Across the High Seas

Abstract

This article examines the issues and concerns faced by Indian women in transnational marriages or what are popularly known as NRI marriages in India. It discusses how the Indian laws, the courts, and women try to deal with the difficulties and problems relating to issues of abuse, abandonment, and violence. It also highlights the inadequacies in laws and policies relating to such marriages in India. This article is complimentary to the article by Ann Stewart that concentrates on the "receiving" end of transnational marriages in the United Kingdom, and focuses on the ways in which the socio-legal context of the receiving State (in this case, the United Kingdom) presents difficulties for South Asian women. This article, conversely, takes a "sending" perspective, that is, the response of the home state, India, to the difficulties faced by Indian women involved in transnational marriages.

Lived Experiences of Women Facing Domestic Violence in India

“…A unique finding of this study was abandonment by husbands. Although there is some documentation of abandonment in transnational marriages in India (Bajpai, 2013), the current study indicates that domestic marriage abandonment is also a huge problem. Women were sent to their natal homes on some pretext, and then the husband either absconded from the marriage or served the woman with a divorce notice.…”

Im/mobility as a form of gender-based violence: the case of transnationally abandoned wives in India

“…Within these modern immigration regimes, parents, families, and communities seemingly accept the risks of transnational marriage which scales up inequalities between men and women, wife-takers and wife-givers, as well as the sponsoring and the sponsored spouse in the face of future potential to migrate (Charsley, 2007). These risks, faced by Indian marriage migrant women, encompass various forms of gender-based violence including marriage abandonment; these have been documented across various diasporic contexts in the UK (Bajpai, 2013), the US (Bhandari, 2024), Canada (Merali et al, 2015) and Australia (Vasil, 2023).…”