Introduction

Given the profound changes in lifestyle as evidenced in post-retirement lives of older adults in industrialized nations, it is no surprise that gerontology remains committed to conceptualize and measure activity domains (regenerative, consumptive, instrumental and social leisure) as a route to enjoy life-satisfaction and wellbeing (Adams et al., 2021; Isaacson et al., 2020; Katz, 2000; Lemon et al., 1972; Nimrod, 2008). Particularly, armed with the influential activity theory (Havighurst, 1963), early interventions of gerontologists have been to demonstrate how higher levels of social engagement (e.g., leisure, participation and peer networks) is linked to successful aging. More recently, the emphasis on social leisure as being more consumptive where baby boomers are rewriting the scripts of old age through consumption choices (leisure, travel, sports) that echoes the centrality of activity in guaranteeing a good life. This sentiment has been championed by the notion of ‘Third Age’ (Laslett, 1987), as a new cultural movement that is governed by a neo-liberal ethic of life-style changes that emphasize youthful vitality and consumerism. In this ‘new’ stage in life, the third agers are focused on self-realisation; where staying healthy in later life is a personal responsibility achieved through careful planning and market-based consumption. With economic globalization, scholars (Gilleard, 2005; Higgs et al., 2009) have noted a gradual cultural demise of the old age pensioner as a signifier of old age and instead how the recent cohorts of middle-class retirees (with adequate disposable income) are crafting their post-retirement lives in practices of a mass consumer society. This has further been supported with a dramatic expansion of leisure communities (Hunt, 2004), providing pre-eminent source of identity and social relationships in the post-work phase of older individuals (Leon, 2011; Yamashita et al., 2017). While leisure and activity caught the collective imagination of practitioners of gerontology in the West, it has remained sparsely researched in non-western societies. India is no exception. However, recent studies point to similar patterns among select groups of upwardly mobile middle-class older Indians, where increasing number of active individuals are seen participating in an “ageless” culture guaranteed through the nexus of leisure, market and consumption (Samanta, 2018; Sharma and Samanta, 2020). Building on the critique that not all leisure is consumptive and commercialized, we focus on ways in which leisure can be experienced in everyday routines, family and remote sociality that were heightened during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

In particular, we relied on time-use diaries, household surveys and interviews to explore the leisure patterns, specifically ‘serious leisure’ (Stebbins, 2017, 2020) defined by ‘a systematic pursuit of an amateur, a hobbyist, or a volunteer activity sufficiently substantial and interesting’ (ibid: 5) pursued by older adults in a select urban centres of India. Respondents for this study came from Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar (prominent cities in the north-western states of Gujarat), Lucknow, Kanpur, Banaras (cities in the western state of Uttar Pradesh) and Bangalore and Chennai (in the southern states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, respectively). We particularly draw on (Stebbins, 2015) concept of Serious Leisure Perspective (henceforth, SLP) to illustrate on how the pandemic heightened the need to engage in both serious and causal forms of leisure with varying intensity, and duration across the selected urban cities. As such, SLP as a theoretical framework synthesizes three main forms of leisure (serious, casual and project-based) to show their distinctive features, similarities and inter-relations (Elkington & Stebbins, 2014; Stebbins, 2020). Notably, leisure, like work, is socially constructed, complex, and constrained (Veal, 2016) and this perspective acknowledges various psychological, social, cultural and historical conditions that shape specific leisure activities (Stebbins, 2020). We use SLP as an analytical category to examine the motivations and complexities of leisure core – ‘distinctive set of interrelated actions or steps followed to achieve a particular outcome’ (Stebbins, 2020: 17), which are intense and complex, both in serious and casual leisure practices.

While many studies continue to investigate the relationship of serious leisure with subjective wellbeing and enhanced life satisfaction, in this paper we contend that serious leisure offers a route through which women (and men) renegotiate everyday forms of time poverty. In the process, we aim to extend the SLP perspective, building on the critics of Veal (2021) and presenting SLP as a micro-meso-macro framework (Stebbins, 2021). In particular we found that the notion of constraint negotiation (Lyu and Oh, 2015) to be a productive concept to show how serious leisure, unwittingly, formed a basis for gendered resistance during the pandemic. Overall, our study records an enhanced (serious) leisure activity participation among the middle-class older adults, in the pandemic context where the temporal and spatial boundaries have been significantly ruptured.

