She Came to Stay: Bangladeshi Women in India Negotiate Cross Border Child Marriages

Abstract

This paper is based on 14 interviews with young Bangladeshi women, who in their early or late teenage years got married to Indian men. It traces their journey from their natal home in Bangladesh to their marital home in India. It focuses on the ways in which young Bangladeshi girls who ‘illegally’ cross the Indo-Bangladesh border for multiple reasons end up marrying Indian men in a border village in West Bengal. While some were brought to India by their parents with the intention of getting them married, the others found their spouse while labouring on someone’s field or visiting a relative living on the Indian side of the border. The paper explores the role of affect in the lives of these young women who negotiate, subvert and resist various norms and laws imposed on them by the family and state respectively. It brings to light the ways in which love, longing, desires of various sorts are caught in the web of securitization of borders and criminalisation of border crossings.

Keywords: child marriage, cross border, negotiations, Indo-Bangladesh border