‘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.