‘It Gets Really Boring if You Stay at Home’: Women,Work and Temporalities in Urban India

Abstract

This article explores narratives of boredom among young lower middle class women employed in the bourgeoning services sector in India, across cafes, call centres, malls and offices. These young women cite boredom from ‘sitting at home’ as a reason to seek employment. Adopting Bourdieu’s understanding of temporal relations as informed by ‘subjective expectations’ and ‘objective chances’, I place young women’s temporal narratives in the context of post-1990 socio-economic change in India. I show that there is a shift in young lower middle class women’s expectations, particularly on the basis of acquisition of higher education. By rendering the space of home – characterised by compulsion to participate in housework, pressure to get married and restrictions on mobility and friendships – as temporally insignificant, young women resist gender norms. Their narratives contribute to gendering scholarship on temporal disruptions in the context of socio-economic change, which is currently overdetermined by young men’s experiences.

Introduction

Women commonly speaking never feel this distemper: they have always something to do; time hangs not on their hands (unless they be fine Ladies) – Thomas Gray (1716–1771) on the affliction of boredom. (Spacks, 1995: 56)

The significance of the dialectical relationship between temporalities and social life has long been recognised by sociologists (Adam, 1995; Gell, 1992; Nowotny, 1992). Many historical and contemporary studies position employment as central to modern social life, and thus, to determining temporal values and experiences. While historians have noted temporal transformations brought about by the work discipline of industries in the 18th and 19th centuries (Thompson, 1967), sociologists have been interested in new temporal regimes and ‘time-bind’ (Hochschild, 1997) in emerging service work. Relatively less attention has been paid to temporal narratives in the context of socio-economic change. This article focuses on articulations of ‘boredom’ among young lower middle class women working in the services sector in Delhi, India. The service economy has been bourgeoning in India since the 1980s, and particularly following the liberalisation of the economy in the early 1990s. The women of this research comprise post-1990 ¹ youth and are mostly first-generation participants entering low-level service work in the ‘new economy’ ² of urban India. Intermittently employed across cafes, call centres, malls and offices in Delhi, these young women positioned work as productive and the alternative – ‘sitting at home’ – as boring. The article highlights that temporal narratives can offer an understanding of emerging subjectivities in a changing context.

Scholars have identified temporal disruption as a particular feature of unemployment and underemployment, expressed through the narratives of boredom, waiting, killing time or ‘timepass’ (Jeffrey, 2010a; Jervis et al., 2003; Mains, 2007; Ozoliņa-Fitzgerald, 2016; Schielke, 2008). While these studies demonstrate the importance of employment in shaping temporalities, particularly for young people ‘left behind’ or marginalised by the promises of neoliberalism, they are predominantly either limited to experiences of men or inattentive to the significance of gender. In attaching productivity to employment, young women workers in the service economy of Delhi may appear to reiterate young men’s narratives of temporal disruption in phases of unemployment. However, this article shows that there are gendered differentials in their temporal values. Young men may experience temporal disruption as a result of unemployment because of the resultant inability to fulfil the masculine role of the breadwinner. These young women’s temporal disruption, on the other hand, emerges through seeking alternatives to gendered norms of domesticity.

In order to further sociological understanding of temporalities, meaning making and subjectivities (Barbalet, 1999; Conrad, 1997; Jervis et al., 2003), this article turns to Bourdieu’s (2000: 208) scholarship on time relations, whereby he suggests that awareness of time emerges when the link between the ‘expectations and the world which is there to fulfil them . . . is broken’. In the context of post-1990 India, what do the temporal narratives of young lower middle class women reveal about their expectations and chances in the new urban economy? The article is structured as follows – first, it details Bourdieusian understanding of temporalities and critiques contemporary scholarship on socio-economic change and temporal disruption. Next, it presents the contemporary socio-economic context of urban India and methods employed to carry out the study in this context. It then proceeds to the discussion of findings, highlighting the temporal values, and therefore meaning attached to work and home by young lower middle class women in Delhi. The conclusion summarises the main arguments and implications of the article.