Leisure and Its Counterparts - Serious Leisure and Constraint Negotiation

It is well-known in leisure scholarship both serious and casual leisure (one that is unserious and mostly dabbling) are associated with improved well-being and life satisfaction (Bowling et al., 2013; Kleiber et al., 2008; Nimrod et al., 2009). Unsurprisingly, the cultural meanings of leisure have undergone significant changes from immediately gratifying hedonistic pursuits to more serious forms of leisure that signal purpose, drive and identity (Blackshaw, 2010). Leisure studies scholar (Stebbins, 2020), notes that by actively engaging in desired leisure activities, individuals are increasingly seeking out greater opportunities for ‘self-expression’ and ‘self-actualisation’ which has resulted in serious leisure. While free choice and intrinsic motivation are central to the pursuit of leisure (Rojek, 1995; Stebbins, 2017), serious leisure contrasts from casual leisure by being more than just free time or recuperation from work or other obligatory activities for daily sustenance like eating, slee**, or taking a stroll. It involves, as we note earlier, a “the steady pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or career volunteer activity that captivates its participants with its complexity and many challenges” (Stebbins, 2001: 54). Additionally, in Stebbins’ (1982, 2020: 25–27) conceptual model of serious leisure, he outlines six distinguishing qualities that determine the seriousness of serious leisure, emphasizing the crucial role of perseverance, personal effort, knowledge and identity-making that makes serious leisure career-oriented, durable and an emergence of a unique ethos. SLP evolved into a comprehensive typology of leisure forms and activities, encompassing a range of interwoven concepts (Stebbins, 2020). Notwithstanding the critics of serious leisure as a theory (Veal, 2021), we argue that SLP allows us to see beyond leisure as entirely fun, hedonistic and as anti-thesis of work (Kennelly et al., 2013) and build upon the deficiencies identified as the inadequacy to engage with complementary approaches, such as needs, benefits, commitment, specialisation, constraints and involvement (ibid.: 577). Through this, we present the complexities of leisure experience (Veal, 2017), by extending the SLP framework to explore the macro-level processes of exploring the potential of social worlds and their relationship with optimal leisure lifestyles, class, identity, and other macro-level dimensions.

In spite of the well-developed connection between leisure and well-being, the previous studies record the varied level of leisure intensity and involvement among individuals (Kennelly et al., 2013). For instance, in a recent study that maps how older adults have (re)adjusted to home-bound leisure lifestyles due to the ongoing pandemic, Chung and colleagues (2021: 302) remind us of the empirical utility of the Selective Optimisation with Compensation model (Baltes & Baltes, 1990). The authors show that with leisure avenues being curtailed and social distancing norms at place, older adults developed strategies to overcome pandemic-led challenges and continued their valued leisure activities. However, in our framing, we don’t see leisure activities as “compensation” strategies but rather creative ways of making sense of the new reality. In fact, our understanding of older adults’ meaning making process during the pandemic finds resonance with the theory of gerotranscendence (Tornstam, 2005, 2011) that offers a re-evaluation of the self under difficult circumstances. Tornstam’s original construct included three dimensions- self, relationships and the cosmic-where he rejected the often-cited dualism of activity and disengagement and instead argued older lives as a culmination of experiences leading to acceptance of present circumstances. Specifically, in the self-transcendent dimension, Tornstam showed late life as a phase of heightened self-awareness, decreased self-centredness and finding transcendent forms of happiness in nature, art and the uncertainties of life. Overall, contrary to popular belief, older lives when seen in this light, are often more meaningful and content. It is no surprise that this theory has been productively used to demonstrate older adults’ emotional preparedness of the pandemic and development of their agentic selves in the midst of an evolving public health crisis (see e.g. Bratun & Asaba 2021). Building on this line of theoretical work, the analytical focus of our study remains on “engagement” with the self in meaningful and nurturing pursuits and not on deliberate co** tactics of “compensation” and “optimization”.

Nevertheless, there is a hierarchy in the way people engage with leisure (Alexandris and Carroll, 1997; Godbey et al., Footnote 1 (2019) report women shouldering a staggering 81.2% of unpaid domestic work while men reporting significantly higher percentage of paid employment outside home. Further, micro-studies from India reveal that even when women engage in discretionary activities, it is mostly fragmented, harried and contaminated with household chores (Basu, 2007). Notably, negotiating the intrapersonal and structural constraints of gender, social class and generation have remained outside the scope of gerontological or sociological scholarship in India.

Overall, as the above review suggests, gaps are still evident in the constraint negotiation literature, where the link between the use of these negotiation resources and actual leisure participation remains empirically inconclusive (Kennelly et al., 2013) and under-researched especially for people 50 years and older (Son et al., 2008).

