
Contents
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The Reluctant Matchmaker The Reluctant Matchmaker
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Family Secrets Family Secrets
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Peer Surveillance Peer Surveillance
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Suspicion and the Family Suspicion and the Family
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Conclusion Conclusion
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4 Blood and Water: The “Bengali” Wife and Close-Kin Marriage among Muslims
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Published:November 2021
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Abstract
This chapter advances with forms of policing that may be continuous across the domains of the state and family even though they may operate within different moral universes. Notwithstanding forms of bureaucratic rationality that are believed to structure practices of governmentality of which policing is a key component, the police rely on ways of seeing that often rely on intuitive assessments of who is inside or outside the law. Similarly, as the chapter emphasizes, an imbalance in the flow of information, suspicion, and trust in the family may threaten to destabilize the traditional order. Even as the “Bengali” wife is seen as a threatening outsider to the state, she may be a desired wife or daughter-in-law within the family, her lack of familiarity being her biggest appeal. The chapter then shifts to argue that traditional consanguineous marriages may at times jeopardize the delicate balance of information management. It stresses that the key fault lines are not necessarily between kin and nonkin or between “wife givers” and “wife takers,” the key categories through which much of South Asian kinship has been understood, but through the management of generational cohorts and the use of lateral surveillance therein. The availability of the “Bengali” wife who is an “outsider” allows the family to circumvent the crisis of intimate knowledge attendant on marrying within the family while also saving face by not marrying a different (possibly lesser) local Muslim caste.
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