Trafficked or Married? Unpacking Dispossession of Matrimonial Choice in Cross-Region Marriage Migration in India

Abstract

The article, based on original research from 246 villages, discusses contemporary marriage migrations of poor women from India’s development peripheries to rural North Indian men. Anti-trafficking activists and organizations in India assert that migrant brides are trafficked into sexual slavery through ‘coerced’ alliances. Employing a postcolonial feminist lens, this article challenges hegemonic anti-trafficking discourse with its gendered presumptions about widespread ‘bride-trafficking’ by showing that the processes of cross-region marriage mediation and motives are replete with contradictions and ambiguities. Fieldwork reveals a range of actors, including the migrant brides, involved in marriage mediation while poverty and heightened dowry compromise women into such matrimonies.

Introduction

From the mid-1990s onward, the rural North Indian marriage-scape, faced with bride deficit due to long term impact of female foeticide, has witnessed locally ineligible bachelors (Hindus and Meo Muslims ¹ ) from Haryana and Rajasthan travel long distances across India to seek wives from its distant and economically marginalized provinces. Internal migration for marriage is experienced by over 97% of Indian women (Krishnan, 2019). Over 74% of Indian women migrate for marriage within their birth district, with marriage migration in North India undertaken by nearly 95% of ever-married women (Fulford, 2013: 6–7). In such marriages, mate selection from the same caste and socio-economic strata is usually ‘arranged’ by family and kin elders. However, cross-region marriages, a specific term used for categorizing this emergent phenomenon, breach customary marriage rules of endogamy as the brides belong to lower castes, other ethnicities and/or different religions. ² The ‘no-dowry demand and all wedding expenses paid’ stance of the North Indian men in garnering migrant brides also piques interest as prohibitive dowry demands of cash, electronic goods, land and jewellery are usually made by prospective grooms.

The non-customary nature of these marriages understandably raises many questions about the modes of marriage-making and the status of migrant brides. There is also a lack of concrete data, either from a government or scholarly perspective, about such marriages. The dominant and almost singular discourse about such marriages and the brides revolves around trafficking – that these marriages constitute egregious instances of bridal trafficking and that the women are all duped or coerced into ‘forced marriage’ by organized trafficking rings and bride-traffickers. This narrative largely emanates from the anti-trafficking lobby consisting of anti-trafficking activists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and Western aid organizations. This ‘victim’ narrative is readily picked up by the media that showcases stories about slave-like status of the migrating brides and their suffering at the hands of their husband-buyers and conjugal families. The Indian law enforcement agencies, swayed by the arguments of the anti-trafficking groups, consider these marriages as a singular assault on the gender rights of the brides, and focus their entire efforts on the brides’ rescue and repatriation to their natal communities.

Scholarly works on cross-region marriages in India primarily discuss the integration of the brides into conjugal families or the reasons that render some rural North Indian men as unfit marriage material locally (Ahlawat, 2009; Kaur, 2004; Mishra, 2013). These works negate the one-dimensional bridal victimhood perspective by contending that the brides themselves arrange chain matrimonies to ease their cultural alienation in North India. However, such discussion is not conducted as a stand-alone focus of inquiry but as part of a larger discussion on marriage migration and the treatment of brides in conjugal communities. Paucity of detailed scholarly analysis thus lends to the dominance of the bridal trafficking narrative.

In consonance with the theme of this Special Issue that problematizes migrant categories, the article seeks to deconstruct the Indian anti-trafficking discourse with its gendered presumptions about widespread ‘bride-trafficking’ and monolithic categorization of ‘trafficked’ for all migrant brides. Migration theorists argue that dichotomies of categories bind people into a logic of exclusion and (il)legality and in doing so, ‘fail to capture adequately the complete relationship between political, social and economic drivers of migration’ (Crawley and Skleparis, 2018).

While acknowledging that trafficking of women for marriage does take place and that the trafficked women are commodified by both the traffickers and the families obtaining them, the article argues that flattening of all cross-region marriages as constitutive of bridal trafficking is erroneous. The simplistic binary of traffickers cheating unsuspecting brides and their parents ignores the heterogeneity of experiences, motives and circumstances that spur such alliances. Crawley and Skleparis (2018) caution against simplistic assumptions about migrant choices. Such assumptions erase the complex social reality of poor families with marriageable-age daughters or the choices women make in face of patriarchal ideology governing female sexuality and lack of access to productive resources for their economic independence.

Thus, the article discusses questions such as: Do these alliances constitute trafficking or legitimate unions? Who are the actors involved in mediating such matrimonies and what are their motives and marriage-brokering practices? What factors compel women and their families to accept these alliances despite worries about deception, trafficking or lack of familial support mechanisms? Such an approach allows us to better unpack the category of ‘all brides as trafficked’ and showcase the agency of the women as well as the cautionary measures undertaken by natal families and communities to deter deception and trafficking.