Boredom: Temporalities, Gender and Socio-Economic Change

Bourdieu suggests that habitus, or durable and transposable dispositions that individuals acquire through their social world (Bourdieu, 1977), includes dispositions towards time (Bourdieu, 1979, 2000). These temporal dispositions are tied to the functioning of economic systems (Bourdieu, 1979). Further, drawing upon his ethnography of the Algerian sub-proletarian, Bourdieu (2000: 229) suggests that relations of time, such as waiting or impatience, regret or nostalgia, boredom or discontent, emerge in the ‘discrepancy between what is anticipated and the logic of the game in relation to which this anticipation was formed, between a “subjective” disposition . . . and an objective tendency’.

Furthering this Bourdieusian understanding of the two dimensions of temporalities – subjective expectations and objective chances – there is emerging scholarship that explores the relationship between unemployment and feelings of waiting, inertia or limbo (Jeffrey, 2010a; Jervis et al., 2003; Mains, 2007; Ozoliņa-Fitzgerald, 2016; Schielke, 2008). In this article, I particularly draw upon literature on temporal disruption effected by the discrepancies between expectations and chances among youth in the context of neoliberal socio-economic change. Mains (2007: 665) analyses the discourses of boredom and shame among young men in urban Ethiopia who have finished school but have not managed to secure ‘respectable’ employment:

For these young men, school was the last structured activity they were involved in. One way school differs from unemployment is that it simply makes a person very busy and, therefore, eliminates the problem of passing excessive amounts of time.

For young women, on the other hand, such boredom seems to be absent (also see Schielke, 2008) –

The burden of too much time was a privilege of gender and urban residence . . . Young men were expected to perform very little household work and were generally free from participating in any activities directly associated with the reproduction of the household. In contrast, young women spent nearly all of their time doing tedious housework. (Mains, 2007: 666)

Similarly, in his study of ‘timepass’, Jeffrey (2010a, 2010b) explores a sense of ennui, disenchantment and hopelessness among young lower middle class men enrolled in Meerut College, India at the ‘crossroads’ of childhood and adulthood. While the economic restructuring of 1990 offered an imagination of modernisation and progress these young lower middle class men find themselves locked out of the new economy. Indeed, Jeffrey (2010b: 466) argues that ‘feelings of temporal rupture may become so intense in situations of economic crisis that time becomes a powerful feature of people’s discourses’. Further, he observes that ‘timepass’ takes on a public expression – young men while away time by hanging out at corner shops and tea stalls – that young women are unable to participate in due to family and community restrictions on their mobility.

Both Jeffrey’s (2010a, 2010b) and Mains’ (2007) studies, based on experiences of young men, establish that temporal disruption – whether expressed as boredom or timepass – is a result of discrepancy between expectations and chances. Although young men have acquired higher education, this does not easily translate into employment. They highlight that unemployment may create dissonance because of young men’s failure to fulfil the normative breadwinner role, and thus inability to affirm masculinity. Faced with overabundance of time, young men may engage in alternative ways of making meaning, including through creating trouble, drugs consumption and violence (Jervis et al., 2003; Musharbash, 2007; Schielke, 2008). In contrast to these interesting studies on young men’s experiences of socio-economic change, research on women’s temporal narratives is scarce. While the sociology of women and work has been concerned with the competing demands of work and family, paid and unpaid labour, or the ‘second shift’ for women (Deem, 1986; Hochschild and Machung, 1990; Oakley, 1974), we know little about transformations in the way women may experience and talk about time.

As the studies by Jeffrey (2010a, 2010b) and Mains (2007) highlight, narratives of temporal disruption can pry open a window into the dissonance between expectations and chances, and importantly, into emerging subjectivities. Since our understanding of temporalities and change is largely informed by young men’s experiences, being attentive to women’s temporal narratives can demonstrate gendered differences in people’s interactions with and meaning making in the context of socio-economic change. This article advances a nuanced understanding of socio-economic change and temporal disruption from the critical lens of gender by exploring narratives of boredom among young lower middle class women in Delhi, India.

