Race, Class, Parenting and Children’s Leisure: Children’s Leisurescapes and Parenting Cultures in Middle-class British Indian Families (Sociology of Children and Families) [1 ed.] 1529219515, 9781529219517

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SOCIOLOGY OF CHILDREN AND FAMILIES

RACE, CLASS, PARENTING AND CHILDREN’S LEISURE

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Race, Class, Parenting and Children’s Leisure Children’s Leisurescapes and Parenting Cultures in Middle-class British Indian Families Utsa Mukherjee

RACE, CLASS, PARENTING AND CHILDREN’S LEISURE



Sociology of Children and Families Series editors: Esther Dermott and Debbie Watson, University of Bristol, UK

The Sociology of Children and Families series brings together the latest international research on children, childhood and families and pushes forward theory in the sociology of childhood and family life. Books in the

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RACE, CLASS, PARENTING AND CHILDREN’S LEISURE Children’s Leisurescapes and Parenting Cultures in Middle-​class British Indian Families Utsa Mukherjee

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1–​9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +​44 (0)117 374 6645 e: bup-​[email protected] Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press 2023 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-5292-1951-7 hardcover ISBN 978-1-5292-1952-4 ePub ISBN 978-1-5292-1953-1 ePdf The right of Utsa Mukherjee to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the author and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design: Blu Inc Front cover image: getty images/​triloks Bristol University Press uses environmentally responsible print partners. Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

To Dida (Uma Rani Mukherjee), for her love, nurturing and belief in me.

Contents List of Figures and Table Acknowledgements

x xi

1 Introduction 1 2 Critical Sociology of Children’s Leisure: A Framework 24 3 Concerted Cultivation the Indian Way? Organised Leisure and 43 Racial Parenting Strategy 4 The Fun, the Boring and the Racist Name Calling: How 66 Children Make Sense of Their Leisure Geographies 5 Negotiated Temporalities: Leisure, Time-​Use and Everyday Life 82 6 Relating, Place-​Making and the Cultural Politics of Leisuring 106 7 Concluding Thoughts 124 References Index

136 164

ix

List of Figures and Table Figures 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1

Jasleen watching films with her family in the living room Saumya baking cookies with her family Aashka playing board games with her family Chirag playing board games with his family ‘Jugaad’ badminton in the back garden

88 90 92 99 112

Table 1.1

List of study participants

17

x

Acknowledgements This book is a labour of love, and it has been made possible by the care, support and intellectual generosity of many mentors and friends. Far too many to be exhaustively listed here. But a few places and people have been so instrumental in supporting me through this journey that it will be remiss not to thank them here. This book builds on my doctoral research, which was funded by a Royal Holloway University of London doctoral scholarship. This funding enabled me to conduct the fieldwork that I report in this book. My primary doctoral supervisor, Ravinder Barn, has supported this project from its very inception, and it was her belief in my ideas that kept me going. My two secondary supervisors, Vicky Harman and Mastoureh Fathi, have also helped me hone my thinking and inspired me to see this project through. The ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (Grant Ref: ES/​V011952/​1), which I held at the University of Southampton, provided the time, space and resources to work on this book manuscript. My conversations with my ESRC postdoctoral mentor, Ros Edwards, led to the framing of the book as it stands now, and I am hugely indebted to Ros for her insightful comments on draft chapters and unwavering support. Some portions of the materials in Chapters 2, 3, 5 and 6 have appeared in my articles in the International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure, British Journal of Sociology of Education (with Ravinder Barn), Children’s Geographies and Loisir et Société/Society and Leisure. I thank the publishers and editors for their permission. Above all, I am thankful to the parents and children who welcomed me to their home, extended their warm hospitality, gave me their valuable time and shared their stories with me. Without their cooperation the research would not have been possible. A special thanks to my research champions who put me in touch with these families and helped me with my fieldwork. Needless to say, the project would not have seen the light of day had it not been for the care and affection of my family and friends. The editors at BUP, Shannon Kneis and Anna Richardson, made the writing process a lot easier with their constant support and encouragement. I am grateful to the series editors Esther Dermott and Debbie Watson for their initial interest in the project and for their constructive feedback and support. xi

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Race, Class, Parenting and Children’s Leisure

Note on Figure 5.3 We wish to acknowledge that, though Figure 5.3 is of low quality, it is integral to the author’s content. Our decision to publish this figure also accepts that it is the best version available. For those reading in digital formats, it will be possible to zoom in on any image to achieve greater clarity.

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1

Introduction It was a late Saturday morning in autumn. A saloon car pulled into the driveway of a six-​bedroom detached house, nestled within a gated development at the edge of London. A boy tumbled out of the car in muddy football boots and jersey and disappeared into the house. His father, Manoj, parked the car and waved at me. Although we had spoken over the phone and exchanged text messages before, this was the first time we were meeting in person. He is an IT programme manager at a multinational bank and his wife, Simi, is the global head of HR services at a major financial institution in London. Like every Saturday morning, Manoj had taken his eldest son to his football practice while his wife supervised the homework of their other two children and finished some of the housework that has been building up over the week. I had arrived a few moments prior and was waiting for Manoj at the front door, which overlooked neatly manicured lawns that separated their two-​and-​half-​storey newly built red-​brick house from the driveway. Manoj greeted me with a broad smile and apologised for the slight delay in meeting me. They were held up in the traffic, Manoj told me as he led me into his home and introduced me to Simi. They had bought this property some nine years ago where they now live with their three children: Meghna, Suraj and Amol, aged 13, 11 and 4 respectively. Manoj and Simi have busy weekly schedules, populated not only with work commitments and long commutes but also with the management of their children’s school and leisure timings. The weekends are therefore set aside for getting domestic chores done, taking their children to a few organised activities that could not be accommodated on weekday evenings and spending time together as a family. That Saturday, for example, the whole family was scheduled to visit a car dealership in the afternoon to browse new models with the view to upgrading the family car and later in the evening they were going out to a local Indian restaurant for a meal. Going out for dinner on Saturday evenings is a regular fixture of this family. Manoj and Simi’s children have equally hectic routines all through the week. On weekdays, their after-​school hours are filled with a gamut 1

Race, Class, Parenting and Children’s Leisure

of adult-​supervised, structured and paid-​for leisure activities. Amol, the youngest, has started playing drums while his sister Meghna does netball, drama and Bollywood dancing. Until recently, she also used to play cricket and take piano lessons. Their brother Suraj is learning to play the guitar besides going for weekly cricket, football and hockey training. At various points over the last couple of years, Suraj has dabbled in Bollywood dancing, played rugby, taken lessons in Hindi and been to Taekwondo classes but these activities have since been jettisoned either due to a clash of schedules or his loss of interest. The everyday lives of these children and their parents revolve to a great extent around the former’s organised leisure schedules. In a sense, Suraj and his siblings are part of the so-​called ‘backseat generation’ (see Karsten, 2005) –​children who are driven around from one organised activity to the other by parents who have the time and resources to devote into such activities. Later that Saturday, I was seated at the front of the car with Manoj as he drove his family to the car dealership; with Simi and the three children at the back. As the car stopped at a traffic light on a busy intersection, a red vintage car whizzed by. With a glint of excitement in his eyes, Manoj called out to his wife and children “Look, it’s like that car from Om Shanti Om”, while knowing fully well that having grown up in India I will get his reference too. Om Shanti Om is a 2007 Hindi-​language Bollywood film about two star-​crossed lovers (named Om and Shanti) that became a major box-​office hit in India and across the global Indian diaspora. The key characters in Om Shanti Om worked in the Hindi film industry, and the film ends with a simulated red-​carpet sequence featuring vintage cars including a red convertible. Like many diasporans, Manoj grew up watching Hindi films with his family and now he enjoys watching Bollywood films like Om Shanti Om with his wife and children. The fact that these Indian popular cultural products pervade his everyday life and provide him with a lens on the world around him bears testimony to the kind of cultural flexibility often found among racialised minority middle classes (see Purkayastha, 2005; Claytor, 2020). Manoj works and lives in majority white settings where he has to demonstrate knowledge of dominant cultural repertoires to gain recognition and acceptance, and for his professional credentials to be rendered legitimate. At the same time, he maintains his association with his Indian cultural heritage and practices from which he draws a sense of belonging and pride. As he crosses racial boundaries on a daily basis, he has come to embody a flexible approach to culture, to develop an understanding of where and when to activate particular cultural tastes and knowledge that bear classed and racial connotations and where to withhold them. He is not caught ‘between two cultures’ as an earlier generation of scholars (Bell, 1968; Anwar, 1976; Ghuman, 1994) described the British South Asian lived experience to be. On the contrary, he is, to use Claytor’s (2020: 8) words, 2

Introduction

an ‘adroit cultural actor’ who embodies cultural resources anchored in his minoritised ethnic background as well as the dominant cultural mores that grant him access to and acceptance in a white minority British society. Manoj and Simi in many ways typify the contemporary British Indian middle-class. They hold university qualifications and have done quite well for themselves in their professional careers too, enabling them to lead a comfortable consumption-​driven lifestyle. They also spend a substantial amount of money on their children’s schooling –​all three attend private schools –​and paid-​for after-​school leisure activities. In every middle-​class British Indian family that I researched for this project, I witnessed, with some variation, similar patterns of leisure consumption and educational strategies among parents who were guided by a dominant middle-​class ideal of childhood wherein children’s holistic growth and future success are understood to be dependent not only on academic credentials but also on the competencies and abilities systematically cultivated through immersion in multiple leisure activities. Such an approach to child-​rearing that drives parents to devote a considerable portion of their time, energy and money in the development of their children’s talents and abilities has attracted the attention of several parenting and family studies scholars in recent years. Lareau (2000, 2011) terms this child-​rearing ideology ‘concerted cultivation’, as professional middle-​class parents come to view their children as projects to be developed and therefore nurture their abilities in a concerted fashion through enrolment in extra-​curricular activities. Relatedly, Such (2009) uses the notion of ‘leisure-​based parenting’ to capture child-​centred aspects of leisure in dual-​earner families where accompanying children to activities is highly valued by parents and is experienced differently from discourses of childcare. These leisure-​oriented child-​rearing practices are grounded in the wider context of social inequalities and the shifting notions of good parenting and ideal childhood that impinge upon the way middle-​class parents think about their responsibilities towards their children and enact strategies such as those that revolve around organised leisure to ensure that their children have the best chances in life. Manoj and Simi’s case raises compelling questions about what it means to be middle-​class and Indian in contemporary Britain, and how these subject positions mould leisure geographies of children and their families. For this project, I spoke to many such professional middle-​class British Indian parents who enjoy relative economic privilege and wealth while simultaneously occupying a position of relative racial disadvantage as minority ethnic subjects in a society that attaches value to whiteness and stigmatises racial others. I also interviewed children and conducted participatory drawing activities with them to hear their perspective on their own leisure engagements. Rooted in these broader concerns, in this book I ask how does the unique position that professional middle-​class British Indian parents inhabit within 3

Race, Class, Parenting and Children’s Leisure

the UK’s social class and racial hierarchies infuse their leisure-​based parenting strategies? What role does leisure play in these families’ attempt to perform and reproduce class advantages across generations as well as in nurturing diasporic cultural identities and sense of belonging? In addressing these questions, it is an imperative that we do not lose sight of the children. Seeing them solely as representatives of the ‘backseat generation’ (Karsten, 2005) denies them agency and casts them as passive non-​actors who are simply marching to the tune of their parents’ instructions. Indeed, in several existing accounts of children’s organised activities (Vincent and Ball, 2007; Lareau, 2011; Vincent et al, 2013; Reay, 2017; Wheeler, 2018; Wheeler and Green, 2019) we only hear the voices and concerns of parents and hardly get to listen to children themselves. How does leisure shape the everyday geographies of racialised middle-​class children? How do children make sense of the various kinds of leisure activities that they take part in? How does leisure mediate children’s relationships and engagements with the world around them? How do race and class inflect these processes? Engaging with these questions, I argue, can offer fresh insights into children’s intra-​ (child–​child) and inter-​(child–​adult) generational relationships and their relational agency –​in the process opening up new frontiers for thinking about children’s lived identities and meaning-​making processes. The questions I have laid before you –​in relation to both parenthoods and childhoods –​have hardly even been asked before within the same study and certainly not in the context of the leisure geographies of racialised minority families in contemporary Britain. The overwhelming majority of research into middle-​class parenting ideologies or middle-​class children’s leisure participation adopts a race-​blind approach and focusses on the experiences of the white middle classes. Consequently, they fail to account for the ways in which classed and racial inequalities intersect or illuminate how middle-​ classness is raced and how racial identities are classed. For instance, based on their research with Black Caribbean middle-​class parents in England, Rollock et al (2015: 1) state that to be ‘White and middle class is not the same as being Black and middle class.’ In a similar vein, I contend that being Indian and middle class in today’s Britain shapes parenthoods and childhoods in unique ways, and I use leisure as a particularly generative yet under-​explored site to grapple with the way race and class intersect within these racialised minority families.

Why study children’s leisure? For school-​going children, there exists a lag of time between the end of school hours and their bedtime (Labriola and Pronzato, 2018). Large-​ scale quantitative studies in the UK indicate that school-​aged children are increasingly spending these hours in structured and paid-​for leisure 4

Introduction

pursuits such as sports, performative arts and other extracurricular activities (Meroni et al, 2017; also see Sport England, 2018). Mullan’s (2019) analysis of children’s time use patterns in the UK between 1975 and 2015 further revealed that children today are spending a larger portion of their daily waking hours in screen-​based leisure activities while outdoor and unsupervised play has declined significantly over this period as homework has increased and risk anxieties are keeping children off the streets and other outdoor spaces. The rising profile of after-​school activities among children across Europe and North America, also attests to the growth in leisure-​based industries and services that often target children as a key demographic. There are now scores of commercial leisure centres dotted across Britain. In 2018, when I conducted my study, families in the UK were spending a whopping £67 million a week in leisure lesson fees for children and adults, a 21 per cent increase compared to only three years ago (Office for National Statistics, 2019a). Equally, children are spending more and more of their waking hours with digital media with half of all ten-​year-​olds in the country having their own smartphone and 80 per cent of all 5–​15-​year-​olds watching online videos on demand (Ofcom, 2020). These figures demonstrate the growing importance of leisure activities –​both offline and online –​within the everyday geographies of British children and how these leisure pursuits contribute significantly to the economy. When we look closely at the statistics around children’s time use patterns, the picture gets even more complicated. Studies show that parental spending on children’s outside-​of-​school leisure activities differs by social class, since middle-​class parents with higher disposable income are enrolling their children in multiple organised and paid-​for structured leisure lessons at an ever-​younger age (Vincent and Ball, 2007; Kornrich, 2016; Reay, 2017; Schneider et al, 2018; Wheeler, 2018). In Reay’s (2010) London-​based study, she found that several middle-​class parents spent more than £100 every week on their children after-​school enrichment activities while many working-​ class lone mothers living on state benefit received less than that amount per week to live on. This puts into perceptive how the rising trend of after-​ school activities or structured leisure rests on class inequalities. It is therefore not surprising that the quantity and frequency of children’s participation in structured leisure activities vary by social class despite the fact that children’s participations in forms of leisure inside the school is largely similar across the board (Lareau and Weininger, 2008; Bennett et al, 2012; Putnam, 2015). It has been argued that this surge in parental financial investment in and the resultant proliferation of children’s structured leisure lessons are fuelled by class-​specific ideologies of child-​rearing wherein professional middle-​class parents respond to rising inequalities and job market volatilities by investing on the pathways that can shape their children’s future in terms of entering selective universities and securing top careers (Devine, 2004; Pugh, 2009; 5

Race, Class, Parenting and Children’s Leisure

Kremer-​Sadlik et al, 2010; Nelson, 2010; Lareau, 2011). Extant research shows that middle-​class parents not only ensure that their children attend high-​performing schools but also enrol them into multiple extracurricular activities from which children can imbibe crucial cultural competencies and expand their social circles while their achievements in sports and other leisure endeavours can add value to their future CVs (Zinnecker, 1995; Nelson, 2010; Friedman 2013; Reay, 2017). The proliferation of children’s extra-​curricular activities and screen-​based leisure as a cornerstone of middle-​class childhood has not only redefined what an ideal childhood should look like but also has expanded the boundaries of parental responsibilities and transformed family lives. Parents are now expected to enact an intensive approach to parenting, which is child-​focused, resource-​intensive and strategic in ways that will reap the best outcomes for their children (Hays, 1996; Vincent, 2012; Faircloth, 2014). This phenomenon has been further boosted by the widening currency of ‘parental determinism’ (Furedi, 2010), which holds that every parental decision has long-​term implications for the child’s future. Therefore, parents are encouraged to think strategically about the way their children lead their daily lives, with decisions taken today having far-​eaching consequences for their children’s prospects in years to come. Within the home too, there has been a marked shift with increasing democratisation of parent–​child relations and parents relying more on logical reasoning than coercive directives while communicating with their children (Giddens, 1999; Lareau, 2011; Chambers, 2012). Parental duties in middle-​class households are no longer confined to the physical space but include guiding children safely through online spaces on a relentless loop while making sure that children make the most of the opportunities that come with digital technologies (Lim, 2020; Livingstone and Blum-​Ross, 2020). As parents have become more strategic in their child-​rearing practices, family time and family-​based activities have been repositioned as vehicles for the welfare and rounded development of children (Shaw, 2008). Reflecting these changes within the family, the urban consumption economy has come to target their products and services at families with young children, creating child-​friendly spaces within restaurants and shopping centres to suit the needs of children in ways unimaginable a few decades ago (Karsten et al, 2015; Karsten and Felder, 2015). The existing body of scholarship therefore demonstrates that leisure is central to the everyday lives of children and their parents in middle-​class households in Britain. This expansion in and changing significance of children’s leisure engagements, be it after-​school activities, screen-​based leisure or family time, lies at the foundation of this book. By focusing on the leisure lives of middle-​class British Indian children, I address a number of key lacunae in the extant literature. First, the vast majority of studies that focus on the changing landscape of children’s leisure and, what following 6

Introduction

Such (2009) can be described as, leisure-​based parenting practices do not include children’s voices and therefore fail to grasp how children experience and make sense of their leisure geographies. Second, most of the sociological literature on children’s leisure referred to till now is the product of research conducted with predominantly white middle-​class parents where questions of race and ethnicity are left unarticulated. Even when Black and other racialised minority parents were included in the sample, the role of race, ethnicity and racism in shaping parental attitudes towards children’s leisure has either been downplayed or left under-​explored (Manning, 2019; Delale-​O’Connor et al, 2020). Our current understanding of leisure-​based parenting is therefore largely race-​blind. Indeed, as Reay et al (2011: 106) point out, ‘white middle-​classes have colonised normativity across society’ wherein middle-​classness has come to signify all this is good and proper and whiteness as a normative identity has displaced race to racialised others, thereby positioning both whiteness and middle-​classness as the universal. This necessitates a closer look at the social processes that run through the time-​spaces of middle-​class children’s everyday leisure, with due attention to both race and class. A deeper understanding of these processes calls for a critical engagement with both parents’ and children’s perspectives, rooted in the social-​spatial context in which they function. A holistic framework is therefore needed for analysing the different kinds of leisure activities that fit into children’s daily geographies. In this book, I develop a tripartite framework for studying middle-​class children’s leisure across three ‘genres’ of structured, family and casual leisure. A more detailed discussion of this framework and its accompanying theoretical manoeuvres are presented in Chapter 2. Notwithstanding Dumazedier’s (1967: 4) contention more than five decades ago that no ‘theorizing about our basic social realities can be valid … without consideration of the relevancy of leisure to them’, leisure research has lost much of its appeal and visibility within contemporary sociology (Stebbins, 2018). Therefore, my aim in this book is not only to break new grounds by bridging leisure sociology and childhood sociology but also to reinvigorate leisure scholarship by illustrating how leisure can offer a unique window into the reproduction of social inequality, identity and cultural politics as revealed through my study with middle-​class British Indians. Although the data presented in this book were collected pre-​pandemic in 2017–​18, the insights that I have harnessed are more relevant now than ever before as we come out of the COVID-​19 pandemic amidst clarion calls to ‘build back better’. The period of COVID-​19 lockdown in Britain certainly reconstituted the geographies of leisure and learning for most children who were confined to their homes, as schools and leisure facilities temporarily closed their doors to curb the spread of the pestilence (Mukherjee, 2021; Lomax et al, 2022), and the impact of the pandemic has cast fresh light on 7

Race, Class, Parenting and Children’s Leisure

the extent of classed and racial inequalities in health, employment, education and living conditions both in the UK and globally (Goudeau et al, 2012; Public Health England, 2020; Nazroo and Bécares, 2021; Blundell et al, 2022; Chen et al, 2022). This has created a new impetus among social researchers to think more critically about the way our societies are structured, and how inequalities are produced, reproduced and sustained. As we come out of the pandemic and look towards ways to combat social inequalities, we need to deepen our understanding of the various avenues –​some more visible than others –​through which classed and racial inequalities play out. The original data presented in the book can contribute to these conversations by showing how children’s leisure geographies play a key role in cross-​generational reproduction of social advantages and as an arena where racial boundaries and identities are constructed and contested.

