Wellbeing and care, a view from India
A conversation with Neha Saigal
Editor’s note: This article is part of our Thematic Focus “Degrowth from the Global South”.
Neha Saigal is currently working on the intersections of gender, care and climate in India, she is also associated with Mobilisation Lab and supports civil society leaders globally in the areas of leadership development, campaigning and movement building. She recently finished the Master in Degrowth: Ecology, Economics and Policy in the UAB, Barcelona, with the thesis: Degrowth & Delinking: Weaving a Majority World Agenda.
Gisela Ruiseco: Wellbeing has been defined in modernity/coloniality 1 mostly in a very material way, today boiling down to striving for having always more. If the North with its overwhelming overshoot of consumption has to direct itself towards “sufficiency”, understood as stepping down from excess, the story in the South looks a bit different, as there are myriads of people living in real, artificial scarcity, i.e. scarcity in the midst of inaccessible abundance (functional for the system).
In the Degrowth movement there is a clear defense of the Pluriverse in the sense that Wellbeing has to be defined locally, ideally around care and life, as ecofeminists around the world have defended. Going beyond “development”, societies could be opening up to countless possibilities. It is perhaps important to note that these re-definitions develop from different starting points: for late modern societies, North and South, are emerging from different positions in the power gradient of modernity/coloniality.
In your work with communities in India, specially with women, what thoughts would you have about how wellbeing there can be understood? What relationship would you see with “care”, how would you understand this latter concept?
Neha Saigal: When I think about wellbeing in the communities I work with in India, I cannot separate it from the realities of gender, caste, class, and culture. Intersectionality2 plays a decisive role in determining who can access wellbeing. Women from indigenous and Dalit communities, in particular, face a double or triple burden. They often have to abandon their own health and wellbeing to engage in low-wage, exploitative labor, domestic work in cities, brick kilns, construction sites, or endless agricultural work. Their bodies bear the weight of caste hierarchies, gender roles, and poverty.
The irony is that the very women who keep households, cities, and fields running are the ones who are denied rest, pleasure, and recognition. This tells us that wellbeing in countries like India and other parts of the Global South cannot be understood without addressing power and inequality.
If women dare to seek rest, pleasure, or leisure, they are quickly labeled as “lazy” or “irresponsible.” Rest is seen as indulgence; pleasure is frowned upon; leisure is a privilege only men, or wealthy women, are “allowed” to have. In most communities, these are not topics women can speak about openly. The idea of being good for nothing or lazy are notions thrust down upon us by the colonisers who considered people in the colonies as labour whose bodies are supposed to be exploited and extracted.
And yet, if one belongs to an urban, privileged class in the Global South, one might adopt Western frameworks of wellbeing and mindfulness practices, fitness regimens, even “self-love” language. These frameworks are not wrong, but they remain inaccessible to the majority of women in the Global South. Worse, they risk becoming aspirational ideals that further alienate those for whom wellbeing is fundamentally about dignity and safety.
Perhaps this is why I believe the concept of wellbeing needs to be reimagined from a decolonial feminine perspective, and as a collective practice rather than an individual one. For women who are already stretched thin, wellbeing is not about “doing more” for themselves in an individualistic way. It is about reshaping norms so that the burden of care is shared, and the possibilities of rest and joy are not seen as selfish.
This reimagining is also about asking different questions: How do we live with less, not because of forced deprivation, but as an intentional way of reducing burdens and sustaining the commons? How do we make sure that wellbeing is not another commodity, but a lived reality shared across communities?
Commons play a crucial role in shaping wellbeing. A park in the neighborhood, the ability to loiter on streets without fear, the chance to gather for festivals or public performances these are collective spaces of pleasure and belonging. Yet, they are increasingly privatized, policed, or made inaccessible, especially for women, and the poor.
To reclaim the commons is to reclaim collective wellbeing. Whether it is a water body, a community hall, or simply a street where people can gather without harassment, these spaces embody the idea that wellbeing is not private property. They remind us that joy, safety, and care are meant to be shared. Movements across the Global South have always understood this whether women gather at village wells to organize, or young people reclaim streets through music and protest.
In much of Western discourse, care is acknowledged but not central. Even movements like Degrowth, which emphasize care, do so against the grain of dominant individualism. In contrast, in the Global South and especially in women’s communities in India that I work with, care has always been central. Care is not just about children or the elderly; it is about taking care of each other in crisis, about looking after neighbors, about extending care to the non-human world. This difference is striking. In the North, care is framed as a “choice.” In the South, individualism is not always an option; survival is tied to interdependence. Thus, care is not simply labor but a principle of life and an ethic of solidarity.
Culture like care is inseparable from wellbeing. Food, festivals, songs, and rituals all shape how people feel connected, nourished, and alive. A festival meal, cooked collectively, is not just about nutrition but about belonging. Seasonal rhythms, agricultural cycles, and cultural rituals offer people a sense of continuity and purpose.
These cultural practices are often overlooked in Global North frameworks of wellbeing, which focus more on individual psychology or economics. But for many communities of the Global South, culture is not an “add-on”it is a core indicator of wellbeing. Without festivals, without music, without the joy of gathering, life feels diminished.