Methods

My research methods, shaped by epistemological concerns such as the nature of knowledge formation about cross-region marriages and migrant brides in India, employ a feminist methodological perspective. This article draws upon my larger study of cross-region marriages, conducted in four phases spread over 2011–2014, in 226 villages from the receiving regions of Nuh, Rohtak and Rewari of Haryana and Alwar and Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan in North India and 10 each from the two East Indian sending regions of Odisha and West Bengal– regions marked by a high numbers of non-customary cross-India brides in recent years. The choice of 10 villages each from the two East Indian sending regions of Odisha and West Bengal was determined by data repetition from surveys with the brides in Haryana and Rajasthan. This allowed a better understanding about the role of marriage mediators, and the reasons why some regions emerged as popular cross-India marriage destinations.

Anti-trafficking scholars advocate adopting multiple methodological approaches and situating individual narratives within broader socio-economic and political contexts to avoid mis-generalizations (Brunovskis and Surtees, 2010). I consciously selected a vast sample pool and triangulated qualitative and quantitative methods including surveys, semi-structured interviews, focus groups and note-taking. The vagueness over numbers of trafficked migrant brides, modes of marriage-making, and the need to problematize distinct migrant categories resulted in the design of two close-ended baseline surveys, one of all self-identifying cross-India brides (1,546) from a sample of 226 conjugal villages and another of all natal families from two clusters of sending regions with one or more daughters in cross-region matrimonies (154 families). This survey sought details about the grooms’ and brides’ socio-economic status, caste, religion, and marriage-making, including details of marriage brokers, marriage commission and reasons for rejection in their respective local marriage markets.

Qualitative methods, used in conjunction with quantitative methods, are valued for problematizing conditions for mobility, determining modes of coercion and deception, and providing insights about the lived reality of hidden populations such as those trafficked (Tyldum and Brunovskis, 2005). Detailed research was conducted in 45 villages in the districts of Rewari, Rohtak, and Nuh in Haryana, and Alwar and Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan, and in six villages each in the districts of Baleshwar and Cooch Behar in the east Indian provinces of Odisha and West Bengal. Interviews with 45 Muslim brides married to Meo Muslim men and 71 Hindu brides (50 Dalit), men in cross-region matrimonies (n = 36), men’s family members (n = 39), women’s family members (n = 41), marriage agents including brides as mediators (n = 11), villagers, and caste and religious elders (n = 74), Caste Council (Khap Panchayat) members (n = 8) and social activists (n = 5), as well as 21 focus groups with brides, women’s parents, villagers and caste councils provided cross-referencing of information. Interviews with Government of India’s Anti-Human Trafficking Cell officials and two of India’s leading anti-bridal trafficking activists were conducted in New Delhi. Research assistants were hired from participating NGO staff base.

My identity as a North Indian female in an inter-ethnic and inter-caste marriage made the cross-region brides interrogate me about my experience and simultaneously share theirs. They viewed me as an insider solely because of my shared gender and experience of mixed marriage, yet viewed me as an outsider precisely because of my multiple privileges of class, caste, education and location. Trust-building, so crucial for honest dialogue, was facilitated in part by seven local NGOs and one rural women-led legal advocacy group collaborating with me. This collaboration allayed the concerns of rural folks about selective and sensationalist use of data. The project with all its research instruments was approved by my university’s ethics committee. Consent was orally obtained from all participants and all research assistants signed confidentiality agreements.

Theorizing with post-colonial feminism

Post-colonial feminists such as Chandra Mohanty and Uma Narayan have consistently sought to deconstruct hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge formation about ‘Third World subjects’, and in particular, that of the female subalterns. The integration of post-colonial feminist theory, which makes a case for recognizing the continuing legacy of colonial representational strategies on ‘Third World’ women’s bodies, provides theoretical tools to deconstruct ideological imperatives behind totalizing trauma narratives of victim-brides. Post-colonial feminists argue that the ‘border-crossing’ of certain women’s issues, such as female feticide, forced marriages or trafficking of women – issues that are of serious concern due to their violation of gender rights and the harm done to the female body – from the ‘Third World’ to the West, occurs with greater ease and frequency precisely because these appear ‘different’ and ‘exotic’ (Narayan, 1997: 100). Mohanty (2003) argues that instead of asymmetrical representational strategies, we need to examine hierarchies of privilege and power based on ‘particular historical, material and ideological power structures’ (p. 28) that lend to women’s subordination. Instead, what often occurs is ‘cultural muscle-flexing’ and the inherent misogyny of native communities (Narayan, 1997: 18). Such flawed representations ‘result in political agendas and public policies that fail to be adequately responsive to the interests of women from . . . marginalised groups’ (Narayan, 1997: 44).

