Delights and Disquiets of Leisure in Premodern India

Leisure is a corollary to pleasure. While modern sociologists locate and relate leisure with the notion of work, time and entertainment emerging as a prominent status marker with modernity; this historical exploration, traces how leisure and recreation were often imagined and celebrated during premodern times, spanning from the ancient to the precolonial period.The book takes into account the differential access to leisure and pleasure based on class and gender where masculinity is projected through manly sports and femininity though beauty and indulgence in projection of recreation, entertainment and luxury. The counter-discourse representing labour for those who cater for this leisure is invisibilized as is their transactional nature.The volume dwells on the attitudes, prescribed and proscribed, and brings to the fore the differences across religious ideologies Brahmanism, Buddhism, Jaina and Muslim in various periods. Further it looks at leisure in the various classes and cultural spaces like the elite, women, the king in the bedchamber, and the court with dancing girls, public such as orchards, garden and performance spaces.