Childhood and parenthoods at the intersection of race and class This book revolves around the everyday leisure lives of middle-​class British Indian children and their parents who took part in my study. These families possess considerable class privileges and live in the least deprived areas of Britain. However, their class resources alone do not protect them from deep-​rooted structures that position all racialised minorities as culturally inferior and marginalise them. Therefore, understanding classed privileges as experienced by racialised minority families requires an approach that simultaneously pays attention to the way race and class intersect within children’s everyday geographies and the parenting ideologies that undergird them. Before expanding on these processes further, I will use this section as an exercise in ground clearing and clarify how I conceive of the core notions of race, ethnicity, racism and class that lie at the heart of this book. Race and ethnicity are socially constructed ideas. It is often argued that race denotes physical characteristics such as skin colour while ethnicity signifies cultural identities revolving around family origin, language, religion and other related markers (Bulmer, 1986; Golash-B ​ oza, 2015). The biological notion of race consolidated within colonial discourses to assert the supposed superiority of white colonisers over their colonised subjects, leading to mass massacre, slavery and subjugation. In rejecting such colonial biological understanding of race, some sociologists argue that ethnicity is a more ‘inclusive’ concept than race for social research (Bulmer, 1986: 54; also see Miles, 2000; Modood et al, 2002). However, contemporary scholarship has established the need for a more nuanced approach where both race and ethnicity are necessary concepts in understanding social diversity and lived experiences of those marked as racial and ethnic others (Gunaratnam, 2003; Knowles, 2003; Song, 2018). Indeed, Hall (2000) has pointed out 8

Introduction

that the reference to biological difference ascribed to race is not absent from discourses of ethnicity but merely displaced through notions of kinship and endogamous marriage which maintains cultural ‘purity’. The discourses of biological and cultural difference overlap and operate simultaneously often functioning as ‘racism’s two registers’ (Hall, 2000: 223). Throughout this book, I operationalise this latter understanding of race and ethnicity as inextricably inter-​locked concepts that provide a framework for analysing the way groups of people are racialised and hierarchised within societies and how they come to see themselves and be seen by others. Put differently, notions of race and ethnicity in contemporary Britain only become meaningful vis-​à-​vis racial ideologies and structures that produce these categories and mould the inter-​relation between them. As Golash-​Boza (2016) has shown, racial ideologies are embodied in discourses, identities and stereotypes. Racist structures, on the other hand, operate at both micro and macro levels. At the micro level, it is manifested through individual acts of bigotry and prejudice as well as through race-​blind approaches that fail to grapple with racial inequalities and help reproduce existing disparities. At the macro level, racist structures are encoded in institutions, policies and practices most of which were historically devised to cater to the needs of the white majority and have continued to exclude racialised others. This sociological approach to racism takes us beyond individual acts of prejudice and name-​ calling, to think about the ways in which racism constructs groups into a racial hierarchy that then becomes the basis for the distribution for society’s coveted resources and status markers (Meghji, 2019). Throughout this book, I use the demographic category of ‘British Indian’ to denote Indian diasporic people living in the UK. Indian is this context, is not a demonym but a historically constituted ethnic category that informs the diasporic subjectivities of those that self-​identify with this ethnic moniker in today’s Britain. While some ethnic categories are less stable than others, evidence over the years has demonstrated that in England census categories such as Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi are effective in capturing the ethnic groups they denote because these terms are widely used by community members themselves as self-​descriptors (Aspinall, 2013). In my project, I included people of Indian descent who were born and brought up in the UK as well as more recent Indian transmigrants who have settled down in the UK in the last few decades and now hold British citizenship. The way I conceptualise social class in this book is inspired largely by the work of Bourdieu (1986, 1984) as well as more contemporary sociologists who have built on his ideas. Based on empirical studies conducted in France in 1960s and 1970s, Bourdieu (1984, 1986) argues that class analysis entails both economic and non-​economic dimensions that translate into different ‘species’ of capital. Class distinctions derive from the uneven distribution of the different types of capital over time. He appropriates the notion of 9

Race, Class, Parenting and Children’s Leisure

capital used by Marx and redefines it as a ‘set of actually usable resources and powers’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 114), which encompasses ‘economic capital’, ‘cultural capital’ and ‘social capital’. The significance of these class resources or species of capital lies in their ability to ‘give those who possess them greater control over the external forces that affect us all, and open doors that might otherwise be closed’ (Bottero, 2013: 15). Sociologists working in the UK have embraced the Bourdieusian approach to social class to chart the way economic inequalities are implicated in larger cultural, political and social relationships, and to reflect on the way uneven accumulation of social advantages over time can help explain soaring inequalities and a widening gap in life chances (Savage, 2015a, 2015b; Reay, 2017). Meanwhile, class identities have become more fragmented in Britain today and overt deference to class hierarchies has declined over the years and has gradually been replaced by notions of ‘ordinariness’ and ‘individuality’ (Sutcliffe-​Braithwaite, 2018). This changing vernacular understanding of class identities in Britain obfuscates the fact that class origins continue to shape life chances and occupational destinations with relative inequalities continuing to rise (Reay, 2017; Friedman and Laurison, 2019; The Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission, 2019). This scenario demands a better understanding of ‘class processes’ or the means by which social advantages are accumulated, retained or accentuated (Crompton, 1998) and its imbrications with the workings of classed identities. As Ball (2003: 6) points out: Class … is an identity based upon modes of being and becoming … and forms of distinction that are realized and reproduced in specific social locations. Certain locations are sought out, others are avoided. … It is about being something and not being something else. It is relational. Class is also a trajectory, a path through space and time. In capturing these relational dynamics of social class, I use the category of ‘middle-​class’ to name and reveal ‘structural conditions of inequality’ (Tyler, 2015: 496) characterised by the accumulation of different species of capital. In other words, I looked at the income, cultural capital and wealth of parents evidenced through occupation, educational credentials and homeownership respectively to determine their relative class location within British society. The middle-​class families I researched for this book were those where at least one parent had a professional job with supervisory or managerial responsibilities, held a university degree and were home owners. Indeed, all the parents in my study with the exception of four housewives worked in well-​paid professional jobs in sectors such as IT, software, banking, medicine, HR and education, and they all held university qualifications and owned their own homes. They all lived in relatively affluent localities in and around 10

Introduction

London, and we know from existing research that if one lives in the least deprived neighbourhoods in England, one is more likely to have access to civic assets such as libraries, parks and consumption spaces such as cafés and community centres (All-​Party Parliamentary Group for Left Behind Neighbourhoods, 2020). Further, the best performing schools in England are located in more affluent areas (Van den Brande et al, 2019). Therefore, the parents and children who took part in the study that forms the basis of this book occupy an ambivalent and complex social location characterised by middle-​class privilege and racial disadvantage, which in turn infuses their leisure choices, attitudes and behaviours. In recent years, there has a welcome growth of sociological scholarship on the child-​rearing ideologies of racialised minority middle-​class parents, such as middle-​class African American, Chinese and Latinx parents in the United States (Banks, 2012; Inoa, 2017; Lan, 2018; Dow, 2019; Manning, 2019; Lareau et al, 2021) and middle-​class Black and Chinese parents in the UK (Archer and Francis, 2006; Archer, 2011, 2010; Gates and Guo, 2014; Rollock et al, 2015). These empirical studies have generated unique insights into the way race and class interact within family practices and parental strategies in racialised minority middle-​class contexts. They have also fed into conversations around middle-​class differentiation by highlighting the ways racialised minority middle classes experience class privileges differently from similarly placed white counterparts (Archer and Francis, 2006; Lacy, 2007; Archer, 2011; Meghji, 2019; Claytor, 2020). This book adds to these streams of literature by centring the experiences of middle-​class British Indians and expands it in new directions by including the voices of children and by using leisure as the point of entry that is woefully under-​utilised in contemporary sociology (Stebbins, 2018).

Middle-​class Indians in the UK The 2011 Census in England and Wales found that 2.5 per cent of the population, that is 1,412,958 people, self-​identity their ethnicity as Indian (Office for National Statistics, 2018a). Indians in Britain today comprise three broad groups. First, the descendants of those who migrated to the UK from the Indian sub-​continent in the post-​war years or before and who are now part of the multigenerational diasporic communities that have developed across the UK. Second, Indian transmigrants who moved to the UK in the last few decades under occupation and skill-​based visa regimes and who have since become naturalised British citizens. Third, are the ensemble of UK-​visa holding Indian citizens who study, work or live in the UK without citizenship rights. Collectively, they constitute one of the biggest racialised minority groups in the country today. However, the presence of Indians in the UK has a longer history that connects their identities and cultural location 11

Race, Class, Parenting and Children’s Leisure

to the postcolonial condition (see Sayyid, 2006) and it is in this longer-​term historical perspective that I situate contemporary British Indian lives. Indians, much like other ethnically marked communities of ex-​colonial populations, did not come to inhabit the British isles, to borrow Hall’s (2018: 12) words, ‘by some incomprehensible sleight of hand or ruse’ but through the pathways established by centuries of British colonialism. Through colonialism, Britain had under-​developed its colonies in Asia and the Caribbean, by draining their wealth into the colonial metropole and then leaving them at their political independence with a huge labour force and little capital (Sivanandan, 2008a). This reserve army of labour in ex-​ colonies then turned to post-​war Britain at a time when the latter faced dual challenges of labour shortage and national rebuilding. As Sri Lanka-​born Sivanandan (2008b; emphasis added) puts it: ‘we came to Britain (and not to Germany for instance) because we were occupied by Britain. Colonialism and immigration are part of the same continuum –​we are here because you were there.’ The collective amnesia in Britain about colonial history has resulted in the delinking of British imperial and domestic histories in popular discourses (Hall, 2018; Patel, 2021). This in turn has led to the framing of migrants from ex-​colonies, who come to post-​war Britain as rights-​bearing British citizens under the Nationality Act 1948, as ‘immigrants’ and a complete failure to grasp the cultural and historical connections that linked the lives of Britons and those living in the Indian sub-​continent (Castles, 2009; Patel, 2021). The first documented presence of Indians in Britain goes back to the 17th century (Habib, 2008), but the frequency of Indian migration to Britain increased with the establishment of British colonialism in India from the 18th century onwards (Visram, 2015) with a significant rise in numbers in the post-​war period (Ballard, 2002). While between the First and the Second World War, there were around 5,000 to 8,000 Indians in Britain (Naujoks, 2009), the figure rose to 31,000 in 1951 (Peach, 2006), and in 2011 it stood at over 1.4 million (Office for National Statistics, 2018a). These demographic changes have been shaped by colonialism, immigration laws, global market forces and British domestic politics. The first generation of post-​war Indian migrants in the UK faced a range of discriminations and challenges in accessing housing and employment, often working long hours in underpaid jobs, and were exploited by a host of structurally racist institutions in Britain (Desai, 1963; Hiro, 1973; Miles, 1982; Phillips, 1998). Aside from the small numbers of Indian elites, the significant portion of first-​generation migrants in post-​war Britain found themselves in ‘largely unskilled and low status [jobs] ... for which white labour was unavailable or which white workers were unwilling to fill’ (Sivanandan, 2008a: 67). The children and grandchildren of these migrants used educational and entrepreneurial aspiration as a resource to navigate these structural barriers and achieve upward social mobility, and many of them can be found today 12

Introduction

in professional roles across sectors. Meanwhile, there has been a growth in the number of middle-​class Indians who have migrated to the UK through work-​visa routes in more recent decades because they possessed valued skills in sectors such as IT, higher education, software and medicine. Compared to other ethnic groups, including other South Asian groups, Indians have consistently out-​performed their white peers in educational attainment and despite racial disadvantages British Indians are markedly better off than other minoritised ethnic groups in terms of high employment rates and hourly pay, and they are also most likely than any other ethnic group in the country to work in the highest-​skilled occupations (Sammons et al, 2015; Cabinet Office, 2018; Office for National Statistics, 2019b). Given these trends of educational and career success among some sections of the Indian community in Britain, there is now a sizeable presence of middle-​class British Indians who own property, possess university degrees and work in professional highly paid jobs. Yet, we know very little about childhoods, leisure cultures and leisure-​based parenting ideologies in these families. Middle-​class British Indian families therefore need to be studied in their own right especially since a specific focus on parenting approaches and children’s activities in this community can provide a unique window into the behind-​the-​scenes processes that enable educational and career success. Since 1970s, scholarly writings on British Indian children and families have focused largely on three thematic areas, and they have mostly been silent on class processes and class-​based differentiations within British Indian communities. First, studies carried out by social psychologists (Ghuman, 1991, 1994, 1997, 1999, 2003; also see Bell, 1968; Bhatti, 1999) argued that British Asian children are continually caught up in between ‘two cultures’: on one hand the white British culture of individualism that prevails at school and in the society around them, and on the other hand the culture of collectivism at home that prioritises the family over the individual. Closely connected to these ideas, the second set of studies drew attention to the strategies British Asian children use for cultural adaptation in everyday life (Hutnik, 1991, 1986; Nesbitt, 1995; Ghuman, 1997; Atzaba-​Poria et al, 2004; Robinson, 2009). Here too, the focus was on cultural difference without accounting for the impact of class resources. Alongside these narratives, a third body of social science scholarship explored questions of cultural identity with respect to British Asian children’s heritage language acquisition and religious identities (Ghuman and Gallop, 1981; Stopes-​Roe and Cochrane, 1990; Nesbitt, 1990, 1991, 1995, 1998a, 1998b, 1997; Sharma, 1993; Jackson and Nesbitt, 1993, 1992; Barn, 2008). Notwithstanding this body of work from previous decades, systematic empirical investigations of British Indian children’s leisure practices are non-​existent. Similarly, despite the growing literature on parenting in British Indian families (Ghuman and Gallop, 1981; Nesbitt, 1995; Dosanjh and Ghuman, 1996; Beishon et al, 1998; Bhatti, 1999; Barn 13

Race, Class, Parenting and Children’s Leisure

et al, 2006; Iqbal, 2013; Iqbal and Golombok, 2018), we know very little about how professional middle-​class British Indian parents understand and enact their class privileges vis-​à-​vis child-​rearing practices and how they approach and construct meaning around their children’s leisure activities. This is where this book intervenes by presenting a study of middle-​class British Indian children and their parents.

Researching middle-​class British Indian children’s leisure The methodological approach that underpinned my study was crafted through a critical dialogue between the key assumptions of childhood sociology on one hand and the ideas arising from feminist and anti-​racist leisure theories on the other. Sociologists of childhood have consistently advocated for research approaches that take children seriously as social actors in their own right, rather than as social-​actors-​in-​the-​making. This amounts to treating children as possessors of legitimate knowledge about their own embodied experiences of the everyday and eschewing the tendency of relying solely on second-​hand accounts about children’s lives from their parents or teachers. And if we are to truly accept children as social actors in the here and now then ‘it clearly makes sense to ask them about their own contributions and participation in social … life’ (Scott, 2000: 100). Such a child-​centred approach to research also means that the way I define leisure cannot be adult-​centric. As I will show in Chapter 2, all existing theories of leisure take the adult as the taken-​for-​g ranted leisure actor. Instead, I call for a critical sociology of children’s leisure that maps leisure in terms that are relevant to the everyday lives of children. In doing so, I build on feminist leisure scholars who were among the first to recognise cultural and demographic variation in people’s understanding of and participation in leisure (Wearing, 1998; Juniu and Henderson, 2001). Anti-​racist leisure scholars have pushed these conversations further by calling on leisure researcher to explicitly engage with questions of race and racism rather than simply invoke cultural difference (Arai and Kivel, 2009). My approach to researching the leisure lives of British Indian children was informed by these anti-​racist and feminist leisure perspectives. I decided to focus on children between the ages 8 and 12 –​roughly, the latter end of middle childhood –​because of two main reasons. First, middle childhood is a particularly significant life-​stage in terms of the formation of children’s racial and classed ideologies (Hagerman, 2018). Second, existing studies show that it is during middle childhood that middle-​class children’s organised leisure activities take off in a significant way while they are also known to actively take part in parent-​child joint family leisure (Shaw et al, 2008; Lareau, 2011). 14

Introduction

The place and the people Middle-​class Indian families in Britain are geographically scattered. This created logistical challenges in terms of selecting a suitable location for the study and in reaching out to potential participants. I chose to focus on London and its commuter belt because more than one-​third of all British Indians in England and Wales live in this region (Office for National Statistics, 2018b). Moreover, London and its surrounding urban area is characterised by ‘super-​diversity’ (Vertovec, 2007) and the ‘paradoxical co-​existence of racism and urban multiculture’ (Back and Sinha, 2016: 518) –​themes that I explore in the following chapters through the lens of children’s leisure. I first moved to the home counties, just outside the formal boundaries of Greater London, in 2015 having lived all my life till then in India. For the first couple of years, I familiarised myself with London and its commuter belt, working out the transport network and education system, visiting Indian diasporic community spaces and festivals, building a network with Indian groups and embedding myself in the UK-​based Indian diasporic Facebook communities. During this time, I also attended events at the Indian High Commission in London and engaged with the staff there to get a sense of how the Indian government engages with the local diasporic community at a time when Prime Minister Modi was travelling around the world and courting a certain section of the diaspora as a centrepiece of his foreign policy and an engine for his neoliberal and Hindu nationalist agenda (Thobani, 2019; de Souza and Hussain, 2021). The formal data collection phase of the project began in the autumn of 2017, after I had received full ethical approval from the university Research Ethics Committee. I drew on the knowledge of the area and the contacts I had amassed till then to identify pathways to access potential participants. I made telephone and email contacts with schools, religious institutions, community organisations and personal acquaintances. I published study posters on the notice boards of temples and gurdwaras, and on the walls of community Facebook groups. On the back of this outreach, two research champions Varun and Anjali (pseudonyms) –​both in their early 40s –​came forward to help. I had met Varun during a visit to a temple where I was putting up study posters. He is a UK-​born British Indian man who organises Sanskrit and Punjabi language classes for children. He volunteered to put me in touch with British Indian families whom he knew through personal and professional channels. Another research champion, Anjali, who I got to know through an academic context also circulated study details in her personal network. I initially recruited families through Varun, Anjali and the Facebook groups I mentioned earlier, and then these participants introduced me to 15

Race, Class, Parenting and Children’s Leisure

their friends and neighbours. The data collection ended in September 2018 by which time a total of 18 parents and 12 children from 10 families living in and around London had taken part in the project. All the participating families were two-​parent households, and the parents were heterosexual married couples. Out of the 18 participating Indian diasporic parents, 6 were born in the UK and have lived here since and the remaining 12 parents were born in India and now hold British citizenship with their length of stay in the UK ranging from 6 to 17 years. Having both India-​born and UK-​born British Indian parents within the same framework created opportunities for theorising the Indian diaspora from a fresh perspective since many previous studies on global Indian diaspora engage with India-​ born and non-​India-​born diasporans separately. The participating parents occupied similar class locations. They were homeowners in London or the home counties. They were all university graduates and some even held postgraduate qualifications. All the parents, except four mothers, were established professionals in the knowledge-​economy, occupying higher ranks within sectors such as IT, software, finance, telecommunications, medicine and education. These four women described motherhood as their primary responsibility and self-​identified as ‘housewife’ or ‘home-​maker’. In sum, the study participants constituted an important cross-​section of urban, middle-​class, home-​owning British Indian families living in and around London, with family links to multiple linguistic, regional and religious backgrounds in India. The current class positions of the UK-​born parents I researched were further underlined by the upward social mobility they have experienced in their own lifetime. Their own parents were first-​generation migrants in the 1960s–​70s who worked in low-​paid manual jobs in factories or ran small corner shops. Growing up in these circumstances, these parents have worked against the grain and achieved considerable educational and professional successes. On the other hand, India-​born parents grew up in middle-​class families in urban and semi-​urban India and went to fee-​paying English-​ medium schools. The India-​born fathers migrated to the UK with job offers in sectors such as IT, software and management. Their wives accompanied them to the UK on dependent spousal visas and most of them have since carved their own careers after the initial hiatus of migration, settlement and at times childbirth. Out of the 12 children, 7 were boys and 5 girls. Seven of them (4 girls and 3 boys) attended fee-​paying independent schools while 3 children (3 girls) went to state primary schools, and 2 others (both boys) studied at grammar schools. The 2 instances of grammar schools were in areas where the 11-​plus examination is still in operation. Most of these children were born in the UK (7 out of the 12) and the others migrated to the UK with their parents and started their primary school education in the UK. 16

Introduction

Table 1.1: List of study participants Child (age, gender)

Mother (occupation)

Father (age, occupation)

Suraj (11, male)

Simi (HR professional)

Manoj (IT programme manager)

Aashka (8, female)

Swati (senior dentist)

Alpesh (software engineer)

Saumya (9, female) Nisha (teacher)

Mahesh (IT project manager)

Sonam (8, female)

Divya (housewife)

Vikas (IT contractor)

Shruti (9, female)

Maya (account executive)

Jayant1 (company head of sales)