Learning from marriage migration in South-East Asia

Cross-country marriage migration is prominent in South-east and East Asian countries such as China, Vietnam and South Korea, where the largest movement of women has occurred to fill the male marriage squeeze. Scholars urge caution around bracketing such marriages into neat categories, as the ‘ambiguities . . . make it difficult for an intimate insider – let alone an outside observer – to pronounce with any degree of certainty where the distinction lies between real and fraudulent marriage’ (Freeman, 2011: 108). They critique dominant discourses about bride victimhood and large-scale human trafficking (Tseng, 2015), arguing that marriage migration needs to be understood as a coping strategy in the larger contexts of globalization, uneven regional development, and structural adjustment programmes in sending countries (Hsia, 2008; Xiong, 2022). Simultaneously, scholars demonstrate that trafficking for marriage is also on the rise in China and Vietnam. For example, within China, widening economic disparity between provinces has spurred peasant women from economically marginalized provinces to choose ‘to be sold as wives through . . . ‘matchmakers’ who profit from the sale’ (Zhuang, 1998: 6). North Korean women defectors who enter China illegally due to economic desperation often fall prey to co-national individual traffickers and organized gangs (Kim et al., 2009: 158–159). Vietnamese women marry Taiwanese males as a ‘voluntary’ act to improve their economic position by actively submitting to patriarchal roles through the act of ‘performing docile’’ (Tseng, 2015: 118). This calculated risk-taking and deliberate self-transformation into market commodities not only muddies the boundaries between victimhood and agency but also runs counter to discourses of the brides’ passive victimhood.

Bridal-slave discourse

Notwithstanding, prominent Indian anti-trafficking activists such as Shafiqur Rahman who founded an NGO, Empower India, assert that, in India, all cross-region brides are trafficked for marriage as the strategies used by both traffickers and marriage agents involve deception and commodification. Rahman contends that, ‘in 100 per cent of cases, these aren’t marriages. These are trafficking, pure and simple. The men buy women, sell women, and do trafficking of women. Each girl has been sold 4-10 times’. ³ Shafiqur Rahman contends that he has coined the term ‘bride-trafficking’ for cross-region marriages as it is ‘trafficking for the purpose of getting brides and nothing else’ and that ‘bride-trafficking’ is ‘about 4-6-8 people sexually sharing the same woman. It is true for all cases. In many instances, they satisfy the sexual lust of all men in a village’. ⁴ The main webpage of Rahman’s NGO, Empower People, states that:

The business of marriage matching or bride trade (trafficking) is not different from sex trafficking because it treats women as a commodity to be sold to some unknown men and their purpose is not to find lifetime loving partners but to arrange a wife to be treated as a sex object, domestic worker and all-around slave. ⁵

Another leading Indian anti-trafficking activist, Ravikant, President of an NGO, Shakti Vahini, argues that the coerced marriage involves labour bondage as ‘the woman is made to work all day and is not given her rights.’ ⁶ Contention are made that such alliances are child marriage, evident from Empower People’s webpage stating that, ‘The most painful part of the whole bride business is that it is also a new form of child marriage which has emerged on a wide scale’. ⁷

A handful of Indian NGO reports from the last decade similarly claim that all cross-region marriages constitute cases of ‘trafficking and forced marriage’; that poor parents are pushed into selling their daughters to agents who prey on their poverty by offering money; that the women are forced into sexual slavery by North Indian male buyers; and that organized bride-trafficking rings operate in the bride-deficit regions of Haryana and Rajasthan (Blanchett, 2003; Pandey and Kant, 2003; Rahman, 2009). The magnitude of bride-trafficking is asserted by statements like ‘there are about 5-10 thousands [sic] women forced into marriage by coercion or trade in Haryana’, or ‘[e]very year, thousands of young women and girls in northern India are lured or sold into involuntary marriage’ (Pandey and Kant, 2003: 7). Another report, Paro: A Woman Sold in Mewat, framing its study specifically on the Meo, similarly stresses the extensiveness of bride-trafficking without providing details about the methods used to arrive at such figures (Rahman, 2009).

When asked directly about the methodology used to arrive at such numbers, the anti-trafficking activists behind such reports reply: ‘[we] cannot give you a figure or a percentage. But we know many of the marriages are through organized crime. Cases are documented. There is no data on this but the numbers may run into thousands’. ⁸ Scholars working on global sex trafficking urge caution as ‘most reports go on to quote large numbers without any indication of what they are actually referring to’ (Doezema, 2010: 5), with extrapolations made from unstandardized data collection methods (Weitzer, 2014: 12).