Gender, Class and Socio-Economic Change in Urban India

Following the economic restructuring of the 1990s which opened up the Indian economy to global trade, the country has experienced significant socio-economic change (Nayyar, 2017). These changes are credited with the growth of the ‘New Middle Class’ in India as ‘the social group which is able to negotiate India’s new relationship with the global economy in both cultural and economic terms’ (Fernandes, 2000: 90). In particular, the ‘newness’ of the post-1990 middle class is closely linked to the expansion of the service economy, the employment opportunities it offers and associated consumption practices (Fernandes, 2000). However, many scholars have pointed out the discrepancies between the discursive construction and material realities of the ‘New Middle Class’ in India (Fernandes, 2000; Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase, 2009). In particular, emerging scholarship on ‘lower middle classes’ in India (Dickey, 2012; Ganguly-Scrase, 2003; Jeffrey, 2010a) is significant in highlighting the gaps between the smaller proportion of secure middle class and the larger proportion of tenuous middle class (Desai, 2001). While the former are able to capitalise on their social and cultural resources, the latter have to acquire a ‘distinctive class culture that characterizes corporate settings’ (Fernandes, 2000: 92) through ‘personality development’ and ‘communication skills’ courses at skills training centres in India (also see Gooptu, 2013; Nambiar, 2013) in order to enter the new economy. ³

Ganguly-Scrase (2003: 554) further suggests that the discursive construction of the ‘New Middle Class’ in India is closely related to desirability for ‘the public visibility of women and their relative freedom to pursue careers’. This is a departure from the association of high status ‘with practices of spatial segregation and women’s domestic roles’ (Donner, 2008: 14). In part, this shift in favour of women’s employment is not merely symbolic; as Fernandes (2000: 100) points out, women’s employment also offers families a way to ‘negotiate increasing household costs and new lifestyle standards that correspond to public representations of the new middle class’. In addition, associated social changes in education and marriage age may also influence women’s employment patterns. In 1990–1991, while there were only 46 girls per 100 boys in higher education, in 2014–2015, the figure increased to 85 girls per 100 boys (Government of India, 2016). The mean age of marriage for urban women has also increased to 23.1 years in 2016 from 22.4 years in 2012 (Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, 2019: 14). In urban areas, although the female labour force participation rate is reported to be only 15.9 per cent, there is a predominance of women’s employment in services. In 2017–2018, 57.4 per cent of urban women workers were employed in services (Government of India, 2019). ⁴

While there is emerging scholarship on the New Middle Class and gender in India (Belliappa, 2013; Dhawan, 2010; Donner, 2008; Fuller and Narasimhan, 2014; Radhakrishnan, 2011; Upadhya, 2011), it tends to focus on those who are securely middle class, with limited research on lower middle class women. As such, women’s employment is often framed between the competing narratives of necessity and aspiration – women work because of either financial necessity or the career drive. However, the necessity/aspiration binary does not adequately capture the ‘in-between’ experiences of lower middle class women who are likely to be absorbed into precarious service work. In this article, I show that temporal narratives emerge as an articulation of lower middle class women’s ‘in-between-ness’ in the context of socio-economic change in urban India.

Methods and Participants

The findings presented in this article are based on nine months of ethnography (August 2016 to May 2017) with young unmarried women (between 19 and 23 years old) employed in cafes, call centres, malls and offices in South Delhi. The fieldwork was conducted for a research project on the experiences of young women in the new service economy of urban India. The initial respondents were found through two sources: (1) by spending time as a customer in a cafe; and (2) through non-government organisations involved in providing skills and education to women. Interestingly, all of these initial respondents led me to the low-income neighbourhoods of Dakshinpuri and Khanpur as their places of residence. I eventually employed one of the employees at the cafe as my research assistant when she quit her job. Through her network, I was able to make contact with more women living in these neighbourhoods.

