familial infelicities occur only within Muslim families in Kutch.
SONAL
During the year that we were closely associated while I conducted my early fieldwork in Kutch, Sonal and I became friends. Because we were both of more or less the same age and were also both unmarried, Sonal shared with me some of the anxieties that are not uncommon among single women in their late twenties and early thirties across the subcontinent. Sonal lived with her parents and younger siblings in Bhuj and, as we know, she worked as part of the health and education outreach team of a local NGO. She often opined that I was lucky to be able to study and write without worrying about “marriage” (she always used this term in English) and marveled at the fact that my parents had “allowed” me to travel to the United States just to study.
The social and parental pressure to marry was a huge burden on Sonal, and I could see the toll it took on her as the months passed. She was turning thirty, well over the age at which young women in Kutch were wed. Although she and her sister were both graduates—Sonal had a degree in law and her sister worked as a primary school teacher—she was beginning to get the distinct impression that her parents were no longer impressed with her academic achievements unless she could save face for them within their larger social and kinship universe. Added to her woes was the fact that a rishta had been proposed for her younger sister, superseding her in the family hierarchy; according to societal convention, the younger sister could not marry before the older. Sonal was acutely aware of these accumulated pressures and the duty of being the eldest weighed heavily on her. To make matters worse, her brother had a mental disability. This, added to her education and “advanced” years, made it difficult to find a suitable match. Sonal often said to me that she felt that she had been born under a particularly inauspicious star, her parents also having given up on her prospects.
One evening, Sonal called me on the phone and asked if I would accompany her to a temple. It turned out that she was finally engaged to be married and she wanted to go to the temple of “Mataji”—Ashapura Mata—to offer thanks. She had taken a vow to perform a series of fasts for nine consecutive Tuesdays and that day was the last one. Coincidentally, it happened to be the same day her rishta was fixed (pukka kiya) with a man who had come to “see” her a week ago. We walked together through the narrow bylanes of the old bazaar to reach Ashapura’s principal temple in Bhuj town, stopping to buy a red-and-gold chunri (scarf) and some bindis (dot worn on the forehead by Hindu women) to be offered to the goddess and then some sweets to be blessed as prasad (sanctified offerings). On the way, Sonal made what was to me a startling confession: she could not remember what her fiancé looked like and was unable to reconstruct his face in her mind. Yet the overwhelming emotion she felt that evening was relief: the feeling of guilt and familial responsibility that she has been burdened with for so long had finally eased.
With our ritual obligations at the temple over, Sonal and I walked along the lakefront, savoring the cool evening breeze, a refreshing balm after the scorching heat of the day. As the sun set over the horizon, we walked over to the lake where, sitting on a bench facing the lake, encased in the gathering dark, I could sense that underneath her obvious relief and pleasure at her upcoming nuptials, she was also anxious. Again, she mentioned the fact that she could not recall her fiancé’s face despite the fact that he had come over to meet her at home just the previous week. She then said that she was now glad she had asked a good friend from her university days who lived in Junagadh (the city where her fiancé’s parents lived) to unobtrusively gather information about the family so that she could satisfy herself about their background. She added that this was because she could not really trust her own parents—“I don’t trust my parents: they are just desperate to see me married; they will probably overlook every fault just to get me off their hands.” Her lack of faith in her parents made her doubt that they had her best interests at heart. Sonal worked out her own investigative networks to inquire into her fiancé’s antecedents.
ZOYA
Zoya was twenty-five years old when I first met her. Like Sonal, she was also already older than most women at the time of their engagements and was frequently told by well-meaning aunts that it was high time she “settled down.” She was feisty and entrepreneurial, running a small beauty salon out of one room in her mother’s house, which was in a modern and well-appointed middle-class urban housing society. Young, middle-class women from the neighborhood dropped by now and then to have henna put in their hair or their eyebrows threaded. On a rainy August day that I happened to be staying over at their house, Zoya and her younger sister persuaded me to have henna put on my hands; Zoya was an artist and she carefully filled my left hand with intricate patterns. Her mother had invited eight young girls to eat dinner at home, the annual fulfillment of a mannat (ritual vow) she had once made for her sister’s recovery in surgery. Over a multicourse dinner, some of them joked that they would not have anyone to give them beauty tips and advice once Zoya was married and left her mother’s house. Zoya insisted that she would go nowhere, that she did not want to marry.
The following morning, everyone asked to see my henna-anointed palm before I washed it, effectively stopping the color deepening any further. What was the color like? I turned my palm out, now covered with a deep auburn design, and everyone smiled happily. The color was dark and deep; I would have a husband who loved me very much and I would get along with my mother-in-law and have a happy marriage, Zoya’s sister proclaimed happily! If the color was faint, I would not have any of these things. “All of this is rubbish,” said Zoya to me, “but what do we do? We are constrained [majbur] to believing these ideas we have grown up with.” Her father and an elder sister had died in the 2001 earthquake; she wanted to live with and look after her mother and two brothers. Her beauty salon business was an attempt to be independent.
