Shruti Patil
Leisure, as the Cambridge Dictionary defines it, is a time when you are not working or doing other duties. It is often imagined as time set apart for rest, pleasure, free from responsibilities or obligations. This understanding assumes a clear boundary between work and non-work, where once responsibilities end, leisure begins. However, this clear-cut division rarely reflects the realities of everyday life, especially for women. Women’s time is often shaped by overlapping responsibilities, making it difficult to identify when work truly ends and leisure begins clearly.
Drawing from five interviews with women across different social locations—Shreya, a development professional; Tanu, a home-based entrepreneur; Medha, a postgraduate student; Maya, a salaried worker; and Lakshmi, a university staff member—this article challenges the mainstream, conventional understanding of leisure. To protect the privacy of participants, all names used here are pseudonyms.
Leisure is not a bounded, universal category but is embedded within everyday routines and is shaped by fatigue and responsibilities and often experienced as moments of mental ease. It challenges the notion of “free time” as leisure. By exploring and analysing these narratives, the article tries to make us rethink leisure as something continuously negotiated within the limitations of everyday life.
Beyond the Binary of Work and Leisure
A key pattern across the interviews was the blurred boundary between leisure and work. Leisure is woven into the everyday lives of women rather than existing as a separate domain.
Shreya is a 25-year-old working in the development sector. Her day extends beyond formal work hours into mental preoccupations, even when she is not working. She says, “Things are going on and on in my mind…. I don’t feel less burdened in a day.” Activities such as cooking for herself, cleaning, and organising her room become a form of self-time for her. This might not fit conventional leisure activities, but these activities carry meaning for her. While sharing about work, she said, “I like going on the field. I like talking to people… Whenever I do some things related to the facilitation in my work, I enjoy that time.” Her experience shows that work is not only burdensome or overwhelming, but it can also contain moments of joy and pleasure.
Similarly, for Tanu, a home-based food entrepreneur, her work is driven by interest and experimentation. During her free time, she likes to watch cooking videos and try preparing new recipes. This serves as both skill-building for her work and enjoyment. Here, leisure-like activities are not just overlapping with work but are connected to it. This challenges the idea that leisure must exist outside work; instead, it can be embedded within it.
Lakshmi, who works in a university setting, shares about learning new tools helpful for her work or listening to music during free time at the workplace as moments of leisure. Even within work hours, she identifies these pockets of enjoyment. Maya, working in a laundry, offers a contrasting perspective when she says, “I feel more free here [at work] than at my home.” For her, even though her workplace is a site of labour, it provides moments of relative relief as compared to the continuous demands of household work.
These accounts challenge the binary of work and leisure and suggest that meaningful engagement and enjoyment can happen within work as well. Therefore, leisure cannot be understood as time outside work; it must be seen as something that overlaps with and emerges within it, or even coexists.
Leisure as Mental Freedom
If leisure is not defined by time alone, how do individuals recognise it? Across the interviews, leisure was defined as a state of mind rather than any specific activity.
For Medha, a 25-year-old postgraduate student, leisure, according to her, is “times where I feel I can actually breathe, where I actually don’t feel the burden to think about how you have to present yourself…. If I am mentally relaxed, then no matter what activity, I think I will count it as leisure.” This highlights that leisure is less about what one does and more about how one feels while doing it.
The emphasis on mental ease strongly across in both Maya and Lakshmi’s narratives. For Maya, relaxation is associated with “man ki shanti,” loosely translated as peace of mind achieved through temple visits, bhajans, and meditation. For Lakshmi, it is doing something without hurry and mindfully, even an activity such as meal preparation.
Shreya mentioned the difficulty in feeling free even when she is not working on weekends, as her mind remains occupied with tasks and responsibilities, similar to Medha, who describes weekends as mentally burdened by the anticipation of the coming week and its tasks.
These narratives shift the focus from getting time for oneself to experiences. They show how leisure becomes possible not when time is available but when mental burdens are temporarily lifted. This challenges the time-based definition of leisure and highlights its affective dimensions.
Time Constraint and Fragmented Leisure
All participants described leisure as something desired, but their narratives also reveal how difficult it is to access.
