I came across this article recently which immediately caught my eye because we rarely see these images kinds of images of women in the everyday, enjoying the public spaces the same way that men do.
Dipanjali Singh, ‘The Right to Rest: Women at Leisure’, The India Forum, 26 March 2021.
A woman at leisure is a rare sighting. Snatched at moments of rest between responsibilities, leisure marks the absence of prescribed duties and emerges as a space for expressing and curating subjecthoods beyond impositions and dictations.
Surabhi Yadav’s Instagram-based photo-project Basanti: Women at Leisure makes visible women’s leisure in all of its glorious heterogeneity. Surabhi writes about the “goddesses of small things” who find leisure beyond straitjacketed renderings of emancipation. In her work, women wash themselves off definitions which require them to act in this way or that, and are seen splayed out in the sun with a book-covered-face quieting the harsh rays, painting their toenails, posing meticulously for a candid picture, or simply letting down their hair while plonked up on a tree.
BAGICHA 