All of the respondents earned between Rs. 8000 and 12,000 per month (GBP 80–120) in their varied jobs. Their salaries were close to the minimum wage for semi-skilled workers in Delhi (Rs. 10,764 or GBP 110). They contributed a substantial proportion, if not all of their incomes towards the maintenance of their households. However, almost uniformly, my respondents denied working only for money. Instead, they asserted that as urban educated young women, ‘sitting at home’ is boring, worthless and a waste of time. The majority of the respondents were pursuing or had completed their undergraduate degrees through distance learning (all of them had finished studying up to class XII, that is, pre-university level). In all cases, this is a higher level of education than the previous generation of women (and quite commonly men) in their families had acquired.

The first phase of fieldwork involved ‘hanging out’ with respondents in various spaces – their workplaces, leisure spaces and in some of the respondents’ homes. On weekdays, it was easier to visit cafes that my respondents worked in whereas on weekends, we could visit malls, parks and markets. Through time spent in cafes, I became aware of young women’s movement both in and out of employment as well as between various professions – from call centres and offices to cafes and malls. Therefore, instead of restricting the ethnography to specific workplaces, I followed young women’s working lives, encompassing employment, unemployment, as well as unpaid labour at home. I also visited skills training centres, interacted with young people enrolled in skills courses and spoke to centre managers. In the second phase, I conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 18 women in private service work (including initial contacts). The interviews were all conducted in Hindi, with respondents sometimes using English words or phrases. I translated and transcribed all the interviews in English. The English words used by the respondents have been underlined in transcriptions. The names of all respondents, employers and skills centres have been changed to preserve anonymity.

As a researcher, I was conscious of my ‘insider–outsider’ position. Initial interactions with respondents were facilitated by our shared gender, language and ethnicity. However, there were differences too – while my slightly older age was not apparent, the gap in our class positions was significant and obvious. Rather than attempt to render it invisible, I engaged in discussions of class with my respondents. The majority of young women in this research identified themselves, their families and/or their neighbourhoods as ‘middle class’ or simply as ‘middle’. They commonly used the English term ‘middle class’ although there were other terms too that they used to refer to their own and others’ class. For example, young women often spoke about being from ‘chhote ghar’ or modest homes. They positioned themselves in the middle of poor people or those who do not have a roof over their head and ‘bade log’ or big people, ‘hi-fi’ people and ‘high class’ people. Importantly, they distinguished themselves from ‘proper middle class’, recognising that they had only a tenuous hold on middle-classness. On the other hand, they classified me – a young woman who grew up in India but was studying abroad – as clearly ‘high class’.

Cognisant of these differences, I was careful to not impose conceptual categories that they might not be familiar with. As stated earlier, I first spent time ‘hanging out’ with my respondents, gaining a general understanding of their milieu. In the interviews, I only posed open-ended questions such as ‘Tell me about yourself’, ‘How did you first start working?’, ‘What is your day usually like?’ This allowed women to highlight aspects that they thought were important to their lives. I conducted thematic narrative analysis of these data adopting a feminist approach (Sosulski et al., 2010), whereby I engage with the interpretations that the respondents offered to me.

‘You Get Nothing from Sitting at Home’: Emerging Temporal Values among Young Women in Urban India

I visited Aarti in her office in the sprawling glass and concrete building of Motocel, a telecoms company, on a Saturday. Aarti got me a visitor’s badge and escorted me upstairs to the stationery room, where she worked, partly at the front-desk issuing stationery to company employees, and partly sorting orders and deliveries in the back room. Her salary, at Rs. 8000 per month (GBP 80), was low and her travel to and from the office, which was based in Gurugram, a satellite city of Delhi, was long and arduous. Since it was a Saturday – officially not a working day – Aarti and I could have the back space mostly to ourselves. In hushed tones, while her manager was in the next room, Aarti told me she had been thinking about quitting this job. However, she did not want to hand in her resignation letter until she had another job because she did not want to stay at home. She explained:

Once you get used to a job, you don’t feel like leaving it. You can’t just be at home, you don’t enjoy it, you feel like going out . . . Even on Sunday, I can’t stay at home. It gets really boring if you stay at home, I was home for one or two months and got really bore. My life became boring. (Aarti, 19, telecoms, emphasis added)

