Preface

doi:10.7591/cornell/9781501759536.002.0007

Front Matter

Preface

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https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501759536.002.0007

Pages

ix–xii

Published:

November 2021

Extract

This book draws on close to two decades of ethnographic research in Kutch, Gujarat. During the course of my fieldwork, there were two things in my experience that tended to not be spoken about freely within the family: the first was the devastating earthquake of January 2001, and the second was the fact of “Bengali” women—that is, migrant women from eastern parts of India—as wives. The causes and consequences of these public secrets were differently manifested. Although the presence of “Bengali” women tied into the state’s identification of “illegal” migration and “infiltrators” believed to be from Bangladesh, the earthquake was often what would—perhaps could—not be narrated, the wounds inflicted by it perhaps not recountable in an interview or even in conversation. It was during the marriage of a much-beloved daughter that some of these tensions played out for me.

In summer 2003, as schools closed for their annual summer vacations, the wedding season kicked off in Kutch. Abdul’s younger daughter Rahila was to be married. This was a time of some anxiety for the family; marriages of daughters tend to be emotionally fraught occasions in a patriarchal and patrilocal system. The structure of the marriage itself also dramatizes latent structural tensions between wife givers and wife takers. Further, young brides are sent off to their affinal homes with a certain degree of finality and marriage rituals make much of this rupturing of the natal tie. At the same time, Rahila’s marriage was also the first publicly “happy” occasion that Abdul’s family was celebrating since the 2001 earthquake, which had brought in its wake much dislocation, physical and emotional. Although money was scarce, for it was not fully clear how much compensatory cash would come through from the state’s disaster relief fund to repair their old house, it was also the marriage of a much-loved youngest child.

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