Rohit (12, male)

Maya (account executive)

Jayant1 (company head of sales)

Aditya (11, male)

Veena (housewife)

Jagadish (IT consultant)

Ankit (12, male)

Jyoti (housewife)

Shekhar1 (entrepreneur)

Koel (12, female)

Aparna (housewife)

Sumit (software client lead)

Jasleen (8, female)

Paramjit (project manager)

Jaswinder (IT consultant)

Anandi (8, female)

Bhavna (medical doctor)

Jignesh (management consultant)

Chirag (12, male)

Bhavna (medical doctor)

Jignesh (management consultant)

1

Did not take part in interviews

The study This book is based on my qualitative study with ten professional middle-​ class Indian families based in and around London (see Table 1.1). The data were collected between 2017 and 2018, using multiple qualitative methods such as semi-​structured interviews, participatory drawing methods and ethnographic observations. I conducted one-​to-​one interviews with both fathers and mothers in eight out of the ten families. In the other two families, the fathers were not available due to their work commitments and only mothers took part in the study. The interviews, which on average lasted for around an hour, took place in family homes, usually in the living room on sofas or occasionally in the kitchen sitting around the dining table. The interviews were carried out in English with very occasional use of Indian languages that I speak such as Hindi and Bengali. These interview conversations were audio-​recorded, and I also made notes in my diary both during and after the interview. I asked open-​ended questions beginning with the parents’ own life stories, family migration histories and childhood experiences, and used their own narratives to move on to different conversation points relevant to the project. Moreover, at the beginning of the interview I provided parents with a form that they filled in with personal information like educational qualification, age, occupation, religion, household income brackets and languages known. I drew on this information as an additional resource during the interview 17

Race, Class, Parenting and Children’s Leisure

to gather rich data about these parents’ own biographies in which I sought to locate their family lives and leisure-​based parenting strategies. With a commitment to treating children as social actors in their own right and harnessing their perspectives, experiences and views, I included children as study participants and made some modification to data collections tools to enable them to fully engage in the project. Consequently, I conducted semi-​structured, narrative interviews with the children, but unlike the ones with parents I limited the timespan to 35–​45 minutes in any one sitting owing to suggestions in the literature about the limited concentration span of younger children in interview settings (Punch, 2002; Bushin, 2007). With the consent of parents as well as children, 11 out of 12 children were interviewed one-​to-​one without the presence of any other family member in the room. In one family, the parents remained within earshot. These interviews with children took place in their family homes usually in living rooms, and in one instance in a designated ‘toy room’ perched on bean bags. To get the interview started with the child participants I asked simpler question such as their name, their school year, and favourite subject to make them feel more comfortable and underscore the fact that I was not looking for one ‘correct’ answer that they must provide. The initial exchange served as an icebreaker and then I moved on to questions relating to their everyday life and leisure activities. To break the monotony of the interview format and involve the child in a more participatory mode of data generation, I peppered my one-​to-​one session with the child with drawing activities. Engaging children in drawing activities to elicit qualitative data has successfully been used in leisure research before (Yuen, 2004; Yuen et al, 2005; Jeanes and Kay, 2006), and it has also been argued that such a task-​ based method helps capture the complexity and multidimensionality of children’s voices (Komulainen, 2007; Eldén, 2013). When children draw, they invariably engage in social interaction, creative thinking and introspection (Coates and Coates, 2006). Moreover, as Petherbridge (2010: 2) points out, drawing is a form of visual thinking, which ‘renders thought visible’. Therefore, I built upon an approach that White and colleagues (2010) call ‘draw-​and-​simultaneous-​talk’. After the initial phase of the interview, when the child was more comfortable with the process and a rapport had been established, I provided them with a blank sheet of A4-​size paper and colouring pencils and invited them to draw anything they like on the theme ‘doing something together with the family’ or ‘going somewhere with the family’. The child-​friendly and simplified information leaflet that children read before they gave consent to be interviewed also explained this drawing activity. I specifically mentioned in the leaflet that no one will ‘mark’ (grade) their drawings and that they are free to draw the way they wanted. During 18

Introduction

the drawing activity, the children explained to me the different objects they were depicting in their drawing and the reasons for doing so. I then asked follow-​up questions. This conversation was audio-​recorded with the rest of the interview. After they completed their drawing, they verbally narrated the drawing to me. While doing so, they often described different aspects of everyday family life and collective leisure activities that are difficult to capture through oral interviews alone. The verbal data produced through the draw-​and-​talk activity was subject to the same narrative analysis framework as the rest of the data, instead of undertaking a psychoanalytical analysis of the drawings per se. As Smart (2009) rightly points out, psychoanalysis of children’s drawings is not epistemologically compatible with the distinctively sociological project of childhood studies because the former attempts to excavate a hidden, stable and ‘authentic’ meaning as opposed to the sociological appraisal of data in terms of the subjective meanings they evoke. Besides interviews and drawing methods, I also undertook non-​participant as well as participant observation in domestic settings, community spaces and online. Soon after visits to family homes for interviews where I spent time with parents and children in their living rooms and toy rooms, I took detailed notes about the neighbourhood, the house, its décor and other smaller details, which gave me a rounded picture of the family’s lifestyle and consumption practices. I also made notes about any significant discussions I had or things I observed beyond the interview time. These details were anonymised, and I have not used any observation data in my writing that can compromise the identity of my participants. The second cluster of observations took place in community-​based leisure spaces, such as places of worship and ethnic-​religious festival sites like Diwali and Durga Puja that I visited during the fieldwork. Here too, I took notes soon after my visit and the emphasis of these observations was on the collective activity rather than on any particular person. The third kind of observation data comes from my participation in Facebook groups that are targeted at UK-​based Indian diasporans. Not only did I use these groups to advertise my project and recruit adult participants but being part of them gave me access to the kind of issues that mattered to diasporic parents and the social networks (revolving around regional, linguistic or religious identities) that they have created in the UK from the ground up. Many of these Facebook groups held in-​person events for networking and celebrations. Some even had dedicated sections or companion websites where they shared information about their charitable work in the UK and in India, as well as showcased their community-​based work with children such as drawing competition, cultural events and language lessons. These observations –​in family homes, community festival spaces and online –​shed light on dimensions of British Indian families’ leisure lives that were not accessible through interview narratives alone. 19

Race, Class, Parenting and Children’s Leisure

My own identities in the field My own identities, that of an adult conducting research with children and as a middle-​class Indian man studying Indian diasporic families, played a salient role in shaping the data I generated, the way I was seen by my participants and in the interpretation of the data. I grew up in a middle-​class family in India and did not have a British Indian childhood like the child participants in my project. As a result, when I started my research on Indian diasporic families in the UK, I familiarised myself with British Indian lives as much as I could before I actually started collecting data. Once I gained access to participants, I entered their homes –​ the main locus of my data collection –​as a stranger–​outsider. Based on her own experiences of conducting family research at participants’ homes, Jordan (2006) argues that different families construct different roles for the researcher as the latter enters the domestic space as a stranger. I was designated a role even before I entered family homes. For instance, when I met Alka, one of my British Indian academic acquaintances, to discuss the possibility of tapping into her social networks for recruitment, she agreed to help out but at one point said, “I would have asked you more questions and would have been suspicious about your intent had you been white.” Although her contacts never participated in the study, this interaction demonstrates how I was being positioned in relation to my Indian identity –​an ethnic background I shared with Alka –​for she had reservations about white researchers pathologising Indian families in their writings. Similarly, one of my research champions, Anjali was particularly enthusiastic about my project because she felt that my study was vicariously representing her voice as a UK-​born British Indian. After reaching out to her contacts about my study, she got back to me saying “I hope one of them [families] at least takes part but can’t tell. People tend to get quite protective over their children!” Therefore, a perceived ethnic link did not translate into easy access. My gender and age were key to how I was perceived by parents. Suraj’s father, Manoj, took part in the study but confessed afterwards that when I first contacted him through my research champion, he imagined me to be a “40-​year-​old man” and was evidently surprised by how “young” I was. On another occasion, nine-​year-​old Saumya’s mother, Nisha, introduced me to Saumya and asked if she could call me ‘bhaiya’ which means ‘elder brother’ in Hindi. Although kin terms like ‘bhaiya’ are widely used in South Asia to address acquaintances or even strangers, in this context it performed the additional function of transforming me from an adult–​male–​stranger–​researcher into a ‘protective’ fictive sibling figure, which symbolically resolved Nisha’s (un)conscious risk anxiety about letting her daughter being interviewed one-​to-​one by a male stranger. Indeed, at the end of my interview with Saumya, Nisha told me that Saumya had 20

Introduction

never spoken to an unknown person by herself before and therefore she was surprised that her daughter spoke to me at length. The India-​born parents in the study, however, identified with me to a greater extent than the UK-​born Indian parents because of our similar migration story and social locations. Much like them, I am an Indian migrant in the UK who grew up in an urban, middle-​class family in India. This sense of identification came across in interviews, as India-​born parents often used phrases like “as you might know already” or “as it is the case in India, which you of course know”. Nonetheless, there was a crucial difference: I am not a parent and considerably younger than them, which in itself inflected the rapport I built with them. When I visited their homes, most of the fathers across participating families volunteered to drive me to the nearest bus or train station and on one instance to my home, and despite my protestations that I could walk to the station, they insisted that they will drive me especially if it was late in the evening. On the one hand, I was positioned as a ‘protective’ fictive sibling figure with whom they could trust their child for a while and, on the other, they themselves assumed a position of helping me with my research and even ‘protecting’ me by safely transporting me to a train station at night. Moreover, the mothers in the study extended their hospitality to me whenever I visited their home. Divya, for instance, asked if I would like coffee “the Indian way” (that is, to boil the milk and the coffee with sugar). Like Divya, Aparna enquired whether I managed to source Indian groceries and food items as I do not have my family around. In these ways, the mothers in the study drew upon the feminist ethics of care and hospitality and redrew the power relation by ‘looking after’ me as a fellow Indian who is younger than them and needed their help for his research. Parents were the principal gatekeepers through whom I gained access to the children before they could consent to taking part in the study. Children operate within a generational order where they occupy a subordinate position to adults in terms of power (Alanen, 2001; Mayall, 2002), and they are therefore prone to treating the researcher’s adult status as the ‘master status’ in a research setting (Wyness, 2012). In engaging children as participants in my study, I did not attempt to adopt a ‘least adult role’ and suspend all my ‘adult-​like characteristics except physical size’ as per Mandell’s (1988) recommendation. I took the view, echoing Mayall (2000), that the power issues between the adult researcher and the child cannot be completely eradicated, and it will be futile to try to make the children accept me as ‘one of them’. Instead, I decided to work with the generational question that the power issue presented. Therefore, to capture children’s worldviews in which their leisure experiences are embedded, I had to negotiate the generation order with participating children. I presented myself to the children as someone who wants to know about their lives and experiences and sought their permission to ask them questions about it. It was implicit 21

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in the information leaflet I gave to the children and my pre-​interview verbal summary of it, that children possessed legitimate knowledge about their own lives and therefore as an adult I had to come to them to gain that knowledge. This approach proved useful, and I soon found that children were quite keen about being interviewed. For instance, Anjali, one of my research champions, had facilitated my access to her friend Swati’s family. After my visit, Anjali spoke to Swati and her daughter Aashka to find out if everything went well. Anjali then messaged me to say “Aashka feels very special and important having had someone chat to her for so long about her.” Beyond the power dynamics of the interview setting alone, throughout this project I have reflected on the politics of knowledge production about racialised minorities. By researching the interior lives of children and parents I have not only captured their ‘private’ social worlds and am now making them ‘public’ through my writing (see Edwards and Ribbens, 1998); I am also conscious of the fact that knowledge of racialised minority lives have previously been used as tools to racialise, pathologise and police the personal lives of these groups (see Alexander, 2006; Sayyid, 2006). In particular, cultural practices of these families including their collective leisure occasions have in the recent past been ‘imbued with an exoticized, othered status in the West’ and shot through orientalists traditions of Western knowledge/​ power (Sharma, Hutnyk and Sharma, 1996: 2). As an racialised minority migrant subject, I am extremely aware of the politics of my research and the power I wield over my participants in terms of the way I interpret their lived experiences and tell their stories. This is part of the reason why I have written myself into the chapters that follow to dispense with pretentions of objectivity and acknowledge how critical sociological writings can work both with and against the grain of participants’ narratives while being cognisant of the historical context and the politics of knowledge production.

Tour of the book Researching children’s everyday leisure from the standpoint of parents as well as children themselves, requires a robust theoretical framework built through sustained dialogues between childhood studies and leisure studies. Chapter 2 lays down the core theoretical premise of what I call a ‘critical sociology of children’s leisure’ that draws on current debates within leisure studies as well as childhood studies and forges the conceptual ground for a critical analysis of middle-​class British Indian children’s leisure geographies. In Chapter 3, I focus on leisure-​based parenting strategies insofar as middle-​class British Indian children’s organised leisure schedule is concerned. Here, I build on Lareau’s (2000, 2011) notion of ‘concerted cultivation’ to illuminate the ways in which the parents in my study marshalled children’s structured leisure activities for instrumental gains. I demonstrate that 22

Introduction

organised leisure-​based concerted cultivation practices carry both classed and racial connotations in these racialised middle-​class households. In Chapter 4, I foreground children’s lived experiences and understandings of their own leisure schedules to reflect on the way leisure mediates their engagement with the world around them. Relying on children’s and parents’ accounts, I direct attention to the way children negotiate leisure choices with parents and the idioms they deploy in sorting and evacuating various activities. I also reveal the way race and class fracture children’s structured leisure experiences. I adopt a temporal lens in Chapter 5 to explore time issues in participating families vis-​à-​vis leisure. Although time is widely invoked in definitions of leisure, our understanding of the way time is subjectively perceived and leveraged in and for leisure in racialised middle-​class settings is thin on the ground. In this chapter I address this gap by exploring key manifestations of time and leisure in participating families, which pivot around notion of busyness and family time, navigation of ‘screen-​time’ in relation to children’s digital leisure and ‘alone time’ as an instantiation of solitary leisure. Each of these axes mark the way race and class inflect experiences of time within families, and how opportunities for various genres of leisure are carved out in relation to each other. Linked to broader debates about the cultural politics of leisure that I have pursued throughout this book, in Chapter 6 I focus on how leisure practices mediate children’s social relationship with others around them as well as the mechanisms through which community-​based British Indian leisure arrangements direct place-​making within the urban multiculture of Greater London and reinforce the role of diasporic groups as agents for city-​making and the transformation of urban socialities. The concluding chapter draws together the key insights presented in preceding chapters to reflect on the core questions broached by the study in the first place, that is how race and class intersect, inflect and shape the everyday leisurescapes of middle-​class British Indian children and their underpinning leisure-​based parenting ideologies. In doing so, I further outline the key findings of the study and delineate their contribution to contemporary debates within the fields of childhood studies, family studies, cultural sociology, sociology of education and leisure studies.

23

2

Critical Sociology of Children’s Leisure: A Framework In this chapter I set into motion a critical sociology of children’s leisure that frames my study of British Indian children’s leisure geographies. In doing so, I contend that long held adult-​centric assumptions at the heart of leisure studies have resulted in the marginalisation of children within leisure theory. Similarly, childhood scholars working on leisure have failed to build bridges with leisure studies resulting in these two fields of research developing in mutual isolation. In response, I propose a critical sociological framework for unpacking children’s leisure, underpinned by a sustained dialogue between leisure studies and childhood studies. Integral to my approach is a tripartite model of three interlocking genres of children’s leisure –​namely organised, family and casual leisure –​ which I will develop in this chapter. The importance of this framework and the reflections on the state of children’s leisure research presented in this chapter go beyond my empirical study with middle-​class British Indians. They can offer new directions to future scholars working on children’s leisure. The chapter is organised in four major sections. I begin by sketching the historical trajectory of childhood sociology and consider its key lines of enquiry as they relate to the study of children’s leisure. This is followed in the second section by a critique of adult-​centrism in leisure theory and its role in pushing children to the margins of leisure research. Given the historical lack of dialogue between childhood studies and leisure studies to date, I have used this space to elaborate on some of the key conceptual developments from both areas of scholarship so that readers from either field can appreciate the concepts I will be deploying through the book and trace their intellectual lineage. This will set the stage for a discussion about the untapped opportunity of bringing these two fields of research together. In the third section, I will present the tripartite model of three genres of children’s leisure. Next, I will comment on the way I have operationalised this model in my study with middle-​class British Indian families. 24

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Sociology of childhood: debates and direction Sociology as a discipline has had a fraught relationship with children. Although children have never been completely absent from early sociological writings, they were never recognised as full members of society. Consequently, until around the late 1980s, there was a ‘conceptual homelessness of childhood’ within the discipline (Qvortrup, 2007: 395) with a great paucity of empirical literature about children’s lived experiences and their contributions to society (Ambert, 1986; Alanen, 1988). The scholarship that did exist was primarily concerned with the manner in which children were integrated into society, that is their unidirectional socialisation where the notion of childhood denoted a transitional life-​stage (Alanen, 1992; Mayall, 2013). Owing to these assumptions, children were not of interest to sociology in the here and now; they were solely engaged with as adults-​in-​the making who revealed valuable clues about the society of tomorrow. These ideas directly impacted methodological practices wherein children were seen, primarily within the sociologies of family and education as sub-​units of analysis but hardly ever listened to. Information about children’s lives came from adults, such as parents and teachers, who were seen as competent social actors who can provide reliable data with children themselves never included as participants in research projects (Scott, 2000). This was the case even when the focus of the research was on issues that directly impacted the wellbeing of children (Moran-​Ellis, 2010). This scenario changed when the so-​called ‘new’ sociology of childhood burst into the academic scene in the 1980s. Often dubbed as a ‘new paradigm’ of childhood research (Prout and James, 1997), an emergent school of sociological scholarship argued against the prevalent systematic marginalisation of children’s lived experiences within sociological literature and shifted focus away from the framing of childhood as a transitory life-​stage. Instead, they argued for child-​focused research agendas and looked afresh at the idea of childhood. Some posited childhood as a ‘permanent structural segment’ of society (Qvortrup, 2007) whose membership continually changes as new children enter into it and older children move out of it. Conceiving of childhood as a structural feature, rather than as a biological given, created affordances for appreciating how and why experiences of childhood differ across time and place. Others drew on feminist and social constructionist ideas to view children as a minority social group at the receiving end of an unequal power relation with adults (Oakley, 1994; Mayall, 2002). Both approaches shared the goal of extending ‘conceptual autonomy’ (Thorne, 1987: 86) to children by centring their voices, perspectives, and aspirations. The concerted efforts at carving a space for a resolutely sociological understanding of children’s lived realities has grown rapidly in the last three decades with the establishment of several dedicated university programmes, 25

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journals, book series and professional associations (Bühler-​Niederberger, 2010; Moran-​Ellis, 2010). The sociological insights into children’s lived experiences and embodied knowledge thus gained are indispensable for arriving at a better understanding of society at large as Mayall (2013: 2) puts it: ‘There are advantages to all generations and societies if we acquire greater understanding of and respect for children and for childhood (just as feminism has altered understandings of women).’ Much like the way women’s studies generated a new understanding of society based on women’s lived experiences and introduced feminist thought, empirical studies that are grounded in the new social studies of childhood have the potential to offer a child’s eye view of the social world and thereby uncover the age-​based hierarchies and power relationships that pattern social interactions and processes across societies. Indeed, many researchers in this field ‘regard the sociology of childhood as essentially a political enterprise’ (Mayall, 2013: 36) linked to the collective struggle to raise the status of children in society and promote their rights including that to social justice. These ideas have ‘unleashed a tremendous intellectual force’ among sociologists of childhood who have now fostered an impressive body of child-​focused sociological scholarship dwelling mostly on ‘questions of how particular forms of childhood are socially constructed and what roles children as agentic actors play in the process’ (Gu, 2022: 480; emphasis added). Within the realms of childhood studies, researchers draw a distinction between children as social actors and childhood as a mutable set of cultural ideas or a structural segment of society (Cunningham, 2005). Herein, the figure of the child is not taken for granted or universalised. Instead, the idea of childhood is interrogated to tease out the situated processes through which some humans are positioned as children and others as adults (Rosen and Twamley, 2018). Such an approach enables us to pick apart how dominant cultural ideas about childhood –​that is, how adults see children –​directly shape the way children are treated in a given society particularly with respect to legal rights, policies and professional practice (Neale, 2004). The dominant idea of childhood in contemporary Western societies positions the child as a vulnerable, dependent and incomplete human becoming, which patterns their exclusion from full participation in society (Cockburn, 2016). In pushing back against these constructions of childhood and to acknowledge the difference that children make to their social milieu, sociologists of childhood have championed ways of countering and transforming these discourses. One such response has been to recognise children as agentic social actors in their own right who contribute to the world around them. This amounts to treating children as possessors of legitimate knowledge about their own embodied experiences of the everyday (Scott, 2000) as alluded to in the last chapter. Although this broad premise is shared across the field of childhood studies, there are disputes in the way children’s 26

