Leisure and self-care for Dalit women in India

Dalit women’s experiences emerge from a system of Brahmanical patriarchy that confines them to inhumane tasks at low wages, while denying them the opportunity to reconstitute themselves. According to Social Reproduction Theory and the Depletion framework developed by Shirin Rai, this opens up the potential for a care crisis as Dalit women get depleted by the demands on them. One way to resist depletion is through self-care or the labour of reconstituting oneself. This is not just through sleeping or eating but also consuming media and socialising. Allocating time to self-care requires opportunities for leisure. Caste inequalities in leisure prevent Dalit women from reproducing themselves and worsen the care crisis. Our paper builds nationwide estimates of caste inequalities in leisure within women in India with microdata from the Time Use Survey of India, 2019 as a data source. We find that married Dalit women spend 34 minutes per day less than upper-caste women on leisure. As Dalit women get older, they continue to be burdened by paid and unpaid work. Senior Dalit women spend 56 minutes a day less than upper-caste women on leisure. Building a Simultaneous Equation Model to estimate the determinants of leisure and self-care along with paid and unpaid labour, we find that education and household expenditure allows women of all caste categories to spend more time on leisure. In particular, Dalit women from households at higher-income quartiles, gain significantly more leisure. We also apply the Oaxaca Blinder decomposition and the Quantile Regression Method as robustness checks.