We argue here that the pandemic with its spatial-temporal blurring, offers a fruitful lens to examine how (leisure) time has been reconfigured under the onslaught of a neoliberal scaffolding of a project on the self. For instance, the pandemic-led epochal downtime has been imagined in the popular as well as the scientific discourse as a period for self-production, self-management and self-investment (Samanta, 2021). We wonder what does this shift in our understanding of leisure time holds for the ‘Third Agers’ (or urban, upper middle class older adults) in India? Given that stable post-retirement income and good health have shown to be reliable predictors of older adults’ engagement in serious leisure pursuits (Heuser, 2005; Kelly, 1993; Roberson, 2005; Stebbins, 2005), we were particularly interested to see (1) engagement patterns of urban older adults in India and how they are aligned with the Serious Leisure perspective as studied in the developed West, and (2) what were the ways in which constraint negotiation was practiced among older men and women in a context where social norms around gender and class create hierarchies of leisure (both access and availability)? Relatedly, whether these negotiations disrupted or reconfigured traditional hierarchies of domestic time-use in Indian households. The focus on middle-class older Indians is significant since factors of good health and steady income continue to influence older adults’ willingness to pursue a wide variety of serious leisure activities. Finally, we were interested to understand whether the pandemic with its renewed emphasis on (abundant and slow) time, fostered leisure equality (even if momentarily) in a context where gender struggles are real.

Methods

The Study Site and the Sample

This paper draws on data collected from older adults aged 55–80 years-old across a few urban cities of India – the capital territory of Delhi, Gujarat (Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar), Tamil Nadu (Chennai), Karnataka (Bangalore), and Uttar Pradesh (Lucknow, Kanpur and Banaras). We followed a combination of convenience and purposive sampling techniques which explains why our participants are located at different cities in India. They were interviewed between September 2020 to February 2021 in-person (wherever possible) and telephonically using semi-structured questions. It is important to note that during this time different Indian cities were at varying stages of pandemic-led lockdowns which thwarted the possibility to conduct in-person interviews. This study adopted three routes to collect data: a household survey, time-use diaries and telephonic interviews. Access to respondents was achieved through (i) a Bangalore based online magazine and social engagement platform for 55 + adults – Silver TalkiesFootnote 2 and (ii) through personal contacts of the first author; the initial contacts were then requested to circulate the paper-based household survey in their social network (snowball technique). For the final time diary recruitment, a purposive sampling technique was employed to recruit the participants and further interviewed them. Ethics approval for this study was obtained from Institutional Ethics Committee of the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar. Verbal consent was received in all cases. Pseudonyms have been used to protect the identity of our participants.

A total of 71 individuals completed the household surveys (NFemale= 37, NMale =34) and 15 individuals provided detailed time diaries (NFemale= 9, NMale =6) and agreed to participate in the interview (Mean age of sample: ~ 64 years). The online-based household survey was administered through social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The household survey included questions capturing respondents’ socio-demographic characteristics as well as information on household living arrangement patterns, health profile through what illnesses they have and if they have suffered a major health shock in recent years. Finally, it also included other socio-demographic factors (e.g. gender identity, caste, highest level of education and occupational status). We offer insights from the household survey in the findings section of this paper.

Among those who took the household survey, the lead author followed up with 15 participants who were willing to fill out time-diary reports (24-hour recall). These 15 respondents were subsequently the ones who participated in the semi-structured interviews. The interview questions began with broad, open-ended querying of ‘what do the term leisure mean to them?’ and ‘how they practised it (especially now that they are more home-bound due to pandemic-related lockdowns)?’. In the process, questions related to their everyday lives were asked which included aspects of their daily routine (e.g. sleep and wake times, morning rituals, household management chores, etc.); time spent with family and friends (over phone or meeting them in person, wherever possible); time spent in healthcare needs (this included time spent on self-care, if any) and their overall time allocation for different activities carried on the previous day. With this, our goal was also to understand their motivations carry out those activities. Less number of participants agreed to fill the time diaries due to the extensive time commitment involved in diary completion. This was not surprising since non-response is one of the major methodological issues in time-use surveys (Chatzitheochari and Arber, 2011). Although, in no way claiming generalization of the study findings, we are hopeful that by triangulating the data (from surveys, time-use diaries and telephonic interviews), we are able to offer a rich and credible description of household level differences and inequalities around time-use, more so using the lens of social differentials like gender, social class and employment status.

This analytic sample consists primarily of 63.4% (N = 71) older individuals either retired or never employed (including both men and women). Table 1 presents the socio-demographic and household level information collected from the online-based survey questionnaire. As noted earlier, for the time diaries and in-depth interviews, a smaller set of participants (N = 15) from the original survey were invited to be part of the study on a volunteer basis. As such, the social class composition of the study participants of this study reflects upper middle-class Hindus – the dominant caste category in the highly stratified Indian society where social distances in terms of labor, income, diet and residence among caste categories are common (Desai and Dubey, 2011). Given the fuzzy and contested empirical notion of social class in India (Fernandes, 2006; Mazzarella, 2011), we relied on cultural markers (access to economic, social and cultural capital), by looking at their everyday activities and accessibility during the pandemic than exclusively on income. In some cases, middle class status was self-reported by the participants, whereas in others, we determined class status based on income, leisure practices, asset holding and the ease with which our informants communicated in English.