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agency is conceptualised: some scholars view it as an inherent quality of children or as a context-​bound social competency while others theorise it as a product of social–​material interactions or a social process embedded in networks of inter-​dependence. I enlist the latter school of thought that locates children’s agency within webs of independence (Bordonaro and Payne, 2012; Taylor et al, 2012). The former approach of theorising children’s agency as a context-​bound competency or inherent trait of individual children is anchored in neoliberal ideas of individualism, which champion children as ‘independent social actors’ (James and James, 2012: 3) and in doing so have managed to ‘transfer fictions of Western autonomy from the adult male subject to children’ (Esser et al, 2016: 8). The second, relational model of child agency that I embrace throughout this book conceives of children’s agency as heterogeneous and locates it within relations of interdependence –​ something that applies as much to adults as to children –​thereby dispersing agency across the whole range of relationships that children are a part of, be it with other humans, materials or nonhuman actors (Prout, 2011; Leonard, 2016; Eßer, 2017). Borne out of this relational approach to the study of childhood and children’s agency, is the conceptual lens of ‘generational order’ that I will mobilise throughout this book to analyse children’s leisure engagements and parent–​child relations in the context of leisure. The notion of ‘generation’ here denotes patterned relations between age-​derived relational categories, for example the relation between parents and children at home or that between teachers and children at school (Mayall, 2001; Alanen, 2014). Generational structuring therefore names the social processes through which some people are constructed as children while others are constructed as adults; wherein these ‘constructions’ entail agency of both children and adults and can be studied as a set of (material) practices (Alanen, 2001). This notion of the generational order draws attention to the fact that children and adults ‘share the same world but from different locations, based largely on generation’ (Leonard, 2016: 132). Parent–​child relations or teacher–​child relations, in this sense, can be understood as types of adult–​child relations, which are in turn connected to other relational structures linked to class, gender and race among others. The generational order encompasses a range of more localised generational structures, for instance the generational structure within the family, which involves the child position and the parent position (Alanen, 2020). In this familial generational structure, the social relations are internal in the sense that both the parent position and the child position are dependent on one another; the existence of one presupposes the other (Alanen, 2014). Although the power relation between the two positions is asymmetrical, holders of both generational positions continually inform, implicate and shape each other’s positional performance and identity (Alanen, 2014; 27

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Leonard, 2016). If the positional performance of those occupying the parental position within the familial generational structure, that is their intergenerational activities vis-​à-​vis children, is termed ‘parenting’ then ‘children’s intergenerational activities and relationships in complement to those understood through the term “parenting” can be called “childing” ’ (Mayall, 1996: 49). Thus conceptualised, the framework of generational order takes us, both conceptually and methodologically, beyond the polarities of structure versus agency and help us grasp the interdependent and relational nature of children’s lived geographies. Children’s agency emerges within these generational relationships and processes that circumscribe children’s lives (Leonard, 2016). However, as Holt and her colleagues point out (2020), if we are to fully appreciate the relational nature of children’s lives it is important that we listen to other voices (such as those of parents) alongside the important task of highlighting children’s own narratives. Overall, in this section I have mapped the field of childhood studies and foregrounded some of its key conceptual debates that I have drawn upon and engaged with in thinking about children’s everyday leisure. I have also delineated the relational approach to children’s agency and generational order that I will champion in this book to unpack and analyse the leisure lives of middle-​class British Indian children and the leisure-​based parenting strategies that buttress them. These discussions also have a wider relevance to the field of childhood studies as issues around child agency continue to be debated within the field. As mentioned earlier, childhood researchers have in the last few decades produced an impressive corpus of empirical literature on several aspects of children’s quotidian lives and personal relationships. Leisure is no exception. However, these empirical works focus narrowly on specific aspects of children’s leisure in isolation (for example, play) without paying attention to the wider ecosystem of children’s everyday leisure and the way they are connected to the structural issues around leisure and social inequalities in contemporary societies. Put differently, childhood scholars working on singular aspects of children’s leisure repertoire have eschewed the developments afoot in leisure studies and as a result the intellectual growth in the area of children’s leisure has been stunted. In what follows, I will build on the debates in leisure studies, expose its adult-​centrism and make a case for greater collaboration between childhood studies and leisure studies for a holistic and in-​depth analysis of children’s leisure cultures or what I call a critical sociology of children’s leisure that undergird my research with middle-​class British Indian children. I will thereby mount a framework for studying children’s leisure repertoire in the context of their everyday lives which guided my project, and which can be put to work by others working in this area. 28

Critical Sociology of Children’s Leisure

Adult-​centrism and leisure theory: going beyond an add-​children-​and-​stir model Scholars from across all major social science disciplines have ‘opened their … toolboxes and gone to work on leisure’, operating within their ‘normative canonical boundaries’ (Kelly, 1987: iv) to illuminate the various dimensions of leisure. Sociology has been no exception to the burgeoning social science scholarship on leisure. Indeed, the sociological approach to the study of leisure has come of age in recent decades with a rich armoury of theoretical, empirical, and methodological insights into everyday forms of leisure. The foundations of these sociological understandings of leisure can be traced to the historical emergence of sociology itself; ideas that were later distilled and institutionalised through the inauguration of leisure studies as a field of research in the 1970s (Roberts, 2013; Snape, 2020). Since then, sociological work on leisure has proliferated along multiple axes, broaching importance questions about the social processes, institutions and actors involved in leisure and using leisure as a lens to understand wider social formations. Like any other area of knowledge production, sociology of leisure is governed by key assumptions about the object of its study and the methodological tools appropriate for its analysis. These underlying assumptions give leisure sociology a sense of direction while also setting its boundaries. I concur with Kelly (1974) that as leisure researchers we need to reflect upon the nature of these assumptions to forge the way forward for leisure studies. Such an exercise is crucial in mounting a critical sociology of children’s leisure. When it comes to disciplinary assumptions in sociology at large, Gouldner (1971) argues that they are of two kinds: explicitly formulated assumptions and those that are left unpostulated. The latter remain at the background of the researchers’ attention and become silent partners in the construction of social theories. Therefore, it is important for leisure scholars to not only acknowledge the explicitly labelled assumptions but to also draw out those background assumptions that inform leisure studies’ direction of travel as a field, albeit silently. In unpacking these disciplinary assumptions, leisure scholars have thus far reflected upon the way leisure is defined within research agendas and raised questions about whose leisure gets represented within the academic literature (Allison, 2000; Juniu and Henderson, 2001). The definitional debate around leisure has largely been encased within the leisure paradox of freedom and constraint (Coalter, 1989), which often translates into two opposing camps of leisure theories, the liberal view of leisure with its notion of freedom and the critical approach to the study of leisure that identifies structural constraints and pays attention to the role of leisure in (re)producing social inequalities (see Spracklen, 2009). In this critical vein, race, class, gender, ageing and working patterns have been recognised as some of the central ‘axial constructs’ of Western leisure 29

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(Rojek et al, 2006b). However, there is a conspicuous absence in leisure theories of child-​centred lenses and an implied disavowal of age-​based power hierarchies in which children and their leisure are embedded. None of the leisure research handbooks or major publications in leisure theory (Rojek, 2005, 2010; Roberts, 2006; Rojek et al, 2006a; Spracklen, 2009; Blackshaw, 2013) contain a single chapter outlining a child-​centred approach to leisure; if children do appear, they do so as an appendix to questions around the family and women or as an illustration of the unidirectional socialisation model –​echoing the state of mainstream sociology before the ‘new’ sociology of childhood burst into the academic scene (Moran-​Ellis, 2010). This is, however, not the case with youth whose leisure cultures have been central to the enterprise of leisure studies from its inception. This book is uniquely positioned to intervene in the field of leisure studies and bring into its folds key questions about children’s agency and generational structures. Leisure sociology has for the most part ignored school-​age children while defining and theorising leisure, and consequently adult-​centric biases of leisure theory have for long been left unacknowledged and unchallenged. This is not to claim that leisure researchers have never studied children’s leisure, for they have (see for example, Zabriskie and McCormick, 2003; Yuen, 2004; Macdonald et al, 2005; Yuen et al, 2005; Shannon, 2006, 2016; Gill and Persson, 2008; Shaw et al, 2008; Shannon and Shaw, 2008; Haglund and Anderson, 2009; Jeanes and Magee, 2012; Karsten et al, 2015; Mjaavatn, 2016; Rhoden et al, 2016; Asakitikpi et al, 2018; Fader et al, 2019; Fowlie et al, 2020). But these studies are riddled with conceptual limitations. First, despite amplifying children’s voices within leisure studies these scholars have not engaged with debates in childhood studies, for example none of them mention children’s agency, and thereby their works have failed to influence those outside leisure studies working on children’s leisure. This is a missed opportunity for influencing childhood researchers in a context where leisure studies’ intellectual isolation has been repeatedly discussed and the need to build bridge with other fields of scholarship has been stressed (Samdahl and Kelly, 1999; Parr and Schmalz, 2019). Second, these isolated empirical projects have not been channelled into systematic theory building endeavours and to date the mainstream of leisure theory has been largely unaffected by children’s leisure as evidenced by their conspicuous absence from major leisure theory monographs and research handbooks. Third, leisure scholars working with children publish their works exclusively in specialist leisure research journals and do not engage with publication platforms in childhood studies. These trends run the risk of further entrenching leisure studies’ intellectual isolation. The adult-​centrism of leisure sociology, far from being an exception, is symptomatic of wider trends in social sciences. Blatterer (2007) argues that adulthood has always been the take-​for-​g ranted status of social actors in 30

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the vast majority of social enquiries while at the same time the category of adulthood itself has remained uncontested. Here, he echoes Elias’ (1978: 248) contention that the ideal actor in sociology ‘was never a child and seemingly came into the world an adult’. Blatterer (2007) goes on to point out that in every sphere of sociological studies, from the analysis of global process to the micro-​level understanding of everyday life, the social actor whether understood as an individual or as a system has always been the embodiment of adulthood. Even when children do appear in branches of social theory such as economic and political philosophy, the academic debate, in Gordon’s (2008: 165) words, ‘ranges from the mildly embarrassing to the downright ridiculous’. Sociologists of childhood have repeatedly argued that such an endemic adult-​centrism and the resultant marginalisation of children within mainstream sociology reflects the subordinate status of children within wider society, something that child-​centred scholarship seeks to rectify (Mayall, 2013). In order for leisure sociology to move beyond its adult centrism, it has to address its intellectual isolation from other relevant bodies of literature, in this case the sociology of childhood, and thereby refashion its conceptual and methodological arsenal. This book engenders an attempt to do just that. In advancing a critical sociology of children’s leisure, I recognise the fact that including children’s voices in leisure theory or critiquing the adult-​ centrism of contemporary leisure research is not a straightforward exercise. Looking at the history of feminist leisure research offers some useful parallels and lessons. Following criticism from feminist scholars who highlighted the absence of women’s leisure from the leisure theories of the time, empirical studies in the 1980s began to acknowledge the need to study women’s leisure and in the process largely followed a ‘add woman [to existing leisure theories] and stir’ model before more nuanced feminist analysis of gender and power developed in leisure studies (Henderson, 1994, 2013). My intention therefore is not to produce an add-​children-​and-​stir model of leisure studies that maintains status quo and merely pays lip service to children’s concerns and rights. To address the aforementioned issues effectively, in this book I champion a ‘disruptive collaboration’ (Fox, 2000) between leisure sociology and sociology of childhood, which has wider relevance beyond my study of British Indian children’s leisure. According to the leisure scholar Fox (2000), disruptive collaboration signifies an approach whereby critiques and political action from points of view beyond leisure studies are incorporated into it, in the processes unsettling taken for granted assumptions and contributing to the development of a more diverse community of leisure scholars. As I have shown earlier in this chapter, the current body of child-​centred research within leisure studies mostly follows an add-​children-​and-​stir model, which a disruptive collaboration within childhood studies can help transform. Such a disruptive collaboration and the resultant diversification of leisure research 31

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will be a major step forward for the sociology of leisure, which continues to be ‘largely invisible in modern Western sociology’ (Stebbins, 2018: 51). Meanwhile, despite its effort at making children visible within sociology, the impact of the sociology of childhood ‘remains piecemeal’ (Leonard, 2016: 34) with mainstream sociological theorising taking little interest in this innovative body of work (Moran-​Ellis, 2010). This collaboration can therefore demonstrate ‘the disruptive impact that childhood studies can have in terms of challenging the adultcentrism of so many fields of research’ (Ní Laoire qtd in Alanen et al, 2018: 133) and benefit both fields. The critical sociology of children’s leisure that flows from this ‘disruptive collaboration’ provides the intellectual direction for this book and offers a template for researchers and practitioners working on children’s leisure.

Genres of children’s everyday leisure: a conceptual map The broad remit of leisure as a conceptual category, its ‘complex and changing’ nature (Kelly, 1987: iii) and the lack of consensus over its definition create particular challenges for any researcher studying leisure empirically. Indeed, some leisure scholars contend that ‘leisure experiences are socially structured and shaped by the inequalities of society’ (Juniu and Henderson, 2001: 8), and as a result expressions and understandings of leisure differ vastly creating considerable challenges for those researching leisure. Moreover, as Cunningham (1980: 13) rightly points out, people ‘talk about concrete, discrete activities’ that they indulge in, which vary across time and place, and not about leisure per se. Therefore, in conducting empirical studies about people’s everyday leisure, leisure researchers deploy varying typologies or categories of leisure to demarcate the object of their study from within the larger domain of leisure. However, the majority of existing typologies used in leisure studies cannot accommodate the particularities of children’s leisure. For instance, Stebbins’ (2007: 5) concept of serious leisure is quite popular among leisure scholars and he defines it thus: ‘Systematic pursuit of an activity that people find so substantial, interesting or rewarding that they typically launch themselves on a (leisure) career centred on acquiring and expressing a combination of its special skills, knowledge and experience.’ The assumptions made here are adult-​centric and they do not necessarily apply to children’s leisure choices that, as previous studies (Shannon, 2006; Vincent and Ball, 2007; Lareau, 2011; Friedman, 2013) show, are often contingent upon parental decisions and do not rest solely with children wanting to ‘launch themselves on a (leisure) career’ (Stebbins, 2007: 5). Similarly, Spracklen et al (2017: 10) posit leisure as ‘just that thing and that space associated with the time when we are not working or engaged in domestic chores (even if the boundaries between all these things may be 32

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blurred)’. The implied leisure actor in either Stebbins’ (2007) or Spracklen et al’s (2017) theorisation of leisure is never imagined as a child. Psychologists studying children’s leisure (Holder et al, 2009; Csikszentmihalyi and Hunter, 2003) have frequently used a binary of active leisure (for example, sports and physical exercises) and passive leisure (for example, reading and watching TV) to map out children’s everyday leisure pursuits. Others have mounted three-​tier typologies for researching children’s leisure: achievement-​ oriented/​active leisure (for example, sports), social leisure (for example, peer activities), and passive/​time-​out leisure (for example, watching TV) (Shin and You, 2013; Passmore, 2003). Meanwhile, childhood and family sociologists studying children’s leisure have usually attended to one kind of leisure activity –​ for example, extracurricular activities (see Vincent and Ball, 2007; Lareau, 2011; Friedman, 2013; Wheeler and Green, 2019) –​in isolation without situating them within the wider leisure constellations of children’s everyday lives. In pulling together these various strands of existing empirical scholarship on children’s leisure, it is apparent that we need a holistic approach that does not isolate different aspects of children’s leisure geographies but treats them as interlocking constituents of the wider ecosystem of children’s everyday leisure. Looking at all the various interlocking components of children’s everyday leisure at once will enable us to draw out the dynamic links between children’s leisure activities, their agency and their social locations. Existing typologies of active/​passive/​social leisure cannot grasp the meanings that parents and children construct around different sets of leisure actions and they also do not reveal the power relations and social positionings through which leisure experiences are produced. Therefore, I propose a conceptual framework that synthesises the existing strands of research on children’s leisure and formulates them into three interrelated genres of children’s leisure, namely ‘structured/​ organised leisure’, ‘family leisure’ and ‘casual leisure’. Activities contained within each genre are context-​dependent and share family resemblances. In presenting this map, I am not suggesting a ‘one leisure size fits all’ approach (Henderson, 1996: 139) for studying children’s leisure. My object here is to inaugurate a new way of thinking about and approaching the sociology of children’s leisure and this tripartite model can facilitate a sustained dialogue between leisure studies and childhood studies. This conceptual map can be modified, critiqued and remade by future leisure scholars doing empirical work on children’s leisure. I will now describe each of the three genres of children’s leisure in turns.

Structured or organised leisure Structured or organised leisure encompasses those paid-​for leisure activities that children partake in and that are more often than not spatially and temporally demarcated in children’s weekly schedules. Sometimes referred 33

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to as ‘extra-​curricular’, ‘out-​of-​school’ or ‘after-​school’ activities in popular parlance, this genre of children’s leisure is also described as ‘enrichment activities’ in the UK policy context (Training and Development Agency for Schools, 2007; Department for Education, 2021). Compared to other forms of leisure, children’s participation in organised leisure activities has attracted immense scholarly attention in recent years, especially since young children’s immersion in these adult-​supervised activities has become a marker of an ideal middle-​class childhood in the global north and by extension the act of initiating and facilitating children’s participation in these activities has become an index of ‘good parenting’ in these societies. Studies in North America and Britain have repeatedly found that school-​ age children are spending a significant portion of the week in structured leisure activities and clear differences in terms of volume and frequency of such leisure participation have been found between children of working class and middle-​class parents (Lareau and Weininger, 2008; Lareau, 2011; Bennett et al, 2012; Putnam, 2015; Wheeler et al, 2019; Wheeler and Green, 2019). This signifies a dominant trend among middle-​class parents who treat these organised leisure lessons as crucial sites for their children to imbibe key behavioural competences and skills, become familiar with competitions (for example, in sports) and add extracurricular achievements to their CV –​all of which are seen by parents as useful tools that can help their children navigate educational and career success in the future (Dunn et al, 2003; Devine, 2004; Pugh, 2009; Nelson, 2010; Lareau, 2011; Friedman, 2013; Reay, 2017; Wheeler and Green, 2019). This genre of children’s leisure activity therefore plays an important role in maintaining and furthering social inequalities since children from all social classes do not enjoy similar level of access to these paid-​for lessons. For instance, Lareau’s (2002, 2011) ethnographic research in the US found that parents’ motivation to send their children to multiple after-​school leisure lessons is nested within a classed ideology of child-​rearing wherein middle-​class parents see their children as projects to be developed and therefore devise a strategy of ‘concerted cultivation’ aimed at nurturing their children’s skills and talents through organised activities. In a similar vein, Vincent and Ball’s (2007) study with middle-​class parents in London revealed that promoting children’s structured leisure pursuits constitutes middle-​class parents’ response to the urgency they feel in developing key skills in their children in the context of a volatile job market and class insecurities. Therefore these activities are crucial in the ‘making up’ of middle-​class childhoods in today’s world. Moreover, Reay (2010) argues that being able to afford culturally enriching and educational leisure activities for their children is part of the social class reproduction mechanism within families and it thus informs the educational advantages that middle-​class children enjoy. Relatedly, Shannon (2006) argues that parental influences on children vis-​à-​vis structured leisure is not limited to the choice of specific activities or interests but also 34

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extends to leisure values and attitudes. Parents’ leisure-​related messages to their children revolve around the valuation of leisure and its role in life; often sculpting hierarchies of leisure where structured extracurricular activities are perceived as more beneficial than unstructured ones (Shannon, 2006). In a recent study with middle-​class families in northern England, Wheeler and Green (2019) found that not only were organised activities extremely popular in these households but initiating and facilitating children’s participation in them were frequently perceived by the parents as an integral part of ‘good parenting’. They further argue that middle-​class parents’ intense, deliberate and well-​thought-​through involvement in the leisure biographies of their children is driven by a focus on the future the parents desired for their children and the aspirations they harboured. These studies highlight the way organised activities are constructed by middle-​class parents today as a form of ‘investment’ into the future of their children wherein children themselves are treated as ‘an educational and developmental project’ (Irwin and Elley, 2011: 481). A sociological approach to the study of children’s organised leisure activities goes beyond an understanding of individual experiences and examines the wider social processes that feed into this growing trend and draws out their implications. The soaring popularity of children’s after-​school lessons, which are adult-​directed and supervised, has been matched by the decline in children’s unsupervised and outdoor play as risk anxieties about children’s safety have assumed greater traction (Holloway and Pimlott-​Wilson, 2014). This has been further accentuated by changing ideals of child-​rearing as good parenting is increasingly being equated with intensive parenting practices, which can be defined, building on Hays’ (1996: 8) work on mothering, as ‘child-​centred … emotionally absorbing, labor intensive, and financially expensive’. Facilitating children’s organised activities have become integral to this middle-​class notion of intensive parenting. This discourse of intensive child-​rearing enacted through children’s organised leisure participation is further buttressed by a wider acceptance of ‘parental determinism’ (Furedi, 2010), which holds that every parental decision has long-​term implications for the child’s future. Another factor that has contributed to this trend is the expansion in dual-earner families with parents viewing after-​school activities as an avenue of childcare (Wheeler and Green, 2019). Within this landscape that has normalised intensive parenting and fuelled notions of parental determinism among the middle classes, enrolling children into a series of organised activities has become the taken-​for-​granted norm of an ideal childhood. The ramifications of this development go beyond the daily lives of middle-​class households, however. As Wheeler (2018: 342) puts it: the social world of middle-​class families is busy and competitive and parents actively look to ‘reinvent’ themselves and their children in the 35