Local and international media also play a key role in disseminating ‘trauma narratives’ in the popular imaginary by employing emotive stories of wife-sharing, sexual slavery, and bride-trafficking and the use of words like ‘bridal slave’, or ‘India’s Bride Buying Country’ in their headlines for stories on such marriages and brides. ₉ Victim accounts and unsubstantiated estimates are reproduced uncritically from NGO reports, and, quite often, the same people figure constantly in media reports, either as anti-trafficking experts or as victim-survivors. ¹⁰ Deliberate agenda setting for the media is evident from the statement of Shakti Vahini’s Ravi Kant, that ‘we wanted the government to admit that it [trafficking for forced marriage] was a problem. The media served as an important tool to influence public opinion’. ¹¹

According to Weitzer (2014), sensationalist victim narratives allow anti-trafficking activists and NGOs to attract ‘media attention, funding, government support, and public involvement’ (p. 6). In India, this institutionalization is stark. The anti-trafficking NGOs and activists are constantly invited by the government and UN bodies – as ‘experts’ on the subject of trafficking for forced marriage – for consultation, report writing, ¹² workshop facilitations, and the training of law enforcement officers. ¹³

Messiness of marriage-making

This is where my large-scale study of the brides and natal families acquires significance to understand how such marriages occur and who the marriage brokers are. Natal and conjugal region surveys reveal that trafficking either by bride-traffickers, trafficking gangs, or husbands constitutes a small percentage of the total cross-region marriages (Tables 1 and 2). Brides (n = 80) emphasize that they are married according to the Hindu religious customs (n = 43), or that documentary proof about their marriages exists either as Marriage Certificates or Nikahnamas ¹⁴ (n = 37). Brides also disclose their trafficked or sold status (n = 5). Some underreporting from the conjugal region survey can be attributed to the unwillingness or fear of the bride-victims to openly state their trafficked status, as in the case of 62 choosing not to disclose the mode of marriage-making (Table 1). However, the same does not appear to hold true for the natal region findings, where a small percentage of nondisclosure is attributable to the death of family members who could have provided details about such marriages.

Table 1.

Mode of mediation for select conjugal regions.

Mediator	Rohtak	Rewari	Alwar	Total (No.)	Total (%)
Agent	49	9	3	61	8.36
Migrant bride	173	10	20	203	27.84
Husband	181	21	16	218	29.90
Husband–bride duo	58	12	17	87	11.93
Sister	12	3	5	20	2.74
Self a	24	3	9	36	4.93
Love Marriage	8	4	2	14	1.92
Husband-trafficker	-	-	4	4	.55
Bride-trafficker	6	-	3	9	1.23
Migratory father/brother	11	1	-	12	1.65
Maulana	-	-	3	3	.41
Undisclosed/ not remember	62	-	-	63	8.64
Total	584	63	82	729	100

Source: Author’s research study in Alwar District (Rajasthan) and Rewari District (Haryana) (2011) and Rohtak District (Haryana) (2014).

^aThis includes marriages through Jamaats.

Table 2.

Mode of mediation for select natal regions.

Mediator	Baleshwar (No.)	Cooch Behar (No.)	Total (No.)	Total (%)
Bride	19	26	45	23.43
Bride trafficker	1	2	3	1.56
Husbands of cross-region brides	10	16	26	13.54
Local locators	23	41	64	33.33
Love marriage	1	5	6	3.0
Migration for work (bride)	-	3	3	1.56
Migration for work (male family member)	2	11	13	6.77
Sister	9	14	23	11.98
Trafficker	2	3	5	2.60
Not remember		5	5	2.60
Total	67 a	126 a	193	100

Source: Author’s research study in Odisha (2011) and West Bengal (2014).

^aIncludes siblings in cross-region marriages, with 50 and 104 families surveyed in Baleshwar and Cooch Behar, respectively.

The transactional nature of dowry and the centrality of cash and other assets in firming up marriage alliances between families is of fairly recent vintage among the Dalits and Muslims in India, two groups from which a significant majority of cross-region brides come from. Excessive dowry demands offers dispossessed males, and by extension, their families – who are landless, precariously employed, or underemployed, or who face dislocation to the city as economic migrants – a form of economic security that they otherwise lack (for more details, see Kukreja, 2022). It forces impoverished families to face the spectre of debt bondage and land alienation to get their daughters married locally. Thus, the perfect entry point for North Indian men with their matrimonial offers of ‘no dowry and all wedding expenses paid’ – these are often hard for poor families with marriageable-age daughters to turn down, a fact underscored by one parent, who said:

Do you think parents like to marry off their daughters in a foreign land? No parent wants that. It is poverty that has forced me to marry her off there. How life will play out is totally dependent on how we are economically placed. ¹⁵

In addition, the high valuation to lighter skin tone in the marriage market due to its association with beauty and higher social and caste status, also makes men demand higher dowries for dark-skinned women (Kukreja, 2021). A Dalit mother stated: ‘Many men came to see my daughter but rejected her. . . . They said, “we will marry her if you give more dowry”’. ¹⁶