Table 1 Socio-Demographic characteristics of respondents (N = 71)
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While acknowledging that this can be a source of potential bias, we would like to note that the pandemic led social distancing and other civic protocols stymied our attempts to reach out to a wider and more socially heterogeneous set of participants who had either no or limited access to the internet (a route through which the study participants were recruited). The online surveys and the time diaries were both in English and Hindi while the telephone interviews were for the most part conducted in English language.

Time-Use Dairy Data

As noted earlier, along with the household survey, we used Time-use diaries (a specific format was shared with our informants) and semi-structured interviews (both in-person and telephonic). The informants who filled out the time diaries were also the ones who participated in the in-depth, narrative style interviews. For the Time-use diary data, the study design was guided by the framework provided by (Antonopoulos and Hirway, 2010) which includes comprehensive information on the everyday lives of our informants: (i) information on major socio-economic characteristics of households and individuals, (ii) time spent by individuals on different activities, and (iii) the context in which activities are carried out (ibid.: pg.253). The diaries provide information on how individuals allocate their time over a specified time period (typically 24 h of a day or over seven days of a week) and how much time they spend on each of these activities. Hirway (2009) discuss how by making use of self-completed 24-hour time diaries, information on primary and secondary activities (both paid and unpaid labor, such as care work, household management, cleaning; as well as discretionary activities like socialising, self-care) of the informants can be gathered. Leisure, or the residual category, was captured as time spent on cultivating hobbies, attending cultural or family events, entertainment and media use (watching television or using video devices). It also included non-work-related travel for religious or recreational purposes.

The time diaries allowed for a narrative nature where participants could record their activities around routine parts of the day (e.g., waking up, daily chores, religious activities, meals, evening walks and sociality) to elicit sequential time-allocation for different activities over the previous 24-hours (from 5:00am to 10:00pm with activities recorded at one hour interval). Any instance of simultaneous work was captured during the interviews. A sample time diary matrix has been presented in Table 2. In some cases, the first author asked their schedules and filled the diary data while talking over the telephone.

Table 2 Sample Time-Use Diary (24-hour recall)
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The semi-structured interviews (conducted in-person and over telephone by the first author) with the informants ranged between 20 and 40 min. Interviews were recorded with prior consent from the informants and transcribed later. Since the interviews were conducted with a smaller set of participants who had initially filled out the online survey, reliability and validity were ensured by triangulation to allow methodological pluralism (Bekhet & Zauszniewski, 2012; Olsen et al., 2004). We follow Sayer (2000) and later Olsen’s (2004) emphasis on the realist tradition to social science research that advocates an integrated approach to both method and data triangulation.

Overall, the combined use of time-use diaries and interviews allows a better understanding of how people use their time. The data compiled presented a complex montage of discourses on leisure, household work, care perception, care giving and receiving, their daily routines and changes brought by the pandemic. The semi-structured interview questions ranged from (i) Could you please walk me through your day yesterday, (ii) How have you adjusted to changes by the pandemic, (iii) How is the household work divided among members of the household, so on and so forth.

In this study, serious leisure is conceptualized as an activity which requires active engagement, commitment and perseverance to learn. We operationalize the concept by culminating all activities that needed perseverance and considered daily (in some cases weekly) participation in these activities (apart from paid and unpaid work) as an indicator of engaging in leisure. The everyday activities were broadly categorized into (i) paid work, (ii) unpaid work and, (iii) leisure activities. Free-time activities (casual leisure) were excluded from leisure activities, as the informants differentiated between the two (see section Findings section (i)). Particularly, leisure activities were then broken down to specific categories ranging from ‘doing time’ (Felski, 2000) to serious leisure, as elaborated in Table 3. This leads us to the serious leisure-casual leisure (SL-CL) continuum proposed by Veal (2021) while criticizing the SLP as a mere classificatory system.

Table 3 Contents of Leisure activities
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All activities recorded were performed from home, online or within communities. In some cases, we were informed of activities like walking, exercising and essential work was performed outside the house.

Findings

This section focuses on exploring the following themes (i) how time allocation for leisure activities (along with everyday chores) happen throughout the day in lives of older men and women and (ii) the everyday negotiations around time and leisure to maintain active living among the older adults. These themes were arrived at by utilizing thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006; Clarke and Braun, 2014), after transcribing the interview data. Once dominant themes were identified, we used the theoretical framework of SLP: subjectively defined leisure, conscious experience and post hoc satisfaction to guide the use of the interview data. The interview material was read by both the authors and the themes were subsequently developed based on discussions and consensus. As such, following Braun and Clark’s (2006) contention of a flexible, inductive process, our theme development was largely an interpretive one than relying on pre-existing codes. We privilege our greater engagement with the interview data (thus ensuring inter-rater reliability) than focusing on establishing ‘activity’ coding accuracy. The first part of the findings broadly cover the time spent on different activities spanning from time spent on household chores to running errands, taking care of grandchildren, exercising and self-care.