Aarti strikingly described the boredom that she had experienced in the intermittent period between jobs as all-encompassing – ‘My life became boring.’ Her big office was nearly empty on the day I visited and Aarti did not seem to have many tasks to do, yet she said she would rather be at work than at home. We had on a previous occasion met on a Sunday – her only non-work day – at a shopping mall, where she had come with friends to spend time. Similar to Aarti, Deepti, a cafe worker, who was unhappy with her manager’s attitude, expressed reluctance to quit without finding another job first:

I think I should quit, there’s no respect, no value for my work, so what’s the point? But then I can quit, it doesn’t impact him [the manager] in any way, he’ll find more staff. But what will I do just sitting at home? If I have another job, I can still think of quitting. (Deepti, 21, cafe worker)

The drive to avoid idle periods of sitting at home also manifested through their enrolment in short-term skills training courses as a means to ‘self-improvement’. Sarita, a 23-year-old cafe worker, had started working after class XII as a teacher. Over the last few years, she had changed a number of jobs, moving from teaching to events and eventually to retail. Before joining the cafe where I met her, Sarita had been unemployed for a few months. In this period of interruption to employment, Sarita decided to enrol in a computer course for ‘timepass’ (also see Fleming, 2018):

Yes, when I wasn’t working recently, I did a course there [at the skills training centre]. I didn’t need to but I was sitting at home, so I thought this can be timepass. I did three months’ training but then I left and joined this job. So I didn’t complete it. (Sarita, 23, cafe worker)

Phases of unemployment were common among my respondents. In some cases, young women quit work themselves after a period of deliberation (as Aarti’s and Deepti’s narratives show). In other cases, they were laid off or forced to leave because of underpayment or non-payment of salaries and businesses shutting down. Chandni, a 19-year-old, who worked across cafes, events and market research during my fieldwork, described her temporary bouts of unemployment as loss of ‘routine’. While employed, Chandni said she was used to the rhythm of the work day whereas unemployment made her lose track of the beginning and end of the day. When I visited her at home while she was unemployed, she told me that she had been bored out of her mind. She also pointed to the unmade bed and her own appearance, attributing her inertia and perhaps poor mental health to unemployment. Prachi struggled to secure another job after impulsively resigning from her cafe job. I kept in touch with her over WhatsApp after finishing fieldwork; her communication in this period of unemployment was despondent. She described her days as passing by without much happening; she repeatedly told me she was bored at home.

While exploring temporalities was not an explicit objective of the study, the predominance of temporal narratives among my respondents compelled this analysis. The respondents specifically used the English words ‘bore’ and ‘boring’ in conversations in Hindi to describe the endless stretching of time, listlessness and feeling of worthlessness when ‘sitting at home’. It is striking that narratives of boredom were prominent even though young women were unemployed and ‘sitting at home’ for only short periods of time extending to a few months at the most. The significance of the space of ‘home’ to feelings of boredom merits further investigation. What are the features of ‘home’ that render it temporally disruptive for these young lower middle class women? My findings suggest that home was temporally disruptive because it required conformity with gendered norms that these young lower middle class women were seeking to reject through their employment. In the following sections, I discuss compulsion to housework, pressure to get married and restrictions on mobility and friendships as the defining features of ‘sitting at home’.

‘I Have a Problem with Housework’: Housework

As unmarried women, my respondents were not solely responsible for the maintenance of the household. However, all of them, to varying degrees, were expected to help out their mothers with chores. Although contemporary literature suggests that unemployment leads to overabundance of time (Jeffrey, 2010a, 2010b; Jervis et al., 2003; Mains, 2007), for these young women, it led to increased responsibility for housework. The classification of housework as non-work has been extensively noted in feminist scholarship (Hochschild and Machung, 1990; Oakley, 1974). These young women reproduced this notion by referring to their time at home as time that is hard to while away because there is ‘nothing to do’. However, there was disjuncture between this temporal narrative and their activities at home. Chandni, who complained about lack of routine while she was unemployed, had taken on responsibility for the household while her mother had gone to work as a live-in nanny for a family in Delhi. At the time, although Chandni’s father was also unemployed, she managed the cooking, shopping and laundry. Similarly, Prachi expressed frustration with being asked to make tea, clean the house and help out with cooking when she was at home.

