Wedding across Borders: Narratives of Marriage, Migration and Desertion

The agrarian crisis that engulfed the northern Indian state of Punjab post-Green Revolution era has been worsened by the neo-liberal regime, inducing rampant migration of the young and aspirational to relatively developed countries. Subsequently, with narratives of better life abroad, the desirability of a Non-Resident Indian (NRI) groom has superseded that of an agrarian groom, developing a feverish frenzy among locals to marry their daughters with NRIs. Meanwhile, thousands of cases of male NRIs marrying and deserting their wives have come to the limelight through police complaints and media reports. Deploying a synthesis of Constructivist Grounded Theory and Feminist Methodologies as a theoretical framework, the paper draws from 52 qualitative interviews that include women deserted by their NRI husbands, their family members and the practitioners consisting of police personnel, lawyers and members of civil society organizations. The analysis reveals that a transnational marriage is solemnized as family enterprise envisaged to achieve upward social mobility where patriarchal kinship networks play a crucial role. Hence, marrying a daughter to an NRI is fashioned as a gateway for the other members of the family to move abroad. Further, as the field evidence unveils, majority of the cases cannot be reduced to oversimplified binaries of victim (women) and perpetrator (men), as suggested by dominant discourse in media and public policy. Instead, the phenomenon is a resultant of broader processes of capitalization and globalization whereby local customs are interlinked with creating global labor forces— dowry transactions in marriage are utilized by grooms from marginal backgrounds as a fluid fund to finance the emigration process. Therefore, apart from unraveling the subterranean currents of political economy of marriage and migration in the region, the study highlights the gendered trajectories of failed aspirations; and thus, provides a counter narrative to predominant interlinkage of migration and upward social mobility.