Evidence from Household Surveys

The data drawn from our household survey of 71 older adults was collected through online platforms ~ emails and WhatsApp in most cases. In the other cases, the first author collected information in-person. The household survey was designed to obtain views from older participants, ranging from 50 years old to 80 years old. We received maximum participation from the age group 63–72 years old (~ 44%) and participation dwindled with increasing age. A majority of older adults in our sample population had atleast a graduate degree (~ 58%)- out of which 6% had specialised degrees and vocational experiences. Although a few of our participants were hesitant to share their annual income figures with us, from their ease of English language (a form of cultural capital) and access to internet as well as leisure-based private club membership (e.g. Rotary Insurance Welfare Association, Alumni Club Community and Senior Citizen Association to more private not-for-profit organizations like Silver Talkies, KSCA Golf Club and Lion’s Club), it is reasonable to assume that a majority of our participants belonged to middle to upper-middle classes. Those who indicated their income figures, their average monthly incomes were around INR 60,000 (~$ 725) which can be considered to be ‘upper-middle class’ as per the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) estimates (https://www.cmie.com/).

Moreover, 29% older adults continue to work (~ 44% men and 34% women) and nearly 75% of our sample (N = 71) has worked at least once in their adult lives. Out of the 71 older adults who provided information through surveys, 17 men and 19 women learnt new skills in last one year at the time of data collection. Men focused on activities like improving their English proficiency on Duolingo (a mobile-based application for language learning and certification), new gardening techniques, learning contemporary dance forms (such as, Salsa and Latin), and online trading in equity markets. They rarely engaged in learning cooking or home management skills. Older women, on the other hand, focused on activities that offered them the promise of skilful domesticity with heightened social skills. These involve learning baking, boutique work, getting familiarized to basic internet functions such as emails and web-based collaborative platforms such as zoom. Some women reported attending art classes and workshops, chatting with grandchildren and many tried learning new recipes on YouTube. When asked with whom they did perform most of these activities, women preferred doing it with their spouses while most men preferred performing leisure activities with their friends. Older men also opted for passive leisure activities like reading and watching television, while women chose socialization with friends, self-care activities and learning new things. Self-care activities for men involved going out with friends and exercising while women focused on their health. Although, all participants in our household survey reported being diagnosed with one or more lifestyle illnesses (e.g. diabetes, blood pressure and heart conditions), none of them mentioned any functional limitations as barriers to perform daily tasks. On average, our sample participants rated their health 4 and above on the Likert scale ranging from 1 to 5 (where 1 = poor health and 5 = excellent health). According to our collected information, most older adults (~ 45%) were staying with their spouses and adult children and only 5 of them lived alone. As a result, 66% of them were not actively engaged in grandparenting at the time of the survey. However, whenever older adults spent time caring for their grandchildren, women spent on average two hours more time than men. Sleep patterns were almost consistent with 52% of our sample participants reporting sleep times ranging between 7 and 10 h on average.

Evidence from Interviews

In our next section, we describe the themes by juxtaposing the narratives from the in-depth, telephone based interviews. The next section presents the analysed data under three broad themes – (i) the varied understanding of leisure and free-time, discussing the contextual understanding among the older population which is often mixed with work obligations; while there also exists dilute boundaries between casual and serious leisure; (ii) the second theme discusses an enhanced engagement and well-being vis-à-vis serious leisure practices and lastly; (iii) the negotiation around leisure constraints experienced by older adults, irrespective of their class and age.

(i) “I don’t want to have time when I do nothing”: Multiple interpretations of leisure and free-time.

I always want to be up to something, if I’m enjoying that is okay. I do not want to sit around and do nothing. Happy to be doing something all the time…

  • Neelu (68-year-old).

Active engagement with activities has always been seen crucial for subjective wellbeing. The above quote from a 68-year-old informant further emphasises the moral centrality of a ‘busy ethic’ (Ekerdt, 1986) as a way to lead meaningful lives. She considers herself a multitasker and takes pride in not having much free-time (the time when she does nothing). What was surprising is the constant association of leisure with agency, purpose and freedom, while free-time as being mindless and boring. For instance, she would talk to her grandchildren every morning over zoom, simultaneously cooking or reading newspaper, which she considered as part of her work. While free-time for her continues to be chatting with friends and family, attending her book club readings and playing games online. She says “I absolutely love bridge online and spend a lot of time checking my WhatsApp,”. Here, leisure for her does not mean sitting idle or relaxing but to continue to do something which makes her content. Although inconsistent with the traditional forms of leisure as rest and relaxation, Neelu’s notion of leisure with a focus on the ‘self’ resonates with contemporary writings on the shifting cultural practices of leisure among Indian middleclass (Brosius, 2012; Naganathan et al., 2021). The emergence of casual leisure to serious leisure continuum is recorded in how older adults continue to engage with everyday activities and develop into specific routines to keep themselves engaged. Similarly, another informant, an 80-years-old retired professor continues to read at every chance he gets, “I am dead if I am not learning, actively learning new things,” emphasising on his serious leisure pursuits. As he structures his day around his work schedule, he also enjoys unproductive and unstructured activities (i.e., casual leisure) including walking or talking to his friends and ruminating about life in general. Thus, both serious and casual leisure define the bulk of leisure-based activities for older adults during the pandemic. While his wife, who is 78-years-old believes leisure time is not bound by any constraints of purpose, with no obligation or need to finish the activity. However, she says, “ladies hardly have free-time…Women work more, Indian households are made that way…”, to which she further adds, “I consciously find time to meet my friends or engage in discussion with them or even play online games…” She says these involvements are necessary at her age to keep her mental coherence and find some time for herself, as she would have done it for any other household chore. One could also say, in this case, the conceptual distinction between serious versus casual leisure gets eroded from the perspective of this older female participant. Apart from their will to engage, specific leisure choices between gender are recorded; where men continued to passive leisure activities and in some cases more paid work like activities, while women tend to incline more towards develo** their hobby skills and active socialisation. In fact, women (re)negotiated a balance as gender norms are gradually shifting by focusing on the self and overall mirrored their leisure choices, personal identity and social position.

