ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with experiences of violence that the Bangladeshi women face during their journey to India and then in the prison; but it moves on to discuss affective questions of love, longing, and identity in detention highlighting the centrality of human relationships in the everyday experiences of detention. The Bangladeshi women were socialised from childhood to abstain from interactions with men apart from close kin. But in the prison, they often formed emotionally intimate relationships with men or women or both. The process of falling in love with another inmate, whether male or female, required them to undo/abandon what they had learnt through their years of growing up. Love was one of the ways in which the women dealt with the difficulties of detention. They explored the possibilities of “love” in prison, something that not only helped them spend time in prison but also held the excitement of a kind of “freedom” that they had probably never experienced outside the prison walls.
