Introduction. Marriage and Carcerality in South Asia

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.