Taken together, these insights point to an alternative understanding of wellbeing and one that the Global South can offer as a call to action. Instead of chasing individualized, commodified versions of wellbeing, we can learn from practices rooted in care, commons, culture, and the collective.
G.R.: Neha, you bring very important points which help to localize and bring complexity to the discussion on Wellbeing. I want to highlight what you say about it being for many women fundamentally about dignity and safety, taking the discussion away from abstract human needs into concrete capitalist hard realities.
Your discussion serves also as a mirror to look at the society I live in in the Global North. Here, when thinking about care, it would seem culturally more inaccessible to include a collective aspect or a relationship to the commons. Further, as you say, in the South: “survival is tied to interdependence”, and thus the latter is much more visible. In the North even though interdependence is a fact on the long run, mutual dependency is invisibilized in daily life, except in impoverished sectors of society (or in times of crisis, as feminist authors have pointed out). The loss of awareness of interdependency and of the communitarian could be seen as obstacles for re-imagining societies in the materially oversaturated North.
That leisure and culture can be seen as part of caring for each other seems also important to stress. Leisure: an aspect of wellbeing which is perhaps taken for granted in the North --it has been harshly fought for, but has also benefited from an ‘imperial way of life’-- is today filled up with individualistic entertainment, far from collective or relational aspects, and thus a deeper source of wellbeing...
You have linked the lack of leisure, its significance for wellbeing, and the questions of injustice and power. Today, the people who were labelled as lazy by coloniality, are working in double and triple shifts to survive: I just came back from Argentina where even the middle classes, or what is left of them, have almost no time for an own life. And, as with your example of Dalit women, the systemic extraction of labor hits women much harder. It is striking what you say about society frowning upon women taking time for themselves. This reminds me of S. Federici’s account of how, in Europe, women’s getting-together and mutual support was destroyed in the turn to the Renaissance, impoverishing them and making them completely vulnerable and dependent on men...
How could one regain the positive value of something like “loitering in community” (which maybe still exists in collective memories) for wellbeing, and (also!) survival? Are women organizing towards this de-colonizing of “leisure”, reclaiming commons and cultural practices?
N.S.: In the city of Bombay, India three women, Shilpa Phadke, Shilpa Ranade, and Sameera Khan took this question seriously. Their research, captured in the book Why Loiter?, turned a seemingly trivial act into a radical proposition. For Indian women, they argued, the right to loiter is the right to simply exist in public without purpose or apology. It is about claiming joy in a city that too often frames women’s presence only in terms of work, consumption, or danger. To loiter is to imagine safety not just as the absence of violence, but as the freedom to seek pleasure, to linger, to belong. In their framing, the quest for pleasure strengthens the struggle against violence and extends beyond women, toward an “undifferentiated right to public space” for all marginalized groups.
This, to me, is the heart of decolonizing leisure: reclaiming the commons not as functional or transactional spaces, but as places of shared joy, rest, and presence. The right to loiter is not only about individual freedom; it is about a collective imagination of equality.
We can see this imagination at work in the cultural performances of Dalit and Indigenous women artists. Their music, dance, and art carry counter-narratives to the dominant order, questioning the myths and traditions that have long denied them dignity. These performances are not only acts of resistance; they are also invitations into joy, into well-being defined on their own terms. In this sense, they create a new language of leisure where to sing, to dance, to gather becomes survival itself.
Assistant Professor K. Kalyani of Azim Premji University captures this beautifully in her analysis of the Dalit singer Malti Rao. Rao’s music challenges Brahmanical structures by creating what Kalyani calls “new popular music.” The lyrics rework oral histories, myths, and everyday narratives; the form reshapes where and how music is performed. A performance is no longer confined to the elite stage; it spills into streets, courtyards, gatherings spaces where the community can reclaim itself. Leisure here is not passive consumption, but an active reordering of social life, a communal weaving of pleasure and resistance.
Colonial legacies also fractured language, stripping away expressive tools that link people to memory and well-being. Today, across India, artists and communities are reclaiming lost tongues, reviving songs and stories that hold not only knowledge but joy. To speak, sing, or perform in one’s own language is to recover both history and healing.
So, are women organizing toward this decolonizing of leisure, reclaiming commons and cultural practices? Absolutely. Whether by loitering in the city, reimagining music and performance, or reviving erased languages, women, queer and marginalised groups are cultivating collective spaces where joy and survival entwine.
To loiter together, to sing together, to reclaim language together these are not minor acts. They are ways of remembering that leisure itself can be a commons, a form of care, and a strategy for survival.
With decolonial authors like A. Quijano or W. Mignolo, we take modernity to be inseparable from coloniality.
Intersectionality is an analytical framework that examines how various social identities—such as gender, race, caste, class, sexual orientation, religion, ability, and age—intersect and interact to create unique experiences of privilege and oppression. Originating in Black feminist legal scholarship, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term in 1989 to illustrate how the experiences of Black women, shaped by both racism and sexism, were marginalized when these oppressions were considered separately.
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