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changing British post-​modern society through their strategic and often intensive involvement [in children’s education and leisure]. … [This] increasingly intensive social reproduction among the middle-​class is closing off opportunities for reinvention among the poor-​working-​ class, which is likely to be further dividing the rich from the poor. The growth of this genre of leisure has been pivotal to the ‘cultural modernisation of childhood’ (Zinnecker, 1995) in recent years and deserves greater understanding and scrutiny from both leisure and childhood studies perspectives. Organised leisure has refashioned contemporary childhoods in important and far-​reaching ways. First, children’s participation in organised leisure lessons contributes heavily towards the institutionalisation of childhood (Edwards, 2005), which compartmentalises children’s everyday geographies across an array of adult-​supervised and largely chronological-​age based social institutions. Second, through their disproportionate access to paid-​for leisure lessons, middle-​class children pick up key skills and corner social advantages that working-​class children lose out on, hence reproducing and reinforcing existing class-​based inequalities (Lareau, 2011; Reay, 2017). Third, these activities have a direct bearing on parents’ daily schedules and their own leisure opportunities (Such, 2009; Irving and Giles 2011). For instance, the proliferation of school-​aged younger children’s organised leisure schedules has quickened the rhythm and pace of family life within middle-​class families with parents having to spend a significant amount of time, money and energy in accompanying their children to and from these activities (Darrah et al, 2007; Berhau et al, 2011). As Wheeler and Green (2019: 794) put it, many middle-​class parents in their study in northern England ‘pretty much gave over their lives to “ferrying” their children’ to various organised activities. Such leisure activity management labour is gendered, and they construct parents as parents of a particular kind. In the US, for instance, middle-​class women who devote their time and energy in facilitating their children’s sports participation are often portrayed in popular culture as ‘soccer moms’ and it is through their children’s leisure activity management that they are positioned as ‘good mothers’ (Swanson, 2009). Relatedly, structured leisure activities especially sport often serve as a dominant cultural context for contemporary fathering and links have been drawn between ‘sports fathering’ and questions of masculinity (see Kay, 2007; Jeanes and Magee, 2011; Fletcher, 2019). There are a number of limitations in this existing body of research on children’s organised leisure, however. To begin with, the majority of studies report parental accounts about children’s structured leisure participation, without including children’s voices and perspectives on what these leisure activities mean to them. While these studies demonstrate how the trend towards children’s increasing participation in organised leisure is emblematic 36

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of middle-​class child-​rearing ideologies, and indeed how they help preserve and reproduce middle-​class advantages, they are overwhelmingly based on the experiences of white middle-​class parents. We still know very little about children’s organised leisure within racialised middle-​class families, and the intersection of race and class in shaping children’s leisure geographies and leisure-​based parenting cultures remain woefully undertheorised. Studying middle-​class British Indian children’s organised leisure participation from the perspective of both parents and children and doing so using the joint lens of race and class can therefore break new ground in our understanding of this genre of children’s leisure. In doing so, it is important to situate middle-​class British Indian children’s organised leisure within the wider ecosystem of their everyday leisure pursuits, draw out the way various genres of children’s leisure are interlocked, and thereby contribute to conceptual debates within both leisure studies and childhood studies.

Family leisure Family leisure refers to leisure ‘activities that different family members participate in together’ (Shaw, 1997: 99). Leisure scholars emphasise two core aspects of family leisure: its domestic nature, that is to say its occurrence within or around the home and its family-​centredness, which signifies the inter-​generational dynamic of these leisure practices (Harrington, 2006). As an arena of children’s leisure, contemporary forms of family leisure reflect some of the key social and cultural shifts within family life and the domestic space. Today, vernacular expressions such as ‘family time’ or ‘spending time with family’ that variously signal family leisure are ubiquitous (Kremer-​Sadlik, Fatigante and Fasulo, 2008). However, as the social historian Gillis (2003) has shown that the very notion of ‘family time’, centred around children, emerged in Europe and North America only in the 19th century and was initially confined to the households of Victorian elites. The discourse of ‘family time’ has spread more widely since then in lockstep with the changing social construction of childhood. By the early 20th century, children’s lives in the global north were quarantined from the adult world; children were pulled out of paid work and put into compulsory schooling by the state, making them economically ‘worthless’ but emotionally ‘priceless’ (Zelizer, 1994). This in turn reconfigured the intergenerational power dynamics within families as children came to acquire central importance within family practices, and they have been recognised by adults as legitimate stakeholders within the institution of the family (Gillis, 2003; Chambers, 2012). This growing emphasis on ‘family time’, centred around children, has been further entrenched by the so-​called ‘privatisation’ of leisure. The ‘privatisation of leisure’ thesis captures the trend that started in post-​war Britain wherein 37

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people’s leisure lives were becoming increasingly family-​oriented and home-​oriented at the expense of more communal leisure experiences in the public sphere (Allan and Crow, 1991). This trend largely reflects the shift in the leisure lives of partnered men and fathers, since women’s leisure has historically coincided with family and home more frequently (Allan and Crow, 1991). The progressively privatised leisure lives of parents coupled with the escalating emotional worth of children has contributed to the refashioning of family lives and made cross-​generational family leisure, whether enacted within the home or outside, a cornerstone of children’s everyday lives and leisure biographies. As a collective activity, family leisure involves children alongside siblings, parents and other members of the family, and is therefore embedded in familial generational structures. Sociologists now acknowledge that children make manifold contributions to the functioning of households. Understanding the way shared leisure activities are experienced by members of the family including children can therefore offer new avenues into analysing the social institution of the family itself (Shaw, 2008). After an initial lull, family leisure is one area of research where leisure scholars have taken the lead in exploring the subjective experiences and outcomes of family leisure in different social settings (Trussell and Shaw, 2009; Trussell, Jeanes and Such, 2017; Shaw, 2008). Nevertheless, when it comes to families with children, our historical understanding derives primarily from parental accounts as children were usually seen but not heard in family leisure research (Jeanes, 2010). More recently, however, empirical studies have begun to explore children’s perspectives on family leisure, but literature concerning racialised middle-​class children and their family leisure is rather sparse. Existing child-​focused family leisure research has found that children more often than not undertake shared family leisure activities for their intrinsic ‘fun’ qualities (Macdonald et al, 2005), while parents conceive them as a means for their children to imbibe family values and other traditions as well as to cement family bonds and patterns of family communication (Shaw and Dawson, 2001; Shannon, 2006; Shaw, 2008; Shaw et al, 2008). As parents assume the role of ‘leisure educators’ (Robertson, 1999), family leisure becomes a space for reinforcing intergenerational family dispositions (Quarmby and Dagkas, 2010). In the meantime, there has been some noteworthy developments in the way family leisure is carried out outside the home by urban middle-​class families. Studies conducted with families in Western European cities have demonstrated that middle-​class families have reconfigured urban consumption infrastructure by moving together and consuming city spaces through family outings, which have also served to construct family spaces outside the home (DeVault, 2000; Karsten et al, 2015; Karsten and Felder, 2015). These studies recognise the significance of family leisure for studying families and have in the recent past attempted 38

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to locate and listen to children within the context of family leisure. But conversely, empirical studies that locate family leisure within children’s wider everyday leisure repertoire, that is family leisure as part of children’s leisure geography, are largely absent. This is despite the fact that the central role of the family in the cross-​generational reproduction of social advantages and disadvantages has been long understood and acknowledged (Wheeler and Green, 2019). The tripartite framework for studying children’s leisure that I have advanced here, can help chart the manner in which family leisure activities transpire in relation to school patterns, structured leisure schedules and other everyday leisure activities of children. The conceptual manoeuvres suggested so far are significant to the development of a critical sociology of middle-​class British Indian children’s leisure that I pursue in this book. But equally, the framework presented here and the conceptual synthesis of leisure studies and childhood studies that I have mounted in this chapter hold wider relevance for studies on middle-​ class children’s leisurescapes in the global north. The theoretical integration of family leisure into a holistic framework of children’s everyday leisure is long overdue and will constitute an important conceptual contribution to the sociological study of children’s leisure. Indeed, family leisure is a focal point where leisure studies, family studies and childhood studies meet. Consequently, studying family leisure can contribute to key debates across these fields of research and open new avenues for dialogue and synthesis. Further, South Asian families in Britain have for a long time been viewed through reductionist frameworks and written about in terms that essentialise their experiences without due attention to the intersection of social class, gender, histories of migration and regional identities (Ahmad, 2006). There has also been no notable empirical work on family leisure in these families. The inclusion of family leisure within the purview of this book presents a unique opportunity to drive fresh conversations about social identities, inequalities and family leisure by centring the voices of racialised middle-​ class parents and their children.

Casual leisure The term ‘casual leisure’ is derived from Stebbins (1997: 18) who defines it as ‘immediately, intrinsically rewarding, relatively short-​lived pleasurable activity requiring little or no special training to enjoy it’. Although such a description can be applied to certain forms of family leisure activities as well, here it is directed at those unstructured, ludic and solitary leisure activities that do not correspond to either organised activities or collective family leisure experiences but are nonetheless extremely important components of children’s everyday leisure repertoire. Children’s interaction with media technologies, playing with friends and toys, and various ‘nonconsumptive’ 39

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leisure activities such as reading, storytelling and other imaginative avenues of solitary leisure can be seen through the prism of ‘casual leisure’ (Stebbins, 1997, 2007). The existing literature takes a fragmentary approach to children’s casual leisure, looking into discreet aspects of it such as digital leisure and playing, with little mention of solitary leisure. Pulling them together under the rubric of casual leisure offers unparalleled opportunities for in-​depth understanding of middle-​class children’s leisurescapes in the global north by situating the motley assemblage of casual leisure in relation to other forms of leisure activities, social relationships, and generational structures. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have undergone radical transformations in recent years and have become pervasive within the home with a ‘constellation of always-​on and always-​on-​hand mobile media’ encompassing the digitally connected family (Lim, 2020: 2). Screen-​based or digital leisure now constitutes one of the key spheres of children’s casual leisure geography encompassing mobile devices, video games, social media and other internet-​based activities. The proliferation of these ICT devises within the home has spawned intense debates about the opportunities and risks they engender. Children have been at the heart of these debates both in terms of their status as ‘digital natives’ (Prensky, 2001) and consumers of ICT, and because of their supposed vulnerability to the dangers of digital media and their inability to manage the risks that these devices pose (see Clark, 2012). In a pioneering study of children’s ICT use, Holloway and Valentine (2003) challenged the technological determinism that assumes that access to technologies will invariably produce fixed outcomes for children. Instead, their UK-​based empirical study revealed that children as competent social actors were using ICT to forge and enhance social relationships. Children were also identifying potential risks of online activities and coming up with ways to avoid them. Children, Holloway and Valentine (2003) argued, were more concerned with the influence of ICT on their lived identities at home and school and how these were perceived by their peers than they were about future job prospects that technological literacy can bring. These arguments have continued to frame the discussion around digital media within childhood studies. As younger children are becoming increasingly adept at using digital technologies for both schoolwork and leisure, parents have come to play a key role as mediators and gatekeepers of children’s digital leisure experiences (Clark, 2012; Livingstone and Blum-​Ross, 2020). The pervasiveness of mobile and digital media has enabled –​what Lim (2020) describes as –​the practice of ‘transcendent parenting’ wherein parenting obligations have broadened and urban middle-​class parents today are exploiting media technologies to assist their children, guide them through online spaces and keep an eye on them on an endless loop with little respite. Digital leisure is therefore not only integral to the everyday life and leisure experiences of middle-​class children, but it has significantly redrawn the boundaries of parenting. 40

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Besides children’s use of media technologies as forms of casual leisure, tactile and outdoor play with peers and family members are also part of their everyday casual leisure geographies. Psychological and clinical paradigms have been dominant in framing children’s play in relation to its contribution towards children’s cognitive, emotional and social development (Yogman et al, 2018; Parrott and Cohen, 2020) but such a progress-​oriented rhetoric is often adult-​imposed and fails to capture the way play as a social process matters to children (Sutton-​Smith, 1997). Sociological studies point to children’s interactive cultures of play where rules of established games circulate among children as well as between children and adults, as children interpret social norms in creative ways and invent or improvise new games from existing ones (Opie and Opie, 1969; Lancy, 1996; Corsaro, 2012). Ethnographic research with children in recent years confirm that tactile games co-​exist alongside digital leisure, with no evidence to suggest that digital leisure has wiped out tactile games and lore from the everyday lives of children in Britain (Willett et al, 2013; Burn and Richards, 2014). However, their place within children’s casual leisure geographies has been refashioned. Existing research on children’s digital leisure and play bring into focus the fact that children’s casual leisure geography is multi-​layered and context dependent. They point to the need for engaging with children as well as their parents and peers to understand how these leisure practices unfold within the patterns of everyday life and how parental mediation and children’s agency are negotiated in this context. Unfortunately, leisure scholars working on children’s digital leisure continue to deploy technological-​determinism in their approach and enlist unidirectional models of socialisation that posit children as passive non-​actors (see Asakitikpi et al, 2018). There is a clear need for a relational approach to the study of children’s causal leisure that situate instances such as screen-​based leisure and play within the broader context of leisure, everyday routines and parent–​child relations.

Operationalising a critical sociology of middle-​class British Indian children’s leisure In this chapter I have introduced the key theoretical ideas around children’s agency and generational structure, as well as a critical appraisal of the link between social inequality and leisure that form the backbone of this book. In unpacking middle-​class British Indian children’s everyday leisure geographies and their underpinning leisure-​based parenting ideologies, I will focus on all three genres of leisure outlined here and draw out the way race and class make tracks within these time-​spaces. Equipped with this map for studying children’s leisure, I will now put forth the narratives of my study participants to illuminate the classed and racial meanings of leisure in their everyday lives. While the vast majority of theorising in childhood studies has 41

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been based on the lived experiences of white children in the global north (Balagopalan, 2018), I will use the narratives of racialised minority children in my study as the basis to think about the social dynamics of leisure and childhood in contemporary Britain. In the following chapter I take up the case of organised activities and demonstrate how professional middle-​class British Indian parents view their ‘investment’ into children’s organised leisure.

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3

Concerted Cultivation the Indian Way? Organised Leisure and Racial Parenting Strategy The burgeoning trend of middle-​class children’s participation in a panoply of organised leisure activities in the global north has received significant scholarly attention in recent years. This is largely due to the fact that this genre of children’s everyday leisure has been identified to completement school education in reproducing class advantages across generation by equipping children with coveted competencies and extra-​curricular achievements that can put them in good stead in higher education and professional job market in the future. Just as middle-​class parents in Britain play the choice-​based school education market (Ball, 2003; Reay 2017, 2010), they also exploit the children’s leisure market to garner further positional advantage for their children in an unequal, class-stratified society. These efforts are said to be situated within a broader middle-​class cultural logic of child-​rearing that Lareau (2000) terms ‘concerted cultivation’ wherein parents come to view their children as projects to be developed in a concerted fashion. In effect, parental efforts at supporting their children’s education and leisure lives are increasingly framed as an ‘investment’ into the child’s future where the latter are seen as ‘an educational and developmental project’ (Irwin and Elley, 2011: 481) for the parents to work on. A growing body of literature is now replete with instances of how middle-​class parents enrol their children into multiple extracurricular activities as part of this wider strategy of social class reproduction as children are exposed to opportunities to learn skills, build networks and expand their cultural repertoires beyond their formal school curriculum (Devine, 2004; Vincent and Ball, 2007; Pugh, 2009; Kremer-​Sadlik et al, 2010; Nelson, 2010; Lareau, 2011; Friedman, 2013; Reay, 2017; Wheeler, 2018; Wheeler and Green, 2019). Parental spending in this regard shows sizable quantitative differences across social classes as those with higher disposable income 43

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are more likely to enrol their children in these paid-​for activities (The Sutton Trust, 2014; Schneider et al, 2018). However, this growing body of work on concerted cultivation has largely downplayed the importance of race and ethnicity and consequently fallen short of developing a nuanced understanding of how race and class intersect when it comes to middle-class child-​rearing approaches (Manning, 2019; Delale-​O’Connor et al, 2020). This is where this chapter intervenes, by exploring concerted cultivation strategies vis-​à-​vis children’s organised activities within middle-​class British Indian families through the joint lens of race and class. In investing a great deal of resources into their children’s structured activities, the professional middle-​class British Indian parents who took part in my study enacted ‘concerted cultivation’ of their children through organised leisure. However, I contend that their approach to concerted cultivation is embedded in both classed and racial processes unlike what previous scholars, who adopt a largely race-​blind approach, have suggested. Based on the accounts of these parents, in this chapter I will decode the classed and racial connotations that children’s enrichment activities carry for these middle-​class Indian diasporic parents who channel significant portions of their time, money and energy towards their children’s organised leisure schedule. Concerted cultivation strategies are mounted by these racialised minority middle-​class parents in two main ways. One is to facilitate structured leisure opportunities with an eye to cultivating soft skills and dominant forms of cultural capital in their children. The other is to use organised activities as vehicles for ethnic and racial socialisation of their children so they acquire ‘ethnic cultural capital’ (Lan, 2018), develop a positive ethnic identity and are equipped to deal with experiences of racism in leisure spaces and beyond. Ethnic cultural capital here refers to embodied and intangible cultural resources linked to specific ethnic communities –​a notion I will develop further later in the chapter. In what follows, I unpack both these axes of concerted cultivation in middle-​class British Indian families, located as they are at the intersection of race and class, and reflect on what these accounts mean for rethinking the growing phenomenon of concerted cultivation from the dual perspective of race and class.

Making up a ‘skilled’ child through leisure I interviewed Swati in her children’s play room, perched on a bean bag. The play room housed a television set, which her son, age six, and daughter, age eight, use for watching cartoons and playing online games. Littered around were cushions, piles of board games, toys and transparent plastic containers packed with pencils, crayons and craft supplies. Swati works as a senior

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dentist at a local NHS dental practice in West London. Since the birth of her second child, she decided to switch from full-​time to part-​time work in order to spend more time with her children and take them to school and after-​school activities more often. Her husband, Alpesh, works full-​time as a software engineer in central London. Swati does most of the housework and childcare, but on days she goes to work, she receives help with childcare from her in-​laws and parents who live nearby. Swati and Alpesh both grew up in London, in Hindu Gujarati families. Coming from lower-​middle and working-​class households respectively, Swati and Alpesh have achieved considerable educational success and graduated from top universities. They have been married for ten years now and six months ago they bought the house they currently live in. It is a modern two-​storey detached building, located in a quiet tree-​lined middle-​class neighbourhood in West London. Unlike some of the other parents in my study, Swati and Alpesh decided not to send their children to private schools. “The advantages of private school are not worth the cost,” is what Alpesh told me when explaining the decision. Instead, they channelled their financial resources into buying their home in an area where they can access some of best performing state schools in London. They have invested heavily in their children’s organised activities too. Their daughter, Aashka (8), goes to piano, Taekwondo, swimming and drama classes every week. She also used to play cricket. Their son, Vineet (6), attends swimming, piano, and Taekwondo lessons every week, and has in the past been to Bollywood dancing and drama classes, which have now been discontinued due to his loss of interest. When I asked Swati why she encourages her children to participate in these organised activities, she described a range of short-​and long-​term benefits that she perceives these activities will bring to her children. Swati and her husband have thought carefully about the activities, and their decision to spend so much of their time, energy, and money in shepherding their children to these classes is undergirded by a wider child-​rearing strategy. She explained further: ‘These activities are just to give them life skills. [In “speech and drama” lessons] they’re teaching them how to talk in public and sort of, you know, pronunciation and that kind of thing. Sometimes schools now can’t provide them with all those skills. So, you need to then find things outside of school for them to do. It’s another way for them to make friends as well. So yeah, just keep them mentally active and … if it’s something that they take up and learn something from then it helps them in the future. Rather than just school and come home, watch TV and go to sleep. … When she [daughter] wins medals in Taekwondo it makes her feel proud that she’s been able to do something. And it’s just to give her skills.’