Natal families employ the terms ‘sale’ (bikri), ‘trade’ (byopaar), and ‘marriage’ (bibaha), and make statements like, ‘he sold my daughter to a worthless man’, ‘he traded my daughter’ (aamaar meye re byopaar), and ‘I married my daughter off in a temple following all customs’ (jhiyo re bibaha kori diyo) to distinguish marriage from trafficking. Similarly, distinct terms of address for each category of marriage makers used by the rural populace, such as ‘agent’ (commission-based marriage mediator such as a bride–husband duo), ‘dalal’, (traffickers or shady mediators), and ‘bicholia’ (altruistic mediator), indicate that, in their minds, there is clarity around how each group is perceived in terms of their method of arranging cross-region marriages.

Locators

All marriage brokers, including bride brokers, rely on the local people in the natal regions for ‘locating’ potential brides. These locators, called ‘ghotoks’ in West Bengal and ‘madhyastas’ in Odisha, both terms used locally for marriage mediators, are naturally embedded in the source communities; they speak the language of the area; and they have an extensive rural kin and social network that they can tap into. Oftentimes, the immediate family members of cross-region brides become informal locators, either due to their underlying fear of the ill treatment of their daughters; or the incentive of a commission. Other independent commission-based locators include teashop owners, drivers of passenger minivans that ply on rural routes, and traditional local matchmakers. ¹⁷ The locators are responsible for mediating one-third of such matrimonies (see Table 1).

They ‘travel from village to village and scour for poor parents with four to five daughters. Poor means someone who is landless or has very little land, has no other resources, and does not have a regular source of livelihood’. ¹⁸ They offer a ‘dowry-free, all-expenses paid’ marriage proposal to such parents. The marriage broker pays the locator’s fee. In the Cooch Behar district of West Bengal, in 2014, this ranged from Rs 5000 to 7000. ¹⁹

Informal bride-mediators

Suppose I get married here first. I will then go and arrange marriages of a couple of other women from my family or of neighbours in the village. Those women then mediate a couple of other such marriages. ²⁰

Cross-region brides arrange the largest numbers of cross-region marriages (Tables 1 and 2), thus making some regions emerge as marriage-migration hubs more than others due to chain migration. Often, they are asked to ‘arrange a bride just like you’ for male relatives or neighbours. Their natal relatives and neighbours also request arranging similar dowry-free matrimonies for their females. In addition, Muslim cross-region brides among the Meo marry their sons or conjugal male relatives with their immediate natal female family members, like nieces (n = 5).

Notwithstanding, Indian anti-trafficking activists assert that, ‘the women traffickers pose as sisters just to dupe everyone. In actuality, they are pimps trading in women and pretending to be sisters’. ²¹ Contrarily, my natal region surveys reveal that a significant proportion of brides are blood sisters and often mediate matrimonies for their female siblings (Tables 1 and 2). In Cooch Behar, out of 126 women in cross-region alliances, 44 are sisters. In Baleshwar, 20 out of 67 brides are sisters. Such sibling marriages have a lapse of time between the two alliances. Interviews with groups of married sisters in conjugal regions (n = 5 pairs) also contradict the ‘madam in a brothel posing as a sister’ ²² scenario, through comments like: ‘I got my younger sister married to our neighbour here. This way, even after the death of our parents, we will be together’ ²³ and ‘I saw my younger brother-in-law was a good person. So, I got my younger sister married to him’. ²⁴

Husband-mediators

The husbands, whose role as go-betweens has been overlooked in earlier studies, emerge as a significant category of marriage brokers (Tables 1 and 2). They tap into their wives’ social and kin networks to locate potential brides. Informal husband-mediators are men considered to be in successful cross-region marriages with ‘a wife who treats her in-laws and her husband well and looks after the house and children properly’. ²⁵ Of the 36 husbands interviewed, 11 had requested a male relative to mediate a cross-region marriage for them. Oftentimes, husbands and their cross-region brides work as mediator-duos: the husbands negotiate with the male clients in conjugal regions while their wives handle the natal region section of matchmaking.