It was through their employment that young women were able to negotiate, if not entirely reject, expectations of domesticity. In numerous conversations, they took pride in declaring that they do not like and do not do any housework. Chandni told me while her family initially did not want her to seek employment, she still went ahead with it because she did not like the alternative – ‘I have a problem with housework.’ When Sheela, who was working in a cafe full-time, six days a week, told me that her mother is employed as a domestic worker, I asked her who does the housework. She responded:

Mummy wakes up early to do it [housework]. I don’t do it (laughs). Mummy keeps telling me to, she says ever since I started this job, I’ve become like a queen. I don’t like doing work at home. (Sheela, 22, cafe worker)

Interestingly, young women were able to negotiate participation in housework by emphasising the exhaustion they felt at work (Deem, 1986). Deepti said when she goes back home, she is so tired that she just wants to sit quietly:

I don’t do anything at home. I leave at 7 a.m., come back at 7.30–8 p.m. When I come back, I have tea, I can’t be expected to do more work then. I tell mummy, how can I do it, will you leave all this work for me? . . . Mummy says you’ve become a boy, you go out of the house, you’ve failed even your brother and father. (Deepti, 21, cafe worker)

Both Sheela’s and Deepti’s mothers commented on how their attitude towards housework had changed after finding employment. Sheela was accused of being a ‘queen’ while Deepti was rebuked for becoming a ‘boy’, indicating how these young lower middle class women’s employment may be transforming class and gender relations. Aarti, who usually did not get back home until 9 p.m., also told me:

See, I don’t do any housework. My mummy doesn’t even ask me. Sometimes she asks me, then says no, don’t do it, you’ll spoil it. She calls me, then she says no herself. So I just don’t do it. (Aarti, 19, telecoms)

But then she went on to say that she does wash dishes on Sundays even though ‘I don’t feel like it, I get so tired. I feel like sleeping.’ Nevertheless, young women were able to refuse extensive participation in housework through employment. It would not be presumptuous to infer that this is because of their valuation as ‘earning’ members of the family since rest and care are largely denied to women who are primarily engaged in housework (Deem, 1986; Oakley, 1974). When unemployed, young women did not have any avenues to resist housework and expressed this temporally as having ‘nothing to do’, not being able to ‘pass time’ and not knowing when the day began and ended.

‘I Haven’t Thought So Much about Husband and All’: Marriage

Young women also distanced themselves from the role of ‘housewives’ through resistance to marriage. The oldest of my respondents was 23 years old at the time of fieldwork; only one of the respondents was engaged to be married. Other respondents expressed the inevitability of marriage, particularly given their age, but many were keen to delay it as much as possible. There seemed to be an understanding that if they were neither in education nor working, marriage would be the logical decision. The same did not apply to men, particularly since social norms situate men as the breadwinner and therefore marriageable only with a source of income. Both Jeffrey (2010a) and Mains (2007) note young men’s frustration at not being able to take the next step in their life by getting married and starting a family. In contrast, for young women, employment provided some bargaining power to distance themselves from the norm of stepping into married life at a certain age:

I’m the first girl in the family to go out and work, none of the boys are working either, the elder girl in the family is married. They wanted me to get married next, I got really angry and fought with everyone . . . Then mummy said let her pass class XII. After that . . . I’m intelligent enough to know what to say, what not to say . . . they started forcing me to get married. I got mad and just gave it to them . . . Then before I got my class XII results, I managed to get this job. Now no one says anything. They know that I’m working, they’re scared that if they say too much, I might just leave home because I’m earning money. (Sheela, 22, cafe worker)

Although Sheela refers to her financial independence, she did not keep her income to herself. It was instead spent on household and family expenses, including her younger siblings’ education. This was common among all respondents, with only a few keeping a portion of their income for themselves, either spending it on mobile phones, clothes, food and so on or depositing it into a savings account.