As such, for most participants serious leisure mostly comprised of activities which they were not obligated to do but continue doing, as they enjoy. The previously noted distinction between (serious) leisure as practices that are marked by purpose, skill-building and perseverance as opposed to free-time (or casual leisure) as activities that are unobligated, unstructured and predominantly marked by monotony and boredom, seemed to be the common perception for all participants that we interviewed for this study. Even in cases where our informants experienced time poverty, we saw a growing appreciation towards work (productive or unproductive domestic chores). “Weekends are something, I do not look forward to. I don’t get to meet people and I cannot go out because of the pandemic,” says a 59-year-old Special Needs Educator, who remains busy with the online school sessions throughout her weekdays. Although emphasising how her joint family has been a support system, she says, “there’s always something that needs to be done.” Her days are busy with school work and then she continues to contribute in the housework. She shares her satisfaction with her daily routines of work (and non-work time) as it provides a sense of structure for her days, especially during the pandemic. Yet again we record leisure emerging as a structured sphere that involved more purposeful engagement which challenges them either mentally or physically. This included enrolling for a computer course or learning to attend zoom sessions, learning new languages and enjoying new craft forms (knitting, ikigai).

For many the pandemic only slightly altered their routines. Thus, we do not see selective optimisation or compensation for activities they would have preferred doing in most cases. Notwithstanding the mobility restrictions outside their house due to nation-wide lockdown, we document, for instance, a 69-year-old widower in Bengaluru, also a member of the medical hospital, used to book himself for cognitive and physical exercise classes, while other days, he used to considerable amount of time in Vedanta classes (religious teachings of Hinduism). The only prominent change for him was the switch to the online mode interaction. In these instances, we see older adults are actively participating and involving themselves in casual as well as serious leisure, which varied with specific contexts and preferences. Nevertheless, we account for an enhanced sense of learning with new opportunities to re-structure and routinise their otherwise unstructured lives.

(ii) “A pleasant diversion”: Serious Leisure and improved well-being.

In the previous discussion, we described how the informants interviewed for this study spent considerable amount of their leisure time learning new hobbies, garnering their past interests and spending time with friends and family.

Several of our participants spoke proudly of the activity and presenting themselves in terms of their leisure-based interest. For instance, a 72-year-old high-spirited, former General Manager explains how he spends considerable amount of time on his health. He explained his “youthfulness” both at heart and health by emphasizing – “I spend two-three hours in the gym everyday which is separate from my walk time.” Similarly, a craft and handloom enthusiast, who recently celebrated her 74th birthday says, “…through craft consciousness of Telangana [a South Indian state], I take forward my interest in boutique, sewing and printing…,” who has always enjoyed working with artisans and weavers. She used to travel outstation to Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore and other cities for exhibitions and has continued the voluntary passion by connecting the maker with the market. “I owned a boutique, whose income used to go into whatever was needed in the house but now I am focus on reviving venkatgiri [handloom from Andhra – known for its fine weaving technique],” as she continues, she also shares how her multiple myeloma has not changed her life. These constraints were considered part and parcel of living life. She continues to kee** herself occupied. Only a few decades back, she would spend considerable amount of time caring for her grandchildren, however, as they grow older, she has shifted focus towards her own interests. She took her adult life interests to voluntary work towards a cause of saving the dying handloom in her state and has taken forward her choice and desired lifestyle.