However, the offer of ‘we will pay all expenses and give you a small fee’ cause many husbands, oftentimes economically destitute, landless, or with precarious livelihoods, to transition to commission-based marriage-brokering. In 2014, some husband-brokers from Rohtak District charged ‘a flat rate of Rs 60,000 per marriage of which 20,000 is the net profit’. ²⁶ They seek to justify the high fees by contending: ‘Why should I take the effort and run about to arrange weddings? It is entirely up to you to label my work either as pimping or mediating’. ²⁷

Army men and truck drivers

Men with some contacts in the natal regions, due to their marriage there, or the nature of their employment in the army, construction industry or the long distance transport business, are also asked to arrange marriages:

Some of the truck drivers who couldn’t get married locally went to Assam or West Bengal, got married, established connections, and then started doing the business of arranging brides . . . Now, every second person says, ‘let me arrange your marriage. It will cost only five to ten thousand Rupees’. ²⁸

Jamaat or religious congregations

The Jamaat, or religious congregation, popularized by the Tablighi Jama’at among the Meo, is another unlikely marriage broker, albeit one with no expenses or commission. These Jamaats, consisting of a fixed number of Meo men, usually young in age and studying in Madrassas, undertake tours to preach the correct tenets of Islam in other parts of India. A Meoni widow with no land or resources said: ‘my son studied in a madrassa and went on a Jamaat. The Maulvi in a madrassa in Bihar arranged a match for him – in fact, my son got married to his niece’. ²⁹

Blurred boundaries: deceptions and trafficking

A number of migrant brides and their husbands transition into brokering marriages in return for big commissions from desperate, ageing bachelors. The women tap into their social networks and often work in tandem with their husbands to draw in potential male clients, by projecting a ‘good wife’ persona as an advertisement for their ability to fetch similar wives. They walk a thin line between trafficking and brokering as, oftentimes, they gloss over or falsify details about the men’s physical ability, age, marital status, and/or earning ability to make them appear attractive ‘husband’ material.

Women are also tricked by their distant female relatives or women from their natal villages who are in cross-region matrimonies. They usually convince the women’s parents to send their daughters with them on the false pretext of helping them with child-care or household work. They are then married off to anyone who offers them their asking price, as happened with one woman who said she was: ‘sold by the maternal aunt to an old man. She told my mother that I would help her with household work’. ³⁰

Undeniably, criminal gangs traffic brides and, in most cases usually, involve rural people embedded in both natal and conjugal communities. Similar to the assertions of the anti-trafficking activists, such gangs lure the women to the conjugal regions on false pretexts of employment in the city and then offer them on the marriage market to whoever is willing to pay the highest price. However, as evident from Tables 1 and 2, this is not the singular source of marriage-making despite the assertions of anti-trafficking activists.

Common to both trafficking gangs and profit-oriented marriage mediators is the charging of an all-inclusive ‘commission’ ranging from Rupees 40,000 to 300,000, paid for by the men and their families. This cost includes the travel and stay of the mediator, the prospective groom, and a couple of his accompanying relatives, as well as wedding expenses like bridal clothes, a feast, and the priest. It is this payment of the commission and marriage-related expenses that gets highlighted by anti-trafficking activists for its ‘bought wife’ narrative.

Adding to the messiness, the common Indian adage that ‘a thousand lies have to be told for a marriage to take place’ acknowledges the exaggerated claims, lies, and deceptions that each side resorts to in order to clinch the matrimony. Of the 116 women and 41 natal families interviewed, 94 mentioned that a full disclosure had not been made about the men’s economic status, physical ability, and/or their marital status, either as divorcees with children or as already married. Muddling the monochromatic rendering of victimhood even further, many brides stressed that, though they might have been deceived about the men’s socio-economic status or abilities, they were not ‘bonded’ slaves. They actively sought to underscore their non-trafficked status by citing their ability to speak freely for interviews, their freedom to use cell phones to speak to their natal families, and their ability to travel between their natal and conjugal homes.

Challenges to the patriarchal idealization of a virgin wife

Subterfuge is not the exclusive domain of grooms, as 13 out of 65 natal families openly admitted to resorting to lies or hiding facts from prospective grooms, either separately or in collusion with locators and marriage brokers. Though the numbers are not enough to indicate trends, these examples contradict totalizing narratives about the gullibility and naivety of natal families. Families with daughters or sisters who are either widows, deserted by their husbands, sexually abused, or those with children born out of wedlock, actively seek out locators or bride brokers to arrange cross-region matrimonies. For example, a man stated that his ‘sister had got involved with a man. No local family would want her as a bride. The only option was to marry her to an outsider, a Haryanvi man’. ³¹ In such instances, the natal families enact deliberate acts of deception, either separately or in collusion with locators and marriage brokers, on the prospective grooms. The deceptions, however, are also tinged with worries about the women’s future well-being, if the grooms or their families do indeed learn about the women’s past.