Similarly, Pranjali, a 21-year-old working as a financial assistant in a small architecture studio, wanted to delay her marriage. She was keen to financially help her parents and siblings. Like many other respondents, Pranjali said she did not like to think much about marriage:

I haven’t thought so much about husband and all . . . I want my family to come to a good level first, then I have to think about someone else’s family in the future anyway . . . I want something good in life. Good job, good earning. I want to get a house . . . don’t tell anyone . . . that can’t happen with a small salary . . . Once my sister and brother start managing on their own, with time, I can do something . . . but I feel like my dream of house won’t be fulfilled. They’ll get me married. Then my in-laws won’t let me do it, they’ll ask me to do it for them. I worry about this all the time. I want to do this before I leave, it’s not possible after marriage. (Pranjali, 21, financial assistant)

Pranjali’s feeling that she is on borrowed time until she gets married was replicated by other respondents too. While they asserted that they would like to continue working after marriage, they were conscious that this may not be possible. In their married home, they would have increased responsibility for housework and perhaps increased restrictions on mobility and, therefore, employment. As unmarried women, they regarded their time as opportunity to secure their futures through ‘good job, good earning’. A ‘good earning’ as contribution to family income, in turn, allowed them to delay marriage and motherhood. If unemployed and ‘sitting at home’, the compulsion to marriage would disrupt these new temporal trajectories.

‘You Go Somewhere, You Meet Someone’: Mobility and Friendships

Work also makes mobility and friendships accessible to young women. Phadke et al. (2011) have written about the gendered nature of loitering in India – while men can aimlessly wander in and occupy public spaces, women are always expected to have a reason to be in the same spaces. In this context, it is not surprising that the choice that young women face is between two options – they can either go to work or (literally) sit at home. This is in contrast to men who can find communities and spaces through ‘killing time’ and ‘timepass’ in public spaces. Meeta, a 20-year-old cafe worker, said her father was the sole earner in the family before she started working. But supporting her father was not the only reason that she wanted to seek employment:

At home, actually, you just can’t pass time. Now when I go home, my sisters say you do get tired but we feel bad staying at home. At least you go outside, you get to see what it’s like out there, you’ve learnt how to travel. (Meeta, 20, cafe worker)

As noted in earlier discussion in the article, the problem of boredom while ‘sitting at home’ was not due to lack of activities, but due to young women’s resistance to participation in those activities. Further, respondents contrasted the experience of being at home with the excitement one can find ‘outside’. Similar to Meeta, many respondents noted that they had only come to know the city and all that it offers by being in employment.

Employment also offered a chance to maintain and develop new friendships. Chandni and Chitra, both 19 years old, who had been friends since school, searched for employment opportunities together. Seeking a friend to work with was a pattern common among other respondents too. Some young women had been able to assure their parents that they would be safe by travelling together. When Chandni worked at a cafe for a few days, she commuted with Prachi and Sheela and described it as a particularly pleasant experience.

Other respondents, like Sarita, a 23-year-old cafe worker, found friendship through work. These work friendships were not only about ‘companionship or sociability’ but also acted as ‘resources’ (Andrew and Montague, 1998: 355) with women often securing opportunities through these friendships (Green, 1998; Pettinger, 2005):

Me:

How did you find out about this [cafe] job?

Sarita:

Through Jahanvi. I had asked her to tell me if there’s a job. So she told me . . . I knew Jahanvi from [the other cafe].

Me:

Ok, what happened in the interview here?

Sarita:

Not much . . . I didn’t feel like doing it for Rs. 9000 [per month], but sir said they’ll increase it in two months . . . I thought it’s better to do this than sit at home. When we’re here, we find out about jobs. You go somewhere, you meet someone, you find out stuff. It makes a difference as compared to sitting at home.

For women who ended up staying at home, boredom did not lead to public trouble or violence as has been noted in the case of unemployed men. Instead, women linked it to conflicts at home and resultant poor mental health. Neha, a 20-year-old sales assistant, the only respondent who was engaged to be married, said her future husband’s family was encouraging of her employment:

Neha:

Yes. They said you get nothing from sitting at home. Unless you go outside and do something, you won’t get anything. Because in the future that’s to come, who knows what will happen with whom, no one knows. In the house, there’s your mother-in-law, you’re there, you say something, things unnecessarily get out of hand, there’s no point to it.

