Conjugal Separation- A Curse or a Boon: An Insight about Left-behind Wives from Rural Varanasi in India

Relationships between the left behind wives and those who leave, vary, and should not be seen only through livelihood strategies. Hence, an attempt has been made to study the conjugal relations between the wives left behind and their out-migrated husbands. Primary data has been collected during January-March 2010 by undertaking a complete house listing of six villages of Pindra block of Varanasi, a district in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India. The study reveals that the left-behind wives are mostly in contact with their husbands. There are handfuls who feel the aggression of their husbands and feel that they are getting victimized by their husbands’ sexual needs. However, it can be concluded that though there are bound to be exceptions, keeping aside those exceptions it has been found that mostly the left-behind wives in the study area are not stressed out as has been generally conceptualized in various literatures.