Partial truths about gendered commoditization

The vociferous assertion about ‘bought’ brides by the anti-trafficking lobby is derived from the problematic description of the women as ‘maal’, or goods, and the manner in which the commission is negotiated by marriage mediators. A man negotiating for a bride for his unemployed elder brother explained: ‘The “agent” said, “You need to have Rs 70,000. I will show you at least 10–20 to choose from. Keep the one that catches your fancy and suits your family”’. ³²

Families seeking brides through brokers not only internalize and reproduce market economy ideology and language, they also act as consumers in a purely capitalist sense in how they describe the process of obtaining a woman: ‘We are now going to buy a bride. We will pay the money and get her. We have spoken to two to three people here and whoever finds the right match, we will buy her from him’. ³³

The complicity of families who source brides from marriage mediators known for their clandestine and deceptive operations cannot be denied. They abet the commodification of women by wilfully choosing to turn a blind eye to the overtly shady operations of such brokers. The bottom line for them is to obtain a guaranteed ‘work horse’ for the best price with no questions asked, as evident from this ‘ask’ by a prospective mother-in-law that the broker ‘get a woman from a poor family, one who will be able to work well, that is, she can cook and also do agricultural chores’. ³⁴

Sadly, ‘horror narratives’ of migrant brides being surveilled and ill-treated bear partial truths. They (n = 93) encounter regulatory regimes that local brides are usually exempt from, ranging from total confinement within the house to restricted movement within the village. The claustrophobia brought on by the constant surveillance and regulation results in the women experiencing their lives as ‘being confined to a prison’. Many (n = 73) are refused permission to go to their natal regions in the early years of their marriage. Conjugal families enforce these regimes in fear that their ‘investment’ might be wasted, as evidenced in a sister-in-law’s comment: ‘We’ve spent so much and then she might run away’.

It is such experiences that anti-trafficking activists and organizations singularly choose to present as evidence of all brides being trafficked. The framing of gendered migration as a ‘moral’ crime, undertaken to evoke an emotional response to elicit a stronger carceral approach (Doezema, 2010), erases the subjectivity of women who actively choose to continue in such marriages despite avenues to escape or repatriate. The blurring of the boundaries between victimhood and agency is exhibited in the calculated risk-taking of one widowed low-caste woman in her early 30s:

My son fell sick and had to be hospitalized. I had no money for the fees. At that time, a man approached me. . . . He knew a woman from this region and her Haryanvi husband who would arrange marriages of women. Did I feel scared that I might be sold off in marriage? . . . I had no other option but to take a chance on this. ³⁵

The victim status was also belied by a handful of cross-region brides who had been widowed, deserted or given a divorce by their North Indian husbands (n = 7). Contrary to expectations that they might want to seize such opportunities to return home, they had actively sought matrimony in the same region. Compromised by the lack of productive assets and lesser educational attainments, which act as barriers to women’s economic independence, one argued:

What would I do if I returned home? Life as a single woman is hard. My parents are dead. I would be an additional burden on my brother. I could not remarry there. But here, widowed or divorced men are willing to do so, so I chose to remarry here. ³⁶

However, the trafficking narrative in India ‘suggests overall that women are victims whether they know it or not, and it obscures some of the ways they express resistance, exert influence and create change. It makes it difficult to imagine any good migration’ (Constable, 2006: 4; emphasis original). The victim status as the most important defining category also feeds into hegemonic discourses about third-world women as silent victims of patriarchal violence (Mohanty, 2003). According to Constable (2006), ‘[i]t seems ironic that some of the activist groups that most strongly oppose the demeaning treatment and condescending images of women, ultimately traffic in those very images themselves’ (p. 19).

Parents and the brides become wiser: enacting agency, initiating checks

The one positive fallout of the trafficking trope and its circulation by the media is the heightened vigilance of natal communities towards cross-region proposals and marriage brokers and a nascent emphasis on accountability and transparency from marriage mediators of all hues. One husband-broker reported: ‘I had to give a photocopy of my Aadhar ³⁷ card to the women’s parents. The families want evidence that I am genuine and not a trafficker’. ³⁸ Feedback from cross-region brides – given either when returning home for visits or through phone calls – about the deceptions and lies of mediators has also made other parents wary. The same social and kin networks that are tapped by the brokers and bride locators are also utilized to shame, denounce and punish those who deceive the women and their families. For example, a father of a bride who acted as a locator for his son-in-law, and brokered several marriages involving a high degree of deception, ‘got ostracized by the community. No one in the village speaks to him or his family. Neither can the daughter visit home’. ³⁹

One method of conducting verification checks (janch pardtaal) against frauds and deceptions involves ‘going personally to the prospective grooms’ villages to run background checks instead of taking the mediator’s word at face value’. ⁴⁰ Such pre-marriage verification visits, sponsored by the mediators with the expenses provided by the prospective grooms, are usually undertaken by the women’s immediate male kin to ‘speak to 2–3 villagers there and ask about the man – about his character, his job, and all the details of his life’. ⁴¹ One hundred and sixty-six interviews with the brides and their parents reveal that, while the number of pre-marriage verification trips is less (n = 6), post-marriage verification trips in which the fathers and/or brothers accompany the bride to her new home are numerous (n = 25). These visits allow the woman’s relatives to place pressure on both the mediators and the prospective grooms to not make false claims as any deceptiveness can ruin their future matchmaking prospects.