While some focused on not being idle and took more common pursuits, some others returned to their earlier life interests. As in the case of 59-year-old special needs educator from Bengaluru, who left her corporate job to take a course in teaching special children from the Scientific Society of Karnataka (as also discussed in the above section). She now teaches children with special needs and this takes her major part of the day. Her work and other engagements related to work allowed an outlet for enjoying herself that contributed to the construction of a social world around the activity and found her encore career as being leisurely. While some others mixed their casual leisure pursuits of meeting people and making new friends to more serious affair of engaging in new events happening the city. One of our informants, who was always interested in the attending new classes happening around the city continues her passion by attending online classes. Continuing her desire to actively learn, she now heads the first Ikebana chapter in Hyderabad. This allowed her to be part of something bigger, contributing and hel** others which rewards her through recognition and meaning interaction with others. While another young-old informant, age 56 recently started MA in psychology as she wanted to fruitfully use this excess time provided by the pandemic and now enjoy working on assignments and internship, as part of her degree. For her, this presented an array of rewards primarily to self-expression and self-actualisation with also deploying pre-existing skills. Rather than viewing the pandemic as a constraint, she framed it as a pragmatic choice. This stands parallel to the findings (Samanta, 2021), who discusses the emerging possibilities of self-actualisation during the pandemic among the upper middle-class older women in India.

(iii) Everyday Negotiation through Serious Leisure Practices.

In the above two sections, we see a clear process of perseverance in serious leisure along with its (unstructured) counterpart – casual leisure. We refrain from offering an empirical commentary on the link between leisure and well-being, and instead, in this section, discuss the complexities in both the forms and how constraints are negotiated. We emphasise how older adults use their age as a route to emancipation (Samanta and Varghese 2019) to work around, adapt or alleviate their leisure constraints.

In the time-use data collected, a bulk of women’s and men’s daily hours were occupied by - household work (care and housework), volunteer activities, leisure (socializing, television, exercise, reading, and relaxing), sleep, and other activities (religious, grooming, eating) and in some cases, paid work. Our male informants in most cases continue to do paid work, even after retirement, which they reported as being enjoyable while women (irrespective of their past employment status) continue to put in higher proportion of daily hours in housework than men. The variation in leisure time emerged due to numerous constraints and obligations older women experience as they shouldered the major share of housework (especially during the unavailability of house help and support staff during the pandemic). For instance, many of our older women participants mentioned how in pre-pandemic times, they enjoyed sociality over tea in the afternoons after their husbands left for work. Since with the pandemic the husbands stay at home and given the social distancing norms, the everyday practice of meeting up with other female friends, came to a halt. They negotiated this by organising once-in-a-while tea meetings in open spaces (this was during the months when there covid cases are continuously declining) and meet their friends. In a similar way, 78-year-old retired professor points out the difficulty map** division of labor in Indian households which she believes are set in a certain way, where women are culturally patterned to take care of their households. Even at her age, she continues to perform household work and care for her grandchildren and children (this was mainly checking in on them through call and video meetings).

With restricted mobility our participants spent their free time watching television, gardening and playing games on their phones. Although leisure activities were fragmented, women enrolled themselves in reading clubs, online hobby classes and in one case, started postgraduate studies. In fact, with the pandemic, although free-time availability increased, we record how older adults tried to learn new things and made constant efforts to engage themselves in productive activities. A group of women interviewed, who also were living in one community shared their daily visits to the grocery shops to buy vegetables together or run other errands and at the same time socialise with their neighbours. This was at the backdrop that availability of more time during the pandemic was not translating to improved relaxation. The distinct boundaries between the productive work and unproductive leisure were also blurred, as older adults (especially women) continued performing domestic chores in their free-time.

Having said that, we record an exacerbated interest in self-motivated leisure practices, particularly among women, as they found themselves confined within the boundaries of home with increased expectations of domestic workload during the pandemic. Therefore, women particularly seem to put an extra effort in making sure they schedule meetings with friends online (casual leisure), learn new skills (ikebana) or continue their studies (serious leisure), as a way to negotiate with their domestic burden. Therefore, using serious leisure as a route to renegotiate and reconfigure their everyday lives. While in case of men, they preferred to continue their earlier life interests (in most cases) and occasionally practised serious leisure to negotiate their way around leisure constraints. This observed gender difference is akin to the differences in leisure constraints that men and women experience within their households. Taken together, these findings suggest that due to the greater leisure constraints experienced by older women, there is an uptick in the ways women creatively reconfigure, adapt and restructure their available time during the pandemic.

Discussion and Concluding Reflections

In this paper, we examine the everyday lives of older adults using time-use diaries, with a specific focus on their leisure activities (both casual and serious) during the pandemic. This provided us to shift our focus from consumption-led leisure practices to everyday leisure practices, especially when the pandemic-led lockdown affected the temporal and spatial boundaries (Craig, 2020). This lies at the backdrop of numerous changes recorded in the post-retirement lives of older adults (popularly referred to as the Third Agers) in the Global North.

