Rimple Mehta, Lecturer in social work, School of social sciences and psychology, Western Sydney University
Rimple has engaged with the experiences of Bangladeshi women prisoners in India for over a decade. Her doctoral research focussed on the strategies of resistance and survival that the Bangladeshi women prisoners employ to go through the everyday life in prison. Love with male and female prisoners was one of the ways in which they survived and made meaning of prison life. The feeling of being in love also enabled them to break several heteronormative and institutional norms that bound them. It helped them to recast themselves and preserve a sense of 'self'. Another important finding from her work has been the continuity between pathologisation and criminalisation of women and how one leads to the other when women cross borders. She accessed the border through the prison narratives of the Bangladeshi women, who continuously questioned the idea of the state and borders and brought forth the difference between a 'wrong doing' and a 'crime' in matters of crossing the border. Her work with the Bangladeshi women has been published in a book titled Women, Mobility and Incarceration. This work has received recognition in print as well as digital media (here, here and here).
This research led her to work on a research paper on cross border child marriages along the Indo-Bangladesh border. She researched in villages close to the border and found that Bangladeshi girls were given in marriage to families in India, in order to maintain kinship ties on either side of the border. Families on the Indian side made every effort to procure citizenship documents for the Bangladeshi girls/women who marry into their families. Once married, the women are unable to go to the other side to meet their families. Some had taken to technology and made video calls to connect with their natal families in Bangladesh. Their ability to go back to their natal families depended on the porosity of the border at a given point in time and the leniency shown by the border guards. They remained tied not only to their marital family but also the Indian nation-state. The research paper cane be found here.
Thereafter she worked on two research projects, first as a researcher with the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University, which focussed on partition of British India. Second, with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences where she was the lead researcher for a national study on human trafficking in vulnerable districts of India.