Remittance, Purdah and the Shrinking Field
A union in Comilla has sent 340 men abroad over 12 years, mostly to the Gulf. Monthly remittances average BDT 35,000 per household and arrive through a mobile financial service; 61% of receiving households are headed de facto by women whose husbands are absent for 3-5 year stretches. Simultaneously, a brickfield has expanded onto 22 acres of agricultural land, and a new road has cut the village's grazing common. Women's mobility has widened - they now visit the bank agent, the school and the market - but a local salish (informal arbitration) recently ruled that a woman could not register land in her own name while her husband was abroad, on the ground that 'the property must remain under family supervision'. Divorce filings have risen from 2 to 9 per year, and two women who filed were socially boycotted.
1. Explain the apparent contradiction between women's expanded mobility and the salish ruling using the concepts of status, role and patriarchy.
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The contradiction is only apparent. Mobility and authority are different dimensions, and the salish ruling targets the second while conceding the first.
Status and role. With the husband absent, the woman acquires a set of roles - remittance manager, school liaison, bank agent, de facto household head - without acquiring the status that normally accompanies them. Role performance has expanded; status recognition has not. This is role–status dissociation: she does what a head of household does, but is not treated as one.
Patriarchy as a system, not a set of restrictions on movement. Patriarchy operates here not by confining women indoors but by controlling the transmission of property and the definition of legitimate authority. The salish can afford to let women walk to the market because market visits do not threaten lineage control. Land registration does. The ruling is therefore not a backlash against mobility; it is a boundary drawn precisely where mobility would convert into structural power.
Why the ruling is enforceable. The salish draws on kinship and religious legitimacy and has no formal jurisdiction; its power is the threat of social boycott. The two boycotted divorce petitioners show the sanction is real and cheap to apply. Formal law (women's equal inheritance and property rights) exists but is not invoked, because invocation would require a court case the woman cannot sustain against local sanction.
Conclusion. Mobility expanded because it was compatible with the underlying property order. The salish ruling is the system defending the order that mobility had begun to touch. Reading the situation as 'progress' or as 'backlash' misses that both are produced by the same structure.
2. Assess the policy options available to a Union Parishad wanting to protect women's land claims without triggering the boycott mechanism.
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The design problem. Any intervention that visibly empowers an individual woman invites the boycott, and boycott is a diffuse, low-cost sanction that formal authorities cannot easily punish. The policy must therefore shift the default rather than champion individual claimants.
Options, ranked by feasibility.
- Procedural default (strongest). Require the land office to register jointly or in the wife's name by default for households with an absent migrant, with opt-out requiring both spouses' documented consent. The woman does not have to make a claim; the burden falls on whoever wants to exclude her. This avoids singling out any individual.
- Collective rather than individual claiming. Encourage registration through a women's savings group so that no single household bears the sanction. Sanctions work best against isolated actors.
- Reduce the cost of formal invocation. A Union Parishad legal-aid desk with a standing local lawyer, plus a documented record of salish rulings, gives a woman an alternative forum. Publicly recording rulings also makes the salish accountable to a wider audience.
- Sanction the sanction. Condition UP services (certificates, relief lists, scheme inclusion) on non-participation in boycotts. This is blunt and risks punishing the wrong people, so use it narrowly and only against named organisers.
- Address the divorce rise separately. Nine filings may reflect genuine exit from bad marriages or may reflect absent-husband abandonment; do not treat the number as a moral indicator without case data.
Caution. Option 1 is the only one that changes outcomes without requiring a confrontation the woman must survive alone. Options 2-4 are supporting measures. A campaign urging women to 'claim their rights' would be the weakest option: it transfers the entire cost of structural change onto the most exposed party.