The pandemic provided an interesting backdrop for the data collection as older adults found themselves devoid of visiting friends and family or of having leisure outside their homes. The lockdown, restricted mobility and greater vulnerabilities forced older individuals to alter their daily routines and re-structure their time-use. Unlike many cases of social isolation among the older adults during the pandemic, we see our (upper) middle-class participants crafted novel ways to combat loneliness and age-related health restrictions. We also record considerable leisure differences in terms of time and choices between women and men. This finding of a leisure gap by gender reinforces earlier finding that suggest how leisure practices are governed by moral-cultural self-descriptions (Codina et al., 2017).

We contend that our study makes both theoretical and empirical advances in gerontological scholarship of the Global South. Empirically, as older adults across the globe experience diverse possibilities of new aging, our study provides evidence of the growing importance of leisure among the urban, middle to upper middle-class Indians, with stable post-retirement incomes and good health. We capture a shifting trajectory of enhanced engagement with more serious forms of leisure along with its casual counterparts (unproductive, free-time activities like socialising with friends and family or watching television). There were few instances where our informants persevered through occasional adversities to gain rewards from the activity, including personal enrichment and self-actualisation, when pursuing serious leisure. This was also combined with casual leisure activities that included meeting friends, evening strolls and playing games. Often, leisure-based activities defined their newly formed pandemic identities. This development, as we have shown, resonates with serious leisure pursuits of Third Agers in the West, where older adults make conscious efforts to participate, involve and learn for their activities of interest. We have argued that the Serious Leisure Perspective (Stebbins, 2017)- a framework that examines leisure activities as complex and inter-related, experiential processes-, hold promise to understand the pandemic led changed everyday realities of older persons in urban India. This framing allowed us to understand how our middle-class participants were engaging in meaning-making of their new-found and/or earlier leisure-based pursuits while not radically disrupting traditional hierarchies of gender and occupation. Additionally, it allowed us to ask if the Western definition of ‘leisure’ is perceived and practiced in ways that are different than those in the industrialized countries. We contend that despite the ambiguous cultural rendering of the term ‘leisure’ (an angle that we discuss elsewhere, see Tripathi & Samanta 2022), older adults in our sample utilized their discretionary time in ways that are similar with their Western counterparts. This surprising cultural homogeneity in leisure practices could be attributed to our participants’ privileged social class belonging. This finding is supported by a recent survey on (upper) middle class older Indians in metropolitan cities who reported spending their post-retirement time in leisure travel and self-development pursuits (The Economic Times, 2021).

Constraint negotiation vis-a-vis leisure allowed us to study everyday constraints like family obligations and time poverty, where serious leisure caught our imaginative eyes. Although serious leisure in the Indian context has not always been consumptive leisure (as in the case of Global North) but everyday activities performed with the aim to routinise and structure their lives. This varied among men and women due to the differences in their responsibilities; where women continued to contribute more in the household. Although serious leisure activities provide a route to negotiate with leisure constraints, we see a re-configuration of traditional hierarchies of domestic time-use; where men would have more time liberty of choosing their activities while women continue to work within strict time boundaries. These findings have pragmatic implications as governments, civil society organizations and practitioners prepare for a post-pandemic recovery. For example, older Indians’ adoption of internet technology in socializing or acquiring new skills and knowledge can be harnessed to offer support during adverse situations. As such, as noted in pandemic-related studies, development and delivery of interventions to facilitate an uptake of technology-use among older persons could help identify external resources that allow better co** under adverse environmental and health conditions (see Chung et al., 2021; Nimrod, 2020).

We found our participants constructing a meaningful time as they negotiated everyday routines and leisure without eliciting a despair narrative (commonly associated with aging and the COVID19 pandemic). The conceptual framework of gerotranscendence (Tornstam, 2011) allowed us to argue that the upended lives of older adults were still lived in positivity since it encouraged a cosmic comprehension of life. Overall, by focusing on everyday subjectivities, practices and normative roles, we offer a deeper understanding of (gendered) time that is reconfigured and preserved at once.

Limitations and Directions for Future Research

Although the data collection was conducted during the pandemic, it would be interesting to study if these novel efforts of leisure engagement persist in a post-pandemic world where restrictions on mobility and social distancing have been eased. Relatedly, to claim that these shifts in leisure practices are enduring, further research that involves data collection efforts across a range of states and cities in India, are warranted. We acknowledge that our observations about re-configured leisure practices have a distinct social class dimension (i.e. our participants came from affluent middle classes that had adequate cultural capital to be able to adapt to adverse conditions promptly) and cannot be generalized to the older population in India. Further, our analysis paid less attention to other socio-economic dimensions such as living arrangements, social capital, caste affiliations and geographical context- all of which have implications on leisure practices. Nonetheless, this study responds to gerontology’s plea of making theory-use more relevant and innovative in understanding social realities of growing old (Bengtson et al., 1997; Humble et al., 2020) while at the same time offering an empirical starting point to use leisure in later life as a lens to examine family-level inequalities.