Me:

That’s what happens at home. . .

Neha:

Yes, that’s happens at home. Better than that, go out and do a job, mummy will also be tension-free, you’ll also be tension-free.

Although Neha specifically commented on potential conflicts with her mother-in-law, other respondents made references to conflicts between their parents, and at times, with their siblings. Such conflicts, they suggested, were caused by feelings of restlessness that emerged from confinement at home. Therefore, by spending the majority of their day outside the home, they could avoid these ‘tensions’. While workplaces were not free of hostilities, these did not weigh upon the respondents in the same way, perhaps because their time at work was limited as opposed to the endless stretching of time at home. Thus, they primarily posited employment as an avenue where they could choose friends, develop new relationships and importantly spend time in the ‘outside’ world.

Conclusion

Drawing on ethnographic research in Delhi, India, this article highlights young lower middle class women’s narratives of boredom, offering an insight into the relationship between temporal disruptions and socio-economic change from a critical gender lens. My respondents’ narratives show that they deploy the language of time with reference to unemployment, not unlike young men in similar contexts, as evidenced in the studies by Jeffrey (2010a) and Mains (2007). However, young lower middle class women closely aligned boredom with ‘sitting at home’, where their time was constrained by conformity to gender norms through participation in housework, pressure to get married and limits on friendships and mobility. Rendering the space of home as temporally insignificant, even wasteful, young women positioned employment as the alternative; that is, as a way of resisting gender norms and crafting new subjectivities. This does not lead to the inference that participation in paid work is singularly empowering for women. It instead suggests that although employment may be exploitative, it ‘can also be used to transgress spaces and places that are socio-culturally constraining’ (Raju, 2011: 13). That is, it may offer them an opportunity to ‘[recreate] the temporal vector’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 22) by delaying marriage, motherhood and family life.

Through in-depth engagement with these young women’s life trajectories in contemporary urban India, the article draws attention to (to borrow from Kristeva, 1981) ‘women’s time’ to nuance the scholarship on temporalities and socio-economic change. Rather than take an additive approach, the article focuses on the specificities of women’s evaluation and description of their time. In particular, the article challenges the tendency to assume the primacy of domesticity in women’s lives. My research shows that while young women were conscious of impending domesticity, they were actively drawing upon alternative subjectivities, resisting housework and marriage. The neoliberal turn in India, characterised by emergence of new service work as well as growing precarity in people’s lives (Balakrishnan, 2017; Chakrabarti, 2016), may propel these young women into the market economy, thus, altering their life expectations. Young women’s life chances, however, are not necessarily changing in line with their expectations. Feeling the pull into domesticity while pursuing education and employment, young women experience temporal rupture as a result of mismatch between their life expectations and chances (Bourdieu, 2000). By highlighting the moments in which young women become aware of and talk about time, the article addresses the significance of temporal narratives to understanding the relationship between time, social change and the way people make meaning in their lives.

The article contributes to scholarship on socio-economic change, employment and time. While agreeing with the inextricability of temporal dispositions from economic systems, the article highlights the importance of accounting for social differentials in experiences of neoliberal change, exemplified by adopting a critical gender lens. It engages with the minutiae of women’s time which offers understanding of gender relations as ‘in-transition’, thus, complicating the ways in which women may negotiate, resist and challenge gender norms. Further, affirming the dialectical relationship between time and society, the article demonstrates the value of narratives in understanding the temporal organisation of everyday life. While this article specifically speaks to research on lower middle class youth in the Global South, it offers a more general framework for understanding emerging time regimes in other parts of the world. Further research on narratives about acceleration of time – time-bind, time-squeeze, busy-ness – as well as deceleration of time – waiting, inertia, boredom – which is attentive to gender and other social classifications will be fruitful for expanding our understanding of contemporary socio-economic change.