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As the market logic has become integral to the British school education system, middle-​class parents like Swati and Alpesh have wielded the choice afforded to them by government policies to play the education market at will and select the best-​performing schools for their children. The quality of nearby schools was a key consideration when they bought their home. However, Swati understands that a good schooling experience or academic achievements alone will not ensure a successful career for their children in the future. Even before the COVID-​19 pandemic hit the global economy, structural changes were well underway for the last few decades with old certainties about getting a job-​for-​life upended. Workers in knowledge-​ based economies like Britain must now compete for employment across national borders, within the global context of uneven geographical development, which has created an environment of uncertainty about the job market and career prospects in the coming decades (Mitchell, 2018). To temper these uncertainties and allay any fears of possible downward mobility for the next generation, Swati is among the many middle-​class parents in London who want their children to be equipped with abilities, connections and attitudes that will allow them to flourish in spaces of higher education and future labour market. She accepts that the school alone cannot provide all of these necessary avenues, and she therefore mobilises organised leisure activities as arenas for her children to develop these very qualities. She uses the label of ‘skills’ to identify and think about the embodied learnings from these leisure activities that go over and beyond the know-​how of the practice itself. She uses the example of ‘speech and drama’ classes to illustrate how engaging in these performances week in and week out has made Aashka more articulate and comfortable in public speaking; qualities that she describes as essential ‘life skills’. In this instrumental pursuit of leisure activities, the parents and to some extent the children see themselves emerging as active players in the marketplace of leisure. Swati and Alpesh recognise that a high-​performing school alone will not guarantee future success for their children and therefore they are invested in playing the leisure market with equal dexterity, tailoring their children’s leisure lives by negotiating their own ideas and aspirations with the likes and dislikes of their children. Their approach as parents is centred around their children and driven by visions of the future that they hope their children get to inhabit. They believe that both schooling and leisure hold the key to realising those visions. Echoing Swati’s concerns with confidence and public speaking and further underscoring the role of organised activities in children’s skill development, the IT-​contractor Vikas reflected on his eight-​year-​old daughter Sonam’s regular participation in piano, ukulele, art, and Bollywood and Indian classical dancing lessons in the following manner:

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‘Most important is their self-​confidence. They don’t have stage fear. … They can go and stand; they can present themselves. I want them to learn these basic skills of life than just book knowledge. So, for me that is a very important part.’ Vikas grew up in a middle-​class family in Western India, so did his wife, Divya. His career in the IT industry has taken him to the United States and Japan where he lived for several years before settling down in the UK with his family. They are now naturalised British citizens. Having lived and worked in professional capacities across multiple continents, Vikas appreciates the value of self-​confidence and communication if one is to make it in the professional world. He draws a distinction between ‘book knowledge’ acquired via formal schooling and the embodied competences and dispositions gained through participation in extra-​curricular activities. The stress laid on the latter as a supplement to the former constructs organised leisure as a site for behind-​the-​scenes development of middle-​class cultural and symbolic resources that can be leveraged throughout the life trajectory, especially within institutional contexts, to demonstrate one’s behavioural qualities and professionalism. In their mixed-​method study of elite professions in the UK (such as television, law, journalism, IT and finance), Friedman and Laurison (2019) have shown that employers in these sectors treat candidates’ modes of self-​presentation, communication techniques and body languages as proxies for demonstrable competencies and to assess whether someone will be able to fit in and get along within their organisations where most of the existing employees come from largely middle-​class origin. Vikas’ own experience of navigating these spaces and achieving career success has provided him with a ring-​side-​view of these processes and he thus wants to make sure that Sonam has every opportunity to cultivate and hone these prized traits that academic studies alone will not impart. This, however, does not mean that schoolwork is in any way undervalued. On the contrary, Divya is a trained teacher turned housewife who supervises Sonam’s studies every day and they have also arranged for extra help through weekly private tuition for subjects like English and Maths. Sonam is in the top sets in each subject and is surrounded by successful role models in education: parents who both possess advanced university degrees and an elder sister who passed the 11-​plus examination two years ago to enter a grammar school that has an excellent reputation in the locality. The way leisure-​based parenting strategies are entangled with the wider educational strategy of these parents was made explicit by Sonam’s mother, who told me that she curates her children’s activities with future UCAS applications in mind. UCAS is a UK-​wide undergraduate university application service that enables students to apply to multiple universities through the same online portal. Divya believes that achievements in music and dance, demonstrated through standardised grades, will earn her daughters 47

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additional UCAS points and thus enhance their chances of entering the best universities in the country. Similarly, while talking about her 12-​year-​old daughter’s structured leisure pursuits, Aparna –​who holds an MBA and has worked in both India and Germany before moving to the UK with her husband –​stated: “if you go to interviews, if they see that you’re just an academic, if you don’t have any other hobbies or interests, they don’t really like you.” It is through such simultaneous attention to academic excellence and extra-​curricular achievements that most parents in my study sought to fulfil their parental obligations towards their children. What Swati and Vikas broadly described as life skills were articulated in more specific terms by some of the other parents whom I interviewed. When I asked a similar question about the need for children’s organised leisure activities to Jignesh, a management consultant and the father of Chirag (8) and Anandi (12), he named a range of ‘skills’ that he thinks his children gain by participating in adult-​supervised leisure activities: ‘As parents you feel that they need to learn various things and you send them to these places so they can learn those skills. … Social skills are most important. There is a hope that they will learn to interact with other kids and so on and so forth. That’s one expectation. … But other than that, I think they definitely learn the skills of the sport. They learn how to lose. For example, if you’re dancing, they learn how to dance. If you are playing a sport, they learn … the techniques of playing that sport and so on so forth. … They pick up communication skills as well I believe when they play sports.’ Jignesh’s children take part in an array of paid-​for organised leisure activities including sports coaching. For him, his children’s interaction with other children in these spaces is not an end in itself but a means to shore up social and communication skills besides learning the technical know-​how of the activity itself. These skills, he believes, will put his children in good stead within institutional settings and contribute to their overall development. He does not envisage his children to become profession sportspeople or performers, but he is keen for them to undertake these activities in order to amass coveted ‘skills’ that they can carry with them to other aspects of life such as the job market. As a management consultant who works in the higher echelons of the knowledge economy in a global city like London, Jignesh is acutely aware of the kind of behaviour qualities and aptitudes that are valued by employers in these sectors. In global north economies including Britain, the majority of manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to developing countries and the jobs available here are in the knowledge-​ and service-​based industries where ‘skills’ are hierarchised in terms of their importance and constantly upgraded in tune with changing technological 48

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and economic developments. Against this macro-​economic backdrop, Jignesh views the accumulation of the right variety of skills as the core takeaway of adult-​directed children’s after-school activities. As the child gathers more of these experiences in the structured leisure arena, their skills are also seen to develop cumulatively thus preparing them for life beyond schooling. As middle-​class professionals, who have been successful at higher education and the professional labour market, the Indian diasporic parents I interviewed have a clear sense of how they want to guide their children into academic achievements and high-​earning professional careers. To realise these goals, they not only optimise the economic resources at their disposal, for instance by enrolling their children into paid-​for enrichment activities, but also utilise the confidence they have gained through their own experience as insiders of the middle-​class professional world and play the education and leisure markets at will to get the best outcomes for their children. The language of skills that they deploy to underscore the benefits of adult-​directed organised leisure activities for their children aligns with their work identities and experiences. The identification and evaluation of skills, the qualities and competences that are coveted, are not objective processes but products of social construction (Rigby and Sanchis, 2006). As some sociologists have suggested, the manner in which skills are conceptualised and named as such is itself a process of social construction, and it precedes recognition in job descriptions or qualifications (Hampton and Junor, 2015). These constructions occur today in the context of a knowledge-​ based, highly inter-​connected global economy, where a premium is placed on ‘soft’ skills such the ones the parents in my study identified. These soft skills correspond to various qualities and behaviours that get ascribed as skills, and they are often separate from ‘achieved skills’, which are evidenced through qualifications and certificates (Warhurst et al, 2017). The ideal worker in today’s economy is one who is adept at developing and honing these ‘soft’ skills in sync with the changing demands of the global market (Sennett, 2006). Warhurst et al (2017: 73) argue that with the decline of manufacturing industries and the weaking of labour unions, ‘skills’ centre of gravity’ in economies like Britain has shifted towards informal or soft skills where consumers, credentialers (particularly universities) and employers get to define these skills. In this labour market flexibility is the key, one must be able to ‘nimbly leap between skills and across spaces to capture the open position in the global economy’ and those who cannot make this leap are left behind (Mitchell, 2018: 4). Indeed, in his research with final-​ year undergraduate students in the UK, Tomlinson (2008) found that as these students looked ahead to a competitive graduate labour market, they recognised the salient role of academic credentials but equally stressed the need to add value to their degrees by acquiring ‘soft credentials’ through extra-​curricular pathways. State policy too lays emphasis on training of 49

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‘human capital’ and ‘soft’ skills. A UK government report specifically implored workers to develop their ‘mental capital’ to remain competitive in the global market, the preparation for which ‘will need to start early in life’ (Government Office for Science, 2008: 11). Echoing this discourse of soft skills that need to be fostered from early on in life, the middle-​class British Indian parents who participated in my research were eager for their children to embark on this journey of acquiring soft skills alongside academic credentials; that is to a suite of both achieved and ascribed skills. Those born in India, who had migrated to the UK had done so under an immigration regime where they were recognised as ‘skilled workers’ and thus deemed eligible to settle in the country. Their migration to the UK was wholly dependent on their ‘skills’ profile or to be more precise, on the ability of the government and the employers to designate certain forms of knowledge, abilities and competencies as ‘high’ skills that are in demand in the country and which make those who embody these skills eligible to live and work in the UK. On the other hand, the UK-​born parents, who have experienced upward social mobility within their lifetime, know all too well the importance of soft skills and relevant behavioural traits in professional circles. Skills is therefore a political concept that organises work and work relations, sorting some workers as skilled and others as ‘unskilled’, which has wider implications in terms of jobs, earnings and the capacity to move across national borders with ease, dignity and rights (see Iskander, 2021). The parental narratives presented in this section expand our existing understanding of the role of children’s organised activities in middle-​class parenting ideologies. In her influential work on social class and parenting, Lareau (2011: 64) concluded that ‘the close fit between skills children learn in soccer games or at piano recitals and those they will eventually need in white-​ collar professional or technical positions goes unnoted’ by middle-​class parents who took part in her study. In contrast, the middle-​class British Indian parents in my study were not only critically aware of these ‘skills’ and their direct link to children’s future professional careers, but it is precisely the importance of these ‘skills’ and the role they can play in their children’s future careers that make children’s organised leisure participation important for these parents. The way neoliberalisation of the global economy and professional job market has further intensified in the intervening years between Lareau’s study and mine, coupled by the ‘new social construction of skills’ (Warhurst et al, 2017) it has engendered partly explains this shift. The rest, however, has to do with the social and geographical mobilities that parents in my study have experienced mostly on account of their own skills profile as well as the unique classed and racial position that they occupy. As Claytor (2020) and Meghji (2019) have shown, racialised middle-​class professionals often have to work twice as hard as their white counterparts to gain recognition for their credentials, and 50

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their success is often dependent on their ability to manoeuvre majority white spaces effectively and curate their work identities in ways that offset the stigma often attached to their racial identity in a society that centres whiteness. It is the combination of these factors that undergirds middle-​class British Indian parents’ efforts at cultivating soft skills in their children through leisure which, they know all too well from their own experiences, are indispensable to career success in the knowledge-based economy. While these parents were quick to articulate the benefits of children’s organised activities in terms of soft skills, the latter cloaked the vital role these leisure pursuits play in shoring up dominant species of cultural capital. Activities such as piano, speech and drama, sport and ballroom dancing provide embodied cultural resources that are highly valued in the wider, white-​majority British society. Cultural capital augmented in this way contributes directly to the class position and status of these families and provides these children with tools to demonstrate their social standing and fit into white majority settings such as elite universities and workplaces. Unlike economic capital which depletes with use, cultural capital increases when it is leveraged. Moreover, economic capital can be invested to shore up cultural capital further. These transaction of class resources are visible in the leisure choices made by the parents I interviewed and the fervour with which they went about shaping their children’s after-​school leisure schedules. Although these parents did not encode the activities they chose for their children as ‘white’, it will be remiss to adopt a colour-​blind approach to our understanding of cultural capital as they play out in this context especially since ‘cultural capital is always already a racialised construct’ (Wallace, 2019: 159). Dominant forms of cultural capital in British society have historically been the reserve of white upper and middle classes, and grasp of these cultural resources is still of paramount importance if one is to garner acceptance and recognition within professional spaces that are dominated by these very social groups. Indeed, Reeves and de Vries’ (2019) analysis of data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, a large-​scale individual level panel survey conducted across Britain, reveal that people who consume wide ranging cultural activities are more likely than others to gain higher earnings in the future, be promoted within their organisation and be upwardly socially mobile. In tune with the wider strategy of cultural flexibility exemplified by middle-​class British Indians, the parents I spoke to marshalled children’s organised leisure as sites not only to foster dominant forms of cultural capital but also to channel specific cultural mores linked to their ethnic and familial fields. In this regard, the parents in my study mobilised their children’s organised leisure to drive their children’s ethnic and racial socialisation, by transmitting ‘ethnic cultural capital’ (Lan, 2018) through leisure and by using leisure spaces to mount anti-​racist strategies as I will now demonstrate. 51

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Children’s ethnic and racial socialisation through organised leisure Transmission of ethnic cultural capital through organised leisure When I asked parents in my study about their children’s organised leisure schedule and the importance they attach to specific activities, they often spoke at length about the intimate links that bind certain organised activities to their Indian cultural heritage and family traditions. These narratives become even more salient when seen in the wider context of the UK school education system, which offers hardly any avenues for children from these minoritised diasporic families to appreciate their own cultural heritage. The only exception is the subject of Religious Studies, which offers children a cursory understanding of their religious backgrounds, but the schools that children in my study attended did not have any provision for the teaching of Indian heritage languages. Moreover, the curriculum has little to say about Indian, British Indian or colonial history, as others have well documented (see Heath, 2016). Where the curriculum fails to offer any substantive pathways for these children to learn about their communities of origin, develop a positive ethnic identity and celebrate their distinctive cultural practices, the parents took it upon themselves and mustered the resources at their disposal to provide their children with these opportunities. Organised leisure is a popular avenue among these parents to expose their children to activities that in their perception bear historical associations with their Indian identity. The supposed benefits of this set of activities have little to do with the cultivation of desired white-​collar skills that will put their children in good stead in the labour market (Lareau, 2011). Rather, it is believed that a diet of these activities will drive ethnic and racial socialisation of children as they amass embodied knowledge of arts, languages and sports that are anchored in the histories and cultural legacies of India. Ethnic and racial socialisation refers to the ways in which children learn about their own racial and ethnic identities and family histories, grapple with racial and ethnic differences around them, and come to comprehend processes of racialisation and racism (Barn, 2013; Hughes, 2003). Mother of two and telecommunications professional Paramjit grew up in a London council estate in a Sikh family where Punjabi was the predominant household language. It was in Punjabi that she spoke to her parents, her siblings and wider kin networks spread across the UK and India. She fondly remembers listening to holy scriptures recited in Punjabi by her mother and grandmother. Her London-​born husband, Jaswinder, also comes from a similar Sikh background and as a child spoke Punjabi with relative ease. However, in their family home in Greater London today they speak in English with some occasional usage of Punjabi words or phrases, mostly on account of their children who struggle with Punjabi. Since Paramjit and Jaswinder went to university and then made their way through professional 52

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circles across London, they lost touch with Punjabi. More recently, Paramjit has realised that her children are losing out on their community language and by extension the links to their Punjabi and Sikh cultural roots. As we sat down to talk at the dining table on a Saturday morning, Paramjit told me about her decision to enrol her elder daughter Jasleen, age eight, into Punjabi language lessons, which she is scheduled to start in a few weeks. She has similar plans drawn up for her son Akash, who is a year younger than Jasleen. This will involve her driving Jasleen to a Gurdwara (Sikh temple) a few miles away and thus create more work for her. With her husband travelling for work to Europe for multiple days a week, Paramjit already shoulders the majority of childcare and housework but she is happy to add this new activity to her schedule in the hope that this will enable her daughter to develop a positive appreciation of her Punjabi–​Sikh cultural heritage: ‘It’s a nice skill to have because then she can speak … with the family [in Punjabi]. In this class they not only learn about the language they also learn about the culture, the Sikh history. And I don’t even know half of it to teach her myself.’ It is the link between the Punjabi language and the Sikh religion on one hand and the importance of that language for communicating with transnational kin networks on the other that Paramjit celebrates. She believes that picking up Punjabi language ‘skills’ will help Jasleen connect to her religion better. Moreover, knowledge of Punjabi is seen to enhance Jasleen’s ability to interact with family members, including grandparents who have limited command over English and prefer to speak in Punjabi. Most other parents in the study too highlighted these links between heritage language acquisition and communication with grandparents or relatives, as well as the association between heritage language and religion. Paramjit, however, feels unable to teach Punjabi to Jasleen herself and this is further compounded by the fact that like most other schools, Jasleen’s school –​a private preparatory school a few miles down the road –​does not have provisions for Punjabi lessons within the school curriculum. Therefore, experiences of child-​rearing prompted Paramjit to look into her Punjabi–​Sikh identity with a renewed interest as she wanted her daughter to grow up with an awareness of her cultural heritage. Paramjit therefore decided to send Jasleen to Punjabi language lessons as an enrichment activity with the hope that her daughter will come to love the language and continue with the lessons. Several other Indian parents who took part in my project explored opportunities for their children to learn their heritage language through after-​school or weekend classes. However, the options available to these parents were shaped by a number of historical factors. First, certain Indian communities such as Sikhs from Punjab, and Hindus from Punjab, Gujarat 53

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and other northern Indian states have a longer history of settlement in post-​war Britain and in bigger numbers than other regional and religious groups from India. Consequently, greater number of cultural and religious spaces have been built by these Indian groups than others over the last six decades. This means that there are more opportunities for in-person children’s Punjabi, Hindi, Sanskrit and Gujarati lessons, run mostly in places in worship and community centres, than in-person classes for other regional languages from India spoken by communities with historically smaller numerical presence in Britain. In pre-COVID times, when I conducted fieldwork, in-person classes were the taken-for-granted norm. Second, even though London has many such language classes for children, they are not always within commuting distance for the families I studied. Third, as we shall explore in greater detail in the next chapter, some children who did attend heritage language lessons lost interest and dropped out, which underscores their agency in shaping their own leisure schedule and the way their opinions inflect parental decision-​making in this context. Thus, parents had to work through these issues as they attempted to pass down their community language to their children through extra-​curricular routes. In one family I studied, both parents were Malayali Hindus but given their sub-national/linguistic community’s scattered presence and historically smaller numbers in the UK, there are not many Malayalam language classes where they could send their daughter. Instead, the only Indian language lesson within commuting distance of their home in Greater London was that of Sanskrit, a language that neither of them knew. Nonetheless, they decided to send their child to Sanskrit lessons because of its intimate links with Hindu scriptures and history. The mother of this child explained that in Sanskrit class “they talk about Indian culture and all our stories” and the textbooks are “all about Krishna stories”, letting her daughter learn about Krishna, the Hindu God, and about Indian cultural practices. Just as learning Punjabi is seen by Paramjit to help Jasleen find out more about her ethnic-​ religious background and its history, here too heritage language is aligned with questions of religious identity and cultural roots. Besides heritage languages, parents regularly made references to Bollywood –​a term used to describe the mainstream, Mumbai (erstwhile Bombay) based, Hindi-​language film industry in India –​as an emblem of Indian cultural productions. Bollywood music is popular across participating families and watching Hindi films together constitutes a big part of shared leisure experiences in these families. Alongside the family pursuit of watching Hindi films together, organised children’s activities such as Bollywood and Indian classical dancing were much sought-​after by the parents I interviewed. Mahesh –​an IT project manager based in Greater London –​posited his daughter’s participation in Indian classical dancing lessons as part of his family tradition. He is married to Nisha, who teaches at a local school. They migrated 54

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to the UK more than 13 years ago on account of Mahesh’s job. After a few years of not working outside the home, Nisha found the teaching post she is currently in. They have two daughters: Ankita (16) and Saumya (9), and all four of them are now British citizens. When I visited them in their family home, I found myself in their living room where I interviewed Mahesh, his wife and their younger daughter. As I sat on the sofa, there stood behind me in the corner a metal statue of the Hindu goddess Krishna wrapped in transparent plastic film –​presumably to prevent the accumulation of dust –​ and on the other end was a tall, traditional south Indian brass oil lamp, both of which have been shipped from India. In front was placed a wooden table facing an LED television set and above it a clock brought from Kerala, which had the face of a Kathakali (a classical dance-​drama genre popular in Kerala) performer’s face engraved beneath the dial. The room also housed a Christmas tree, teeming with baubles, tinsels, an assortment of decorative pieces and a star on top. In the company of these diverse cultural artefacts, Mahesh reflected on the way he has kept alive his Keralite family tradition in Britain, ‘In my family’s side and Nisha’s family’s side, the kids start Bharatnatyam [a South Indian classical dance form] at a young age. So, the expectation, if you like, is that a girl child will start Bharatnatyam at an early age. And if you get an opportunity [to do Bharatnatyam] here in the UK, then why not? … She shouldn’t be at a disadvantage because she’s not in India. And if that opportunity is readily available here then why not expose the child to that and see if she has interest in it.’ Mahesh and Nisha have found a local Indian dance instructor for Saumya, who now goes for a weekly hour-​long dance lesson where she receives training in both Bharatnatyam and Bollywood dancing. In the aforementioned quote, Mahesh foregrounds gender in articulating the link between his cultural heritage and his daughter’s enrolment in Bharatnatyam lessons. Bharatnatyam owes its origin to the temple dance of ‘sadir’ from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where until the 1920s this dance form was the exclusive reserve of devadasis or hereditary courtesans affiliated to Hindu shrines (Gaston, 2005). After the devadasi system was banned in 1947, this dance form was delinked from its ritual function in temples, rebranded as ‘Bharatnatyam’ and began to be performed by urban, educated women (Srinivasan, 1985; Gaston, 2005). The social background of the new practitioners was seen to ‘purify’ the dance and make it a respectable form of classical art that middle-​class, upper-​caste families in India like Mahesh’s came to embrace and where it is still practised largely by women (Srinivasan, 1985). Bharatnatyam has since spread across India and its global diaspora, becoming synonymous with Indian culture and performing arts 55