Maya’s routine is one striking example. Her day begins at 4:00 AM, with time for cattle care, cooking, and sending her children to school and college, followed by a full day of paid work at a laundry facility. After returning home, she has to engage in household chores again. Even her weekly day off is filled with cleaning and agricultural work. This shows time poverty in her day-to-day life.
Lakshmi’s experience reflects a similar pattern. Even after having weekends off, they are consumed by household responsibilities and childcare. As she puts it, “I don’t have any work as such, but I have a lot of work.”
Even for Medha and Shreya, whose contexts are very different, time is highly structured by work and academic demands. Meetings extend past working hours; the academic schedule and assignments leave little room for uninterrupted rest.
As a result, leisure appears in small, fragmented moments within everyday life. For Shreya, it’s during transitions from fieldwork to desk work that she takes a pause near a water body or jungle and sits with herself for some time. Maya finds leisure during lunch breaks spent chatting with colleagues. For Medha, it is listening to music while working, and for Lakshmi, it is ordering a meal on a Friday evening.
These examples show how leisure is not simply available but actively negotiated and consciously carved out within tight schedules. This fragmentation reflects broader structural conditions. When time is scarce and responsibilities are continuous, leisure cannot take the form of extended activities; instead, it becomes spread across the day, many times unnoticed or undervalued.
Leisure as Recovery from Fatigue
Fatigue plays an important role in how leisure is sought and imagined. For Shreya, Medha, and Lakshmi, leisure is less about pleasure and more about recovery.
Shreya expresses a desire “to sleep peacefully,” while Medha describes her primary form of relaxation as “recovery sleep.” In this context, leisure is not about pursuing hobbies or doing something creative but about restoring energy. This emphasis on rest reflects the intensity in their routines. Tanu notes that doing something like making bangles becomes difficult when she is exhausted.
This redefinition is important as it challenges the normative expectations of leisure as active, productive, or enriching. Activities like dancing, reading, or a leisurely walk, although desired, require energy that participants often do not have. Leisure is therefore shaped by bodily as well as emotional capacity. Without energy, even the time that is available cannot be translated into “meaningful leisure.”
Social Dimensions and Unequal Imaginations of Leisure
Leisure is very subjective and is largely shaped by social contexts and relationships. Contrary to common assumptions, home is not always a space for rest and leisure.
For Maya, home is the site of continuous labour, while the workplace offers moments of relative freedom and relaxation through interactions with peers and breaks in between work. This tells us that social relationships can enable or constrain leisure. Shreya feels relaxed when she is with family members at her home who provide care and support. In contrast, Medha notes that relationships and social expectations can reduce the time available for herself. These dynamics highlight that leisure is not truly individual but is shaped by social environment, expectations, and support systems.
These social conditions not only shape how leisure is experienced but also influence how it is imagined. Despite constraints, participants articulate aspirations for how they would like to spend their time. When asked about what she would like to do if she got some more time, Shreya immediately responded, “I would like to spend it dancing.” Tanu wishes to engage in creative crafts like making bangles and earrings. Medha imagines time dedicated to journaling, exercising, and art. Maya hopes to pursue tailoring and reading.
These aspirations reveal the gap between imagined and lived leisure. The idea of leisure changes with socio-economic context. It shows that leisure is not just unequally accessible but also differently imagined. Educational background, class positions, and life circumstances highly influence what is possible and what is desirable.
Conclusion
The experiences of these five women show that leisure is neither a fixed category nor an easily accessible resource; it is shaped by the demands of work, care responsibilities, and the routines of everyday life.
Taken together, these narratives challenge dominant notions of leisure and reveal leisure as something that can be embedded in work, shaped by mental states, fragmented, negotiated, and structured by gender, class, and life stage. These narratives complicate the common understanding of leisure and make us rethink leisure not as an escape from everydayness but as something continuously negotiated within it. When time is limited and there are multiple responsibilities, the boundary between self and work is constantly shifting. Leisure is not just about having time; it is also about the social and emotional bandwidth to experience time as one’s own.
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Shruti Patil has recently completed her Master’s in Development from Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. Her interests include gender, education, mental health, labour, urban life, and everyday experiences of inequality.