At the end of that year, Zoya’s younger sister became engaged to be married. Zoya was excited for her but insisted she was going to stay single herself. As time passed, she was pressured by various members of the family to not waste more time and, importantly, to not cause any more tension to her mother by her refusal to get engaged. Her mother’s sister rebuked her that she should not be selfish or stubborn (ziddi): as an older sister, she had to be married first. When none of these tactics worked, she was rebuked that her mother had too much tension because of an unmarried daughter growing older by the day, “sitting at home.” Having already lost a husband and a daughter in the earthquake, Zoya should not make her mother suffer any more. Zoya still held out; her sister married and went off to her marital home in another city.
About a year later, Zoya mentioned to me during one of my brief visits to Kutch that she could not bear the pressure anymore and had decided to take up an offer of marriage that had come through the intermediation of one of her uncles. The “boy” was coming over, and she asked if I would be present during the meeting. Afterward, she asked what I thought of him. He seemed like a pleasant enough person, and I said so. However, Zoya cut to the chase: she wanted my opinion on whether I thought there was a “defect” in one of his eyes, referring to a possible squint. Zoya was no longer considered a prize match. Despite her education, the family’s good social standing, and their middle-class urban life, she had to be content with an offer of marriage from an older man, from the same caste but from a poor family. Besides, Zoya could not quite shake off the idea that he had a squint. This is my destiny (kismat), she sighed, even as she agreed to the marriage. The wedding took place, and Zoya moved to a small one-roomed house in another town. When I visited her some years later, I found her cooking on a tiny kerosene stove in the corner of the room, looking after her baby son at the same time. She wove baskets to earn some money on the side. The marriage had entailed a steep downward mobility for her for she could now afford none of the pleasures of middle-class life that she had enjoyed in her mother’s home and that she had so generously included me in when we went to the movies, shopped for clothes and trinkets, always scheduling a detour to eat sev puri and dabeli.7
Both Zoya and Sonal reposed faith and confidence in “outsiders” to evaluate the extent to which their prospective spouses were suitably matched with their own personal standards. They were unable to trust their own parents or family members because of an overwhelming sense that they were no more than a “burden” to be disposed of in marriage to the first available suitor. Although Sonal contacted a friend from college, Zoya asked me to be present at her meeting and subsequently demanded that I be honest with her about her prospective fiancé’s physical appearance. Much as is believed to be the case with “Bengali” brides who are married off to “unsuitable” men—those with physical or mental infirmities—here were instances of women from Kutch—both Hindu and Muslim—who were considered too educated or independent to find husbands before they were considered to be “on the shelf.” No longer trusting of their own families, they invoked their own personal circuits of information gathering (in Sonal’s case) and judgment (in Zoya’s case) in order to independently evaluate the suitability of these men as prospective spouses.
Conclusion
Marriage forces women to tread a tightrope between the demands of visibility and invisibility not just to the state but also to others such as the extended family. The example of Rahila’s wedding, described in the preface, when her mother collapsed inexplicably during the rituals was one example of how a key moment in the reproduction of kinship structure also became a dramatic enactment of matters that were internal to the family. Mehrunissa’s extended natal family had died during a collective disaster, the 2001 earthquake. Her inability to bury and mourn them appropriately due to the forms of disfigurement induced by the disaster—bodily as well as by way of survivors’ displacement from their homes—made this a charged moment that erupted during the wedding of her daughter, making visible something that had not been talked about earlier. On the other hand, marriage migrants are pursued by the censorious gaze of the police and of the media, for it is assumed that they are sold into marriage, lured by deceitful middlemen or by a well-planned strategy to infiltrate by unleashing the equivalent of demographic terror: the relentless reproduction of the Muslim family in India. But as this chapter has argued, trust and security within the family may be hard to come by not just for women who are allegedly “bought” and “sold” by dalals; in fact, as Bano’s narrative indicated, her matchmaking skills may have enabled her to retain some measure of control over the fixing of these long-distance marriages; the long journey made from the east to marry into Kutch may help women stay in touch with their sisters and friends from back home when they help them come to Kutch as brides.
On the other hand, women like Zoya and Sonal expressed reservations about their natal families, not sure they could trust them to make the right decision for their future. The deployment of suspicion within extended family circuits must be taken into consideration as a type of policing practice that is parallel to and operates along similar modes of detection and suspicion that is deployed by the police in its attempts to detect the (“Bengali”) “infiltrator wife” even though they stem from different sources. These examples also highlight that a clear binary between marriage and trafficking is not entirely tenable. The failure of trust is not just a possibility between dalals and their clients but also within the biological or extended family. Finally, this chapter should be read as a significant anthropological intervention with respect to Muslim families—on which there is a remarkable gap in the literature. The favoring of the “Bengali” woman by the family—even as she is denigrated by the state as an “infiltrator” from Bangladesh—is also a form of policing within the Muslim community, for it allows certain urban families to reassert dominance in the face of changing sociological conditions in Kutch. Local women who are already part of the family are not the right choice for wives in a consanguineous marriage system because they are thought to be too individualistic, uppity, and not docile enough to be a good daughter-in-law. By this yardstick, the foreigner, who is thought to be pliant, is a better marital choice. In the long run, this is a major shift because it is also changing—in this region—the norm of consanguineous marriage among Muslims, long considered as the hallmark of Muslim marriage structure in South Asia.