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(see O’Shea, 2007). This historical trajectory of Bharatnatyam reveals how ‘traditions’ that are understood to be deeply rooted in ethnic identities are not ‘timeless’ but are subject to social change and are historically constituted by the cross currents of class, caste, and gender. The raison d’être that Mahesh provides for encouraging his daughter to take up Bharatnatyam as an after-​school activity reveals yet another dimension of British Indian middle-​class parenting. Mahesh, much like other India-​ born parents in my study, takes his own childhood experiences in India as well as the leisure opportunities that are available to urban middle-​class children in India today as his points of reference as he engineers his daughter’s leisure schedule in a way that she does not lose out on certain activities only “because she’s not in India”. This articulation of cultural belonging in continual dialogue with that part of their British Indian identity that is far away qualitatively marks India-​born parents apart from their UK-​born counterparts since the latter grew up in the UK and do not have access to this kind of lived experience of India. The UK-​born parents nurture their transnational links to India through consumption of Indian popular culture and periodic visits to the country, and they carry a positive sense of their Indian ethnic identity, but when it comes to their racial parenting strategy they draw largely from their own British Indian childhood as well as the extended ethnic networks that they have developed within the UK through their own parents and kin groups. Cricket came up time and again during my interviews with parents as a sport tethered to their sense of belonging as Indians. While discussing his children’s everyday organised leisure repertoire, Jignesh remarked that he is especially enthusiastic about his 12-​year-​old son’s cricket training because he considers it to be a part of his cultural heritage: ‘India is a country of cricket so naturally, you know, I’m following cricket day-​in day-​out, whenever India plays. So, as my son is growing up, he is watching his dad follow cricket. And that’s coming from our Indian cultural background. … And he is quite competitive in cricket. I mean he has done well so he gets recommended for the club cricket for that age group.’ West L ​ ondon based and India-​born management consultant Jignesh, whom we have met earlier in this chapter, offers a window into how certain sport and leisure activities function within these middle-​class British Indian families as dominant cultural contexts for racial and classed fathering practices. He has played a key role in introducing cricket to his son, and he equally encouraged his daughter to take up cricket but she refused to carry on with the training. Situating cricket within the discourse of “our Indian cultural background” and describing India as a “country of cricket” are particularly 56

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telling since the game of cricket was introduced to India by the British during colonial rule. The fact that Jignesh considers cricket to be an integral part of his Indian ‘cultural background’ gestures towards the decolonisation and re-​appropriation of cricket in India and its diaspora (Appadurai, 1996). A wealth of ethnographic literature (Fletcher, 2012; Raman, 2015; Fletcher and Swain, 2016) has over the years shown that cricket is a key component in the leisure lives of South Asian diasporic communities in the UK, especially among British South Asian men. Some scholars have even gone to the extent of claiming that the game of cricket is the one thing that ensures the continuity of the Indian ethnic identity in the global Indian diaspora (Devan, 2012). British South Asians’ fondness of cricket in turn has driven the infamous Tebbit-​test. In 1990, the Conservative politician Norman Tebbit argued that if British South Asians supported their country of origin while watching a cricket match between England and that country, then they were not fully ‘integrated’ into British society (Yuval-​Davis, 2007). Tebbit’s cricket ‘test’ of national loyalty resurfaced during the Cricket World Cup in 2019 –​which was held in England and Wales –​where the India versus England match saw large numbers of UK-​born British Indian spectators support the Indian team (Pandey, 2019). Jignesh supports India in cricket matches and holds a British citizenship; far from being contradictory this demonstrates that his sense of national belonging is ‘multi-​layered’ (Yuval-​ Davis, 1999). The link that India-​born Jignesh draws between his fathering and his self-​described Indian ‘cultural background’ of cricket underlines one of the many ways in which racial parenting is undertaken within children’s organised leisure spaces. Parental anxieties over child-​rearing in the diaspora, especially on account of limited or no support structures and little external opportunity to expose children to their ethnic and familial cultural repertoire, has been documented among Indian communities across North America and Britain (see Barn, 2008; Bhatt, 2018). Indeed, these concerns resonate with the experiences of many other migrant and diasporic groups. Building on these insights, in this chapter, I have captured how anxieties about inter-​generational cultural reproduction in the diaspora propel parents into action and prompt them to mount specific organised race-​conscious leisure strategies through which their children are exposed to practices and traditions linked to their ethnic and familial fields in the hope that they will come to embody these values and cultural knowledge. In both Mahesh’s and Jignesh’s narratives, gender informed the way they pursued specific leisure pathways for their children to inculcate embodied cultural knowledge and take their family traditions forward. While in Mahesh’s case Indian dance forms such as Bharatnatyam are projected as an exclusively girl-​tradition within the family, Jignesh’s account highlighted how disposition towards sports such as cricket are cultivated among 57

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boys by the dedicated labour of racial fathering practices. The historical trajectories of Bharatnatyam, the way British colonial imports like cricket have been re-​appropriated and transformed in India, and the manner in which Sanskrit lessons are mobilised by a Malayalee family in Britain for cultural reproduction further illustrate the fact that ethnic identities and the cultural practices associated with them are not primordial or static entities but context-​dependent processes with their meanings open to re-​inscription. They also illuminate the internal heterogeneities within the diaspora. This dynamism is not fully captured by the concept of ‘ethnic capital’ that has been developed both in the United States and in Britain in relation to racialised minorities (Zhou, 2009; Modood, 2004) to denote social-​cultural resources that vary both in degree and kind across ethnic groups. It runs the risk of constructing ethnic groups as homogenous and overlooks power relations within. Instead, I argue that Lan’s (2018) conceptualisation of ‘ethnic cultural capital’ offers a more productive lens into the mechanisms of diasporic cultural (re)production through children’s after-​school leisure that I found among middle-​class British Indian families. For Lan (2018: 127), ‘ethnic cultural capital’ involves ‘a dynamics process of cultural negotiation in which immigrant parents selectively mobilise their cultural heritages and sometimes mix and match it with values and practices in the new country’. In a similar vein, Purkayastha (2005: 88) writes about how South Asian diasporic families in the United States selectively emphasise certain versions or elements of their ethnic-​national identities that are more meaningful to them as if they are picking from a ‘shopping cart of ethnic understandings and practices’ and then work out how these chosen aspects of their ethnic culture can contribute to their fit not only within their transnational family fields but also in relation to the US society at large. Notwithstanding the contingency of what is branded as ‘Indian culture’ and its refashioning in diasporic contexts, these cultural practices continue to be marginalised and stigmatised in the wider British society structured by whiteness and racism as I shall explore in the following section. Situated within this wider negotiation around ethnic boundaries, understandings, and practices prevalent in the Indian diaspora, the middle-​class professional parents in my study handpicked activities to transmit ethnic cultural capital to their children. These ethnically coded tastes and understandings provided children with a shared pool of cultural resources to interact with their transnational family and forge social bonds with other British Indians. Besides transference of ethnic cultural capital, after-​school activities drive another key aspect of ethnic and racial socialisation. Many of the families I researched confronted processes of racialisation and racism within children’s organised leisure spaces, and these encounters triggered conversations between parents and children around race and racism. 58

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(Anti)Racism and organised leisure Middle-​class British Indians occupy a fraught intersection of social class and race. They possess a range of material and symbolic class privileges characterised by secure well-​paid professional jobs, comfortable lifestyles and property ownership. On top of this, they have access to valued middle-​ class cultural capital including university credentials, social connections with other middle-​class professionals and the confidence that comes from being successful in education and professional careers. Despite enjoying the benefits of these class resources, these families are at the receiving end of a racial hierarchy that bestows unfair social advantages and status on the white majority population, in particular the white middle and upper classes. We know from existing research that processes of racialisation and racism severely constrain many racialised minority subjects’ educational pathways and their access to job markets, housing and healthcare to name a few (see Byrne et al, 2020). The fact that these racialised minority parents have been successful at making it in their professional careers does not mean that they have been untouched by institutional racism that continues to structure social and economic life in Britain in profound ways. Structural racism inflects and shapes these racialised minority families’ everyday lives, including their children’s leisure lives. From my interactions with British Indian families and community leaders, it became clear that understandings of racism were qualitatively different between the UK-​born and India-​born parents that took part in my research. For those parents who have themselves had a British Indian childhood, growing up in lower-​middle-​and working-​class households in Thatcherite Britain, overt forms of racism were part of daily life. Many of them recounted racist bullying and name calling that they faced on a regular basis from peers in the playground, on the street and at school often with the acquiescence of teachers. They also highlighted the ways they challenged racism whenever they could, and how their generation of racialised minority youth fought back against institutional racism heralding some degree of positive social change. The India-​born parents who migrated to the UK as adults, either to take up a new job or to accompany their spouses, grew up in middle-​class and upper-​caste families in urban India and benefitted from the social advantages that came with such relatively privileged social locations. However, through migration they found themselves lodged within a racial hierarchy and were re-​positioned as racialised minority subjects in 21st-​century Britain. These lived experiences and trajectories are vital in understanding how race and racism play out vis-​à-​vis these parents’ leisure-​ based child-​rearing ideologies. Experiences of racism both within and beyond children’s leisure spaces prompted parent–​child conversations around racial and ethnic identities and often motivated parents to re-​appropriate certain enrichment opportunities 59

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as vehicles for resisting racism. While racism is structural and endemic, woven into the fabric of social institutions and processes, their overt manifestations and the varied lived experiences of racialisation and exclusion directly impacted the way these racialised middle-​class parents undertook their children’s enrichment through after-​school lessons. The first time I met Maya, an account executive and mother of two, she had just come home after picking up her children from their after-​school activities. Her husband, Jayant, is the pan-​Europe head of sales for a UK-​ based company. It is a roving role, and he is out of the country for a few days every week. It therefore falls on Maya to pick up all the housework and the management of their children’s school and leisure schedules. It was a weekday evening when I visited their family home, and after I had interviewed her children it was time for them to drive off again. This time the destination was her 12-​year-​old son Rohit’s Taekwondo class. As Rohit stood by the front door fixing his white belt over his white dobok (Taekwondo uniform), Maya picked up the car keys and called out to her daughter to put on her shoes. Within the next few minutes, they were in their car setting off for a 15-​minute drive to the Taekwondo instructor’s place. The next time I saw Maya a few weeks later, I asked her about these Taekwondo lessons and what she hopes Rohit will gain by learning this Korean martial art form. She responded by saying: ‘It’s [Taekwondo] just for self-​defence I feel it’s very important here. I think every child should learn self-​defence here. … In school there is a lot of bullying. It’s better they learn to protect themselves. … Main thing is it’s because of … racism. My son has faced it. … They [white children at school] used to tease him because of his accent and then he has to talk in this UK accent. Like how I’m talking. I’m talking in a normal Indian accent. What I learned I’m talking. I cannot change my accent for others. But my kids they do have to. When he talks with me it’s a different accent, when he talks with his classmates it’s a different accent. When he spoke in an Indian accent, they used to call him, what’s the word, freshy.’ Maya grew up in a Hindu Brahmin Tamil family in Mumbai, India and migrated to the UK six years ago because of Jayant’s job. In deciding to enrol Rohit into Taekwondo lessons, she was driven by Rohit’s experiences of racism in primary school. Rohit was born in India and came to the UK with his parents at the age of six and resumed his studies in Year 2 at a local state primary school at the edge of London where they currently live. He experienced verbal racist bullying at school on account of his Indian English accent. And he is not alone. Another parent in the study, Vikas reported that his elder daughter, Ekta, who is now 13, faced similar bullying 60

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at primary school because of her Indian accent when she first moved to Britain with her parents six years ago. In response to the instances of racist bullying, Maya further revealed, Rohit has come up with the strategy of accent-​switching. His Indian English accent helps him connect with his family and transnational kin networks, while his acquired ability to talk in a British accent helps him to counter the marginalisation he faced in school and fit in with the others. To equip him further with the ability to physically defend himself in case he is subjected to physical acts of racist violence, Maya considers it necessary that he learns martial arts as a structured leisure activity. While between 6 per cent and 7 per cent of all school-​aged children in England attend martial arts and boxing lessons respectively (Sport England, 2018), the majority of British Indian parents in my study had at least one child who trained in martial arts or combat sports through after-​school lessons. Although it is impossible to draw any inference from these numbers alone, especially from a small-​scale qualitative study, the parental narratives of self-​defence that envelop these figures are noteworthy. Maya’s case illuminates how experiences of everyday racism are channelled into the choices made by racialised middle-​class parents about their children’s organised leisure repertoire and the way some of these activities are specifically chosen as tools for combatting racism. While Rohit is building up his bodily capacities so as to defend himself in any potential future encounter with racist violence, he is also using accent-​switching in the here and now as a means to mitigate bullying and harassment at school. For parents who have grown up in the UK, their own childhood experiences of racism in leisure spaces coupled with those of their children infused their current leisure-​based parenting ideologies. Jyoti grew up in London in a Hindu Punjabi family and growing up she had several cousins who were a few minutes’ walk away and whom she refers to as ‘cousin sisters’ drawing on Indian kinship terms. She spent a lot of time playing and hanging out with her cousins. During my interview with her, she recalled her experiences of going to a local park as a six-​year-​old with her cousins and being beaten up by a 12-​year-​old white boy named Darren and his older brother Pete. These boys would not let them go up and down the slides, and generally terrorised them with racist language, verbal threats and physical assaults. These experiences have stayed with Jyoti who now has two sons: Ankit (12) and Vishal (15). While reflecting on Ankit’s interest in football and his membership of the local football club, she described some of the racist experiences he has had: ‘He [Ankit] plays football for Flowerfields Town. They’re all [white] English. And in the beginning, I was a bit like “I’m not sure, you’re the only Indian playing, what if they’re horrible to you?” But to be honest they had a football match once and somebody called my son 61

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a “Paki” and all his English team including the coach, they all stuck up for my son.’ Jyoti’s childhood experiences of racism especially in parks and playgrounds, as illustrated by the story about Darren and Pete, imbue her decision-​ making as a parent today. When Ankit wanted to join the local football team, which comprised of only white British boys, she was apprehensive whether her son would be safe in an all-​white environment. Reassured by the coach and the team’s inclusive values, she let her son play in that team. However, in one match with a visiting team, a white boy called Ankit a ‘Paki’ –​a racial slur that has historically been used against South Asians in Britain. In response, his white teammates and coach rallied around him and supported him. The support he received does not override the persistent presence of similar racial slurs and harassments that racialised minority players are often subjected to on football pitches across Britain (see Lawrence and Davis, 2019). The charity ‘Kick It Out’ (2020), which campaigns against racism and exclusion in English football, in its 2018/​19 report states that racism continues to be the most common form of discrimination in both professional and grassroots football accounting for more than 65 per cent of the incidents reported to them. Another UK-​born parent, Manoj, reported a similar incident involving his 11-​year-​old son Suraj, ‘At a recent football game, I think there was an issue … it was actually the boys from our school [who] said the P word. … Which was very peculiar because it’s a very small school, half of our team were Indians. So, it was very peculiar. The teachers dealt with it. They called the parents in, of the boy who said the word.’ Since the 1960s, the P word (‘Paki’) and the notion of ‘doing a Paki’ became resonant themes in Britain, which translated into a wave of racially motivated violence against South Asian children in school playgrounds and in the neighbourhood (see Troyna and Hatcher, 1992). Manoj had endured years of racist bullying in school playgrounds, but he thinks that racism has declined substantially in recent years because his generation of British South Asians challenged racism and spearheaded anti-​racist struggles (see Nijjar, 2019). Nevertheless, the recurrence of racial slurs in children’s football matches as demonstrated by Jyoti’s and Manoj’s testimonies indicate how those changes have been accompanied by patterns of continuity. We know that despite considerable involvement at amateur level, British South Asians are significantly under-​represented in English professional football. There are only ten South Asian professional footballers in England out of a total of around four thousand players, and only one British South Asian out of 522 62

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senior football coaches is the country (Kilvington, 2019). In addressing this issue, researchers have repeatedly drawn attention to the fact that professional football in England remains a predominantly white institution where the prevailing narrative that football is ‘colour-​blind’ and meritocratic only serves to reinforce racial disadvantages (Cleland and Cashmore, 2014; Lawrence and Davis, 2019). Explicit as well as concealed forms of racism coupled with lack of opportunity structures create significant barriers for British South Asians to participate in professional football (Kilvington, 2019). Many British South Asians report that they are often made to feel like ‘outsiders’ within the realm of football management and administration, with their football knowledge questioned and these negative experiences alongside lack of representation cement the perception that there are no careers in football for British South Asians (Lawrence et al, 2022). Lareau (2011) argued that middle-​class African American families’ experiences of everyday racism were only incidental to the way cultural logics of parenting played out in those families. However, the narratives of middle-​class British Indians’ leisure-​based parenting strategies reveal that experiences of racism such as the ones recounted by Maya, Manoj and Jyoti are not incidental but formative to the urgency they felt in investing in the concerted cultivation of their children in a manner that their children develop a positive racial and ethnic identity. Such incidents also prompted conversations with children around race and racism. These parental narratives point to what Delale-​O’Connor et al (2020: 1915) describe as ‘purposeful, race-​conscious ways’ of approaching and practising concerted cultivation of children. Moreover, as evident from his interview extract, Manoj found it ‘peculiar’ that children who are friends in school would resort to the use of racist slurs in leisure spaces. Seeming contradictions like these are indicative of the complex nature of racisms faced by racialised minority children notwithstanding their class privileges. As Cohen (1988: 83) argues, many white British youth ‘experience no sense of contradiction in wearing dreadlocks … and going to reggae concerts whilst continuing to assert that “Pakis stink” ’. More recently, Back and Sinha (2016) have pointed to the paradoxical co-​existence of racism and multi-​ethnic conviviality in London. These split perceptions are increasingly becoming the norm, which makes context-​bound expressions of racism hard to get to grips with (Cohen, 1988). These episodes also underline the structural nature of racism and its presence within children’s organised leisure geographies. Further, both Jyoti and Manoj referred to the support that their sons received from white peers and teachers respectively –​which reinforces the need for allyship and support structures as well as robust anti-​discrimination policies so that these cases can be promptly dealt with. These instances as I have already argued are symptomatic of wider, more structural malaise that require continual attention and transformational change. 63

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Rethinking concerted cultivation Professional middle-​c lass British Indian parents see their parenting responsibility as one of steering the rounded development of their children, with an eye to their entry into higher education and the labour market in the future. Their experiences of social and/​or geographical mobility as well as educational success coupled with their current structural location of simultaneous economic privilege and racial disadvantage imbue the urgency they feel in making sure that their children are equipped with the behavioural competencies, social connections and embodied skills they would require to navigate white-​majority, middle-​class spaces and achieve career success. Both education and after-​school activities are seen to complement each other in this process and are thus accorded immense significance within these families. In this sense, the parents I spoke to embody the ideology of ‘concerted cultivation’ that Lareau (2011) has written about. However, the parental narratives I have presented here refine and develop Lareau’s framework in important ways and take the sociological debate around leisure-​based parenting and social inequality to new substantive directions by foregrounding the intersectional dynamics of social class and race. Their own experiences of educational and career success, and the material privileges they currently enjoy have given the parents who participated in my study the confidence and wherewithal to play the children’s leisure market at will and handpick after-​school activities. While others have commented on the widespread practice among the middle classes of enrolling their children into a plethora of extra-​curricular lessons (Lareau, 2011; Vincent and Ball, 2007; Reay, 2017; Wheeler, 2018; Wheeler and Green, 2019) they have paid little attention to the sorting of the available choices and the differential meanings that parents attach to each. Although hardly ever articulated in these terms, the suite of activities children in these families go to fall into two overlapping sets vis-​à-​vis their perceived benefits. One set of activities are meant to cultivate embodied soft or ‘ascribed’ skills in the child, which when further developed will help them fit into white majority middle-​class institutional settings and progress in their careers. This set of activities, I argue, augment dominant species of cultural capital among participating children. The other is composed of activities that are linked to their Indian diasporic and familial fields. These are mobilised for ethnic and racial socialisation of children, either through the transmission of ethnic cultural capital or by their deployment in combating racism. The sorting of these activities and the reasons for their incorporation into children’s everyday lives demonstrate that concerted cultivated bear both classed and racial connotations The commercial leisure industry in Britain has expanded massively with scores of leisure centres and service provisions available to urban middle-​ class families. The families I interacted with used a range of these available 64

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options, from children’s swimming classes held at commercial leisure centres to self-​employed piano and guitar instructors who came round to give one-​ to-​one lessons. Other activities, such as Indian language and performing arts lessons, have also developed either within community settings such as places of worship or in the houses of instructors. This vast constellation of organised adult-​directed leisure activities defines British Indian middle-​class childhoods and parenthoods. For parents, these two sets of activities combine to produce cultural flexibility in children who continually move across racial boundaries at school and in the neighbourhood and are envisaged to enter professional jobs dominated by white middle-​class people. Therefore, the parents I interviewed considered it an overall advantage for their children to possess both the dominant forms of cultural capital and their ethnic cultural capital. There is now growing evidence that a greater volume of cultural consumption and knowledge beyond those conventionally considered ‘highbrow’ or ‘legitimate’ can improve one’s social standing and reap economic rewards in terms of getting hired and promoted (Reeves and de Vries, 2019). Furthermore, ethnic cultural capital, such as knowledge of Indian languages, can unlock future professional opportunities for these children in a global economy where the rise of India and China are increasingly noted. Therefore, the ethnic cultural capital amassed by these children through leisure activities can accrue economic and even career benefits in ways that parents themselves may not necessarily be fully aware of. Building on these insights, I argue that this race-​conscious approach to middle-​class concerted cultivation through children’s organised activities is embedded in the ‘moral rationalities’ (Duncan, 2005) of child-​rearing among the parents who took part in my project –​it is moral in the sense that these parental actions are framed as the right thing to do for the child’s holistic development and future prospects and it constitutes a rationality by providing a framework for parental decision-​making. However, these are only parental perspectives and experiences, and they tell us nothing about how children understand and live these leisure schedules. Seeing these children solely as representatives of the ‘back-​seat generation’ (Karsten, 2005) puts them into a passive role as if they are moulded solely by parents’ ideas and values. It takes away the opportunity of hearing their side of the story, to discern whether the meanings they construct around these activities coincide with or clash against those of their parents. In the chapter that follows, I will turn my attention to the way these activities play out within children’s lived worlds and how children contribute to the making and unmaking of their own organised leisure schedules.