The growing astuteness about gender friendly laws and the courts as a refuge for exploited or abused women is also making some Hindu families (n = 7) opt for registration of marriage, as ‘they can testify in front of the judge and obtain justice. Not so if the marriage occurs in a temple’. ⁴² Natal families have also begun taking wedding photographs as a safety guard against fraudulent marriages: ‘we can show the police photos of the men who married our daughters to identify them’. ⁴³ What also emerges is that traffickers do not allow the sham marriages to be photographed for fear that the police can use these as evidence in case a ‘sale’ goes wrong. ⁴⁴

Conclusion

While acknowledging that trafficking for marriage does take place in small numbers and that such trafficked brides are commodified and objectified by the traffickers and conjugal families, assertions about the large-scale nature of trafficking are based on anecdotal trauma narratives and not on rigorously conducted empirical research. Advocacy groups and activists need to exercise caution in their categorical fetishism (Crawley and Skleparis, 2018) with the labels ‘trafficked brides’ and ‘bride-trafficking’ as these classifications have very specific ‘embodied and material effects’ (Robertson, 2019). Striking a cautionary note, we need to examine the ‘dynamic nature’ of categories as these have policy implications and public reception (Robertson, 2019)

As Mohanty (2003) cautions, ‘universal grouping’ of the brides as trafficked assumes that they are ‘an already constituted, coherent group with identical interest and desires’ (p. 21). Variations in experiences of cross-region brides is thus erased by assuming the ‘sameness of their oppression’ (Mohanty, 2003).

My research reveals a tremendous diversity in the manner through which the women end up in the two North Indian provinces of Haryana and Rajasthan, and in the range of actors, with differing motives, involved in mediating cross-region alliances. Mediation is commission-based as much as it is altruistic and informal. Desperate bachelors seek wives through these varied brokers just as much as poverty-stricken parents of marriageable-age daughters approach these brokers to arrange ‘dowry-free and all wedding expenses paid’ alliances. Notwithstanding the diversity of actors, motives and strategies propelling such matrimonies, the agenda of the anti-trafficking lobby creates a moral panic about the so-called bride-victims to justify the institutionalization of the rescue industry. Such victim narratives erase the agency of the women – an agency exhibited either by their pragmatic opting for such matrimonies or by their undertaking of negotiations and/or resistance – as well as the cautionary measures undertaken by natal families and communities to deter deception and trafficking.

The ‘rescue, repatriation, and rehabilitation’ package stridently pushed by the anti-trafficking groups misses the nuances shaping the women’s compromised decision-making about their marriage options, marriage partners and their future. Instead of pointing fingers at the structural and systemic discriminations and exclusions that create a zero-sum choice for poor women from socio-economically marginalized communities, the anti-trafficking lobby picks on easy targets such as the women’s poor parents and their husbands to blame.

The impact of such distorted knowledge formation with a singularly heavy emphasis on trafficking has long term implications on the legal status and the inheritance rights of the brides and their children. This discourse runs the danger of being appropriated by the conjugal family members, who might want to deny the women and their children their rightful share of the men’s assets. The ‘rescue and repatriate’ paradigm can also be very convenient for such families, as the women are ‘rescued’ by law enforcement agencies and sent back to their natal communities, thus leaving the field open for the family’s appropriation of deceased husbands’ property and other assets. To conclude, a more useful lens to study these marriage migrations, within the context of spread of capitalist relations, would be re-consider women’s pragmatic marriage choice as the exercise of their neoliberally compromised agency.

Author biography

Reena Kukreja is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Development Studies with cross-appointment to the Gender Studies Department and affiliation with the Cultural Studies Program at Queen’s University, Canada. Her research interests and filmmaking practice is focussed on bordering regimes, political economy, marriage migration, South Asian masculinities, caste and trafficking. Her current work examines the intersections of masculinity, securitization of borders and political economy in the lives of undocumented South Asian men in Greece. She is also engaged in another study examining the impact of Far-Right populism in Europe and Canada on racialized migrant workers in the public-facing gig economy. She has published in leading journals in the fields of migration, ethnic studies, masculinities and area studies. Her monograph on marriage migration in India, Why Would I Be Married Here? Marriage Migration and Dispossession in Neoliberal India (Cornell University Press) was published in April 2022. She was a guest editor for a Special Issue for NORMA: International Journal of Masculinity Studies titled, ‘Bordering Regimes and Transitioning Masculinities of Racialized Migrant Men: A Case Study of the EU’. She is putting the final touches to an edited volume for Palgrave titled, South Asians in Southern Europe: Examining Love, Labour, and Desire.