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The Fun, the Boring and the Racist Name Calling: How Children Make Sense of Their Leisure Geographies “I actually feel quite lucky because most children don’t get to go to activities because they are poor; so, I am happy that I get to learn,” eight-​year-​old Anandi paused and said while talking to me about her assorted leisure pursuits. She attends a state primary school in a middle-​class neighbourhood in West London where she lives with her parents (her mother is a medical doctor and her father, a management consultant) and her brother Chirag, who is four years her elder. On most weekdays after school, she takes part in speech and drama, swimming, and yoga lessons that are privately organised either in the school premises or in the nearby leisure centre. For her, it is all about ‘making new friends’ and getting to ‘learn new things’. In addition, she is fond of drawing in her spare time, playing badminton with her elder brother in their back garden and playing with her teddy bears before going to sleep. Encased in her enjoyment of these activities lies an awareness of how fortunate she is to have access to these opportunities that are simply not available to many children growing up both in her own city of London and in Ahmedabad, the city her parents grew up in and which she visits every summer, who cannot afford these activities. She is grateful that she is among those who can indulge in paid-​for activities and toys, make new friends and learn new things by immersing in these spaces. Leisure therefore is key to how she relates to her social environment and her own location within it. In her ethnography with both white and Black middle-​class families in the United States, Lareau (2011: 2) concluded that participation in a plethora of organised activities instils ‘a robust sense of entitlement’ in the children. In Britain too, Reay (2010: 35) has written about the confidence and sense of entitlement that she found among middle-​class parents as ‘emotional resources’ that they utilised in navigating institutional spaces and passed down to their children. The professional middle-​class British Indian parents 66

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I interviewed, and whose voices we heard in the last chapter, did exhibit a sense of confidence in the way they managed their children’s education and leisure lives, and their children too were extremely articulate and confident in their responses to my questions. Notwithstanding the sense of ease with which they functioned in the interview setting, their consumption-​ heavy lifestyle, and their own experiences of educational success at school, the children in my study did not embody a robust sense of middle-​class entitlement. What Anandi’s statement illustrates is her reflexibility and an acknowledgement of her own relative privilege. Far from taking her family’s lifestyle for granted or basking in an unquestioned sense of entitlement to a life full of leisure opportunities, she is acutely aware of the vastly unequal social landscape upon which her own leisure schedules are built. Leisure here mediates the way children like Anandi engage with and, in this instance, implicitly critique the existing social set-​up where poorer children are denied leisure opportunities that come with subscription charges. I argue that this reflexivity in middle-​class British Indian children does not stem from any inherent constellation of ‘Indian values’ but from these children’s lived experiences and everyday encounters. Aitken (2004: 580) has described middle-​class children’s leisure avenues as ‘safe havens’ that keep them away from public spaces and construct ‘playful conviviality’, at a time when children in poorer neighbourhoods are increasingly being prevented from congregating and who have little access to these convivial, commercial leisure spaces. Although it is important to name and unpack the class privileges that configure the leisure spaces of middle-​class children, their ‘safe haven’ of leisure is not monolithic and, as we shall uncover in greater detail in this chapter, children’s leisure spaces are instead fractured by racial hierarchies. Where prior studies (Vincent and Ball, 2007; Reay, 2010, 2017; Lareau, 2011; Wheeler, 2018; Wheeler and Green, 2019) have fallen short of fully engaging with the racialised dimensions of middle-​class children’s classed experiences, I argue that it is precisely the relative insecurity of minoritised ethnic middle-​class’ class privileges coupled with their racial disadvantage that pattern these children’s leisure geographies and hinder the development of a sense of entitlement through leisure that Lareau (2011) has theorised. By centring children’s narratives and relational agency, this chapter enriches existing scholarship on children’s leisure geographies, especially with regard to their organised activities. Barring a few notable examples, such as Friedman’s (2013) ethnography in the United States, and Sen’s (2014a) work with children in urban India, the vast majority of scholars who have researched middle-​class children’s organised leisure lives have only captured parental ideologies, eschewing children’s own voices, experiences and meaning-​making in relation to leisure. It is therefore important, and indeed long overdue, to recognise the significant influence that parents exert on their children’s leisure schedule while also accounting for the ways in which 67

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children encounter these leisure-​based parenting ideologies and relate to their own social environment through leisure (Shannon, 2006). Moreover, as Floyd et al (2008) have pointed out, accounts of minoritised children and diasporic groups are sparse in the writings of race and ethnicity scholars within leisure studies and little has changed on that front in the intervening years. In response, this chapter adopts the multi-​genre view of children’s leisure introduced in Chapter 2 to demonstrate the ways in which middle-​ class Indian diasporic children in my study negotiate leisure choices, make leisure meaningful in their lives and navigate racial codes in leisure spaces. It thereby interrogates how leisure mediates these children’s participation within their lived geographies and condition the way they relate to others. Understanding what leisure participation means to children can also help re-​ evaluate leisure-​based parenting strategies since parenting is always a relational process that involves both parents and children (Mayall, 1996; Alanen, 2011). Based primarily on my interviewers and interactions with children alongside parental accounts, I underscore how time-​spaces of leisure are differentially constructed by parents and children. Leisure here emerges as a site of struggle over choices, meanings, values and belongingness; a polysemic arena of inter-​and intra-​generational collaboration and contestation. The chapter is split into three sections. First, I look at the ways children negotiate their leisure schedules with parents and how their input shapes their own leisure repertoire, particularly with reference to organised activities. Then, I present the idioms of ‘fun’ and ‘boring’ that the children in my study routinely deployed to sort various activities and choose one over the other. Lastly, I bring to the fore the manner in which racism fractures children’s leisure spaces and mediates their interaction with other children. Children’s accounts also offer a window into the way children make sense of and respond to these racist incidents.

Negotiating leisure choices with parents The families I visited and the parents and children whose everyday lives form the crux of this book, live in a world dominated by commercial leisure industries, neoliberal education systems, intensive child-​centred parenting ideologies and risk anxieties around children’s safety and wellbeing. These external forces mingle with familial scripts of kinship, parent–​child relations, and cultural identities to form the social milieux in which leisure achieves its meaning in the lives of these children, where leisure choices are made, and conflicts over activities are resolved. The soaring trend of children’s adult-​directed activities and intensification of screen-​based leisure are well documented and have been commented upon by scholars and journalists alike (Rosenfeld and Wise, 2000; Meroni et al, 2017; Mullan, 2019; Sauerwein and Rees, 2020). Nonetheless, these commentaries often do not delve 68

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into the mechanisms through which leisure choices are worked out within families and the extent to children are involved in these decision-​making processes. In my interviews with both parents and children, I enquired about the manner in which specific activities were chosen and how some activities have been kept on while others were jettisoned from the weekly schedule. The responses shed light not only on the question of choice and the factors that made various leisure options available to these families in the first place but also on the way these selections were tied to the dynamics of parent–​child relations and children’s generational agency. Suraj is 11 and lives in a middle-​class locality at the edge of London. We met his father Manoj (an IT programme manager) and his mother Simi (HR professional) in the last chapter, who like most other parents in my study enacted a two-​pronged approach to concerted cultivation by arranging for activities that transmit both dominant forms of cultural capital and ethnic cultural capital to their children. In Suraj’s household, however, not every activity is chosen solely by his parents. While telling me about his newfound love for playing the guitar, Suraj described the way he came to take guitar lessons from a self-​employed teacher named Simon: ‘My next-​door neighbour Sam did guitar. … So, I said to Sammy one day “what do you like doing at home?” And he said “Well, I like playing the guitar.” And then I went over to his for a bit and I tried out the guitar and I really liked it. One day, he had a lesson, and the teacher was walking out. So, my mum said to the teacher Simon. … “My son is really interested in doing guitar. Would you like to come over in a few days’ time to give him his first guitar lesson?” He said sure. So, I had my first guitar lesson [at home, with Simon the instructor] and it was really fun. So, I decided to get my own electric guitar. And it’s in the dining room over there. It’s cherry red and it’s really fun playing.’ Suraj lives in a gated development surrounded by other middle-​class families. In most of these households, parents and children alike have internalised the dominant middle-​class logic that paid-​for extracurricular activities are essential for future success and therefore they take it for granted that children like Suraj must indulge in these pursuits after school. While this assumption is broadly accepted and operationalised, the decision-​making vis-​à-​vis activities is often not the sole premise of parents. Many children I interviewed, including Suraj, often bring specific activities to the attention of their parents with a view to getting enrolled in them. Suraj’s vignette shows that although he led the choice of this activity, it was made possible through his interaction with his neighbour Sam who is a white middle-​class child based in the same gated community in a relatively affluent neighbourhood. Both Suraj’s and Sam’s parents possess considerable class resources, which 69

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enable them to play the leisure market and invest in leisure commodities like the guitar if their children express a desire to learn it. The ability to play the guitar is deemed to be a legitimate species of cultural capital, which elicits encouragement from parents. In the past too, Suraj has received similar responses from his parents when he and his sister Meghna (13) wanted to learn to play the piano. Now, both siblings have lost interest in piano, as their father later revealed when I asked him about these lessons. He told me: ‘So, you spend £60 a week on teachers, you spend £4,500 on a piano, you want to get that investment back. And so, it was their [the children’s] choice to get a piano, we allowed them to decide if they wanted to do that and ultimately, I think by the end of it, it became a little bit of a punishment to even touch the piano. But sometimes they just go by and they play the keys.’ Professional middle-​class British Indian parents like Suraj’s father, Manoj, whom we have met in Chapters 1 and 3, see structured leisure activities as forms of ‘investment’ that will reap significant benefits for his children in terms of embodied skills and cultural capital. When Suraj’s narrative is juxtaposed with that of his father’s, we see that children are aware of the fact that affordability is not a limiting factor for the family when it comes to playing the leisure market and pursuing leisure interests. Suraj’s agency, that is to say, his ability to select a particular activity, appeal to his parents and get them to enrol him into it, is dependent on his relationships and resources. To begin with, the sort of activities that pique his interests are the ones he comes across among his friends who are drawn mostly from similar middle-​class backgrounds. As the interview excerpt conveyed, it was his interaction with neighbour Sam that led him to play the guitar. To realise his wish, he negotiated with his parents who then utilised their economic resources to buy a guitar and arrange for an instructor to give Suraj one-​to-​one lessons every week. This multi-​layered process illustrates how children’s agency need to conceptualised not as an inherent property but as a social phenomenon that emerge within specific spatial-​material contexts and generational relationships. Suraj’s relationship with his parents (adult–​child relation) and his friendship with Sam (child–​child relation) are key to the way Suraj chose and negotiated his guitar lessons. Grasping these inter-​and intra-​generational relationships is crucial in understanding how child agency is produced and lived vis-​à-​vis leisure choices. Just as Suraj’s decision to learn the guitar was borne out his interaction with Sam, 12-​year-​old Ankit who lives in a neighbouring town took to boxing inspired by his friends. Like Suraj, Ankit attends a fee-​paying independent school and lives in a gated community with his parents and elder brother. I interviewed him at his home during the summer holidays. Both his 70

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parents had grown up in Hindu Punjabi families in London. His father is an entrepreneur, and his mother had a long-​standing career working in the insurance sector and in recruitment agencies before leaving paid work and is now a stay-​at-​home parent. Given both his parents grew up in London; they have a large network of family and friends who are integral to their social life. Ankit and his brother too have many friends from school who live nearby and with whom they hang out from time to time especially during the school holidays. Some of Ankit’s school friends, who all come from middle-​class families, take boxing lessons from a local instructor. During our interview, Ankit explained how after watching his friends box he developed an interest in the sport: ‘I’ve always kind of enjoyed watching boxing so I thought why not try it. I gave it a go and I started liking it. I asked my dad and he signed me up for a class, so I … go twice a week. … I can’t really explain it unless you’ve done boxing, it just gives you that confidence. Unless you’re already confident then it might give you a bit too much confidence and you’ll become overconfident. It gives you the right confidence to know where you are so you’re not too big headed about yourself but at the same time you’re not shy or anything.’ Later in the interview, while reflecting on his boxing experiences, Ankit reported that he does not consider boxing to be a future career option. But he enjoys it as a leisure activity. He believes that academic performances are of paramount importance because they will earn him a well-​paid job and he is keen to ensure that his boxing does not jeopardise his schoolwork. As he puts it “I would do boxing but I would also like to have a backup because if I’m just doing boxing I wouldn’t really get a good job for it.” It is not only parents who tailor children’s daily schedules in ways that both academic and extra-​curricular achievements complement each other and help put their children at the front of the pack. By inhabiting familial and educational spaces imbued with these ideas of success, the children I interviewed also carried with them a commitment to academic excellence and professional middle-​class jobs, often looking up to parents and family members as role models, support systems and cheerleaders. Ankit’s story coveys that his agency in getting enrolled into boxing lessons was contingent on his bonds with his friends and his parents, and the classed milieux where affordability is not a pressing concern. It further underlines the sociological fact that children are reflexive social actors (see Stoecklin, 2013) who can deploy abstracts notions such as that of success in their everyday contexts, and balance education and leisure. Similar issues came alive in eight-​year-​old Sonam’s accounts. She was only two years old when she migrated to the UK from India with her parents, 71

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Vikas and Divya, who have lived and worked in India, Japan and the United States before Sonam was born. Vikas is an IT contractor, and Divya –​a qualified teacher and a dietician –​is currently a full-​time mother and is not in paid work. Divya devotes a great deal of time and effort in supporting her two daughters, Sonam and Ekta (13), with their schoolwork and in facilitating their leisure interests. Sonam attends a local primary school and has a structured activity to go to every day of the week. Among her many activities is ukulele lessons, a musical instrument she first came across at school as she told me during the interview: ‘I’ve got ukulele on Wednesday. … In the school as a lesson, they teach us ukulele and then I really liked it so then I said [to my mother] I would like to do it and then I got to do it.’ Sonam’s initial exposure to ukulele at school spurred her interest so much so that she wanted to take extra lessons outside school hours. Once she expressed that wish to her mother, she received an enthusiastic response and was subsequently taken to the ukulele club that is run in her school premises on Wednesday evenings. Instances where children take the lead and get their parents to enrol them into particular activities represent only a portion of the former’s everyday organised leisure repertoire. However, these narratives challenge the assumption that parents unilaterally go about selecting activities and curating their children’s leisure lives based solely on their own preferences. The children in my study function in neighbourhoods and schools where they meet other middle-​class children and through these encounters they get to learn about new activities and generate their inclination towards leisure pursuits that they had not explored hitherto. When these emergent interests match the financial and logistical wherewithal of their parents, they get to participate in these activities. These mechanisms of leisure choices also cast fresh light on the relational nature of children’s agency and the status of children within participating families where children are acknowledged by parents as stakeholders in decisions that affect their lives, and their input is therefore deemed important by parents in curating leisure schedules.

Fun and boring: the idioms of leisure Aditya is 12. He lives in the home county with his parents and brother Vishal, who is three years older. Having recently passed the highly competitive 11-​ plus examination, he has started attending a local grammar school following in the footsteps of elder brother, Vishal. Shadowing Ankit’s academic achievements are his interests in badminton, chess and video games. With his heart set on the natural sciences and having parents who both hold advanced 72

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degrees in STEM subjects, progressing on to university is the obvious next step in his academic trajectory as far as he or his parents are concerned. When I enquired into his leisure interests, Ankit informed me about his passion for badminton. He goes for structured badminton coaching on Saturdays. In addition, every Friday he plays this racquet sport in the back garden with neighbourhood friends. When I probed his interest further, he expanded on the reasons he enjoys playing badminton so much and expressed his wish to continue with it over the coming years: Aditya: Utsa: Aditya:

It’s [Badminton] just like really fun playing it and I like the competitive part. So, why is playing badminton or playing other sports important to you? It’s ’cause like sometimes if you keep studying or something you need free time so you can have a break. Because sometimes it can be really boring. And then when you have a break sometimes it feels better after having a break and then studying after. … And it’s also really fun like playing with friends and stuff.

Aditya’s badminton sessions thereby embody the restorative functions of leisure participation that several leisure scholars have written about (Dumazedier, 1974; Shannon, 2006). However, playing badminton does not wholly dissolve his academic concerns nor does it completely eliminate the boredom that ensues from extended periods of studying or immersion in other activities. What it does instead is to offer relaxation and respite, and fill him with ‘fun’, excitement and enthusiasm, which he then funnels into his school work. In a sense, he echoes the idea of balance between school work and leisure that Ankit mounted earlier in the chapter. Further, Ankit foreground the notion of ‘fun’, which is tethered both to the leisure activity itself and the company of ‘friends and stuff’ with whom he gets to play the sport. This relationality is at the heart of his leisure experience. Csikszentmihalyi (1990, 1993), whose work has been used extensively by social psychologists of leisure, posits that enjoyment in an activity rests on the balance between the challenge posed by it and the abilities of those who are engaged in that activity. It is only when the challenge posed and the ability of the people involved are both high and evenly matched, he contends, that peak enjoyment is achieved. Csikszentmihalyi’s illustration of a game of tennis is applicable to Aditya’s badminton matches since in both instances the experience of one player is dependent on the skill of the other. Aditya’s friends not only provide the genial company in which he plays the sport, they are also relatively skilled players against whom Aditya’s own capabilities are stretched to produce a competitive game that he relishes. The foil to 73

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this experience for Aditya is the state of boredom, as he proclaimed during the interview “sometimes it can be really boring”. Disrupting this sense of boredom is important in restoring Aditya’s subjective sense of wellbeing and infusing ‘fun’ into his life. Leisure opportunities, especially those involving friends, help Aditya achieve this objective and make life more pleasurable, varied, and meaningful. These discourses represent a shift away from the educative role of organised leisure that parents espoused in the last chapter. For Aditya and several other children who participated in my study, time-​ spaces of leisure are embedded in their ordinary life and serve to inspire ‘fun’, cement relationships, and expunge boredom. Leisure, in their lived world, has a more immediate role in the here and now as opposed to the utilitarian view of leisure advanced by their parents. The idioms of fun and boring thread through the account of Rohit as well, who lives on the same street as Aditya and attends a grammar school like him. Unlike Aditya, Rohit was born in India and migrated to the UK with his parents when he was six. In Chapter 3, we learnt from his mother about his experiences of racism at school on account of his Indian English accent. He was called a ‘freshie’ by his peers at school, which is a derogatory term shortened from the phrase ‘Fresh off the Boat’ used against recent migrants in the UK and other English-​speaking countries to stigmatise them on account of their perceived lack of local knowledge, poor language skills or deviation from the standard accent, inappropriate clothing and personal hygiene among other stereotypes (Qureshi et al, 2012; Charsley and Bolognani, 2017). Rohit’s experiences of racist bullying and name calling compelled his mother to enrol him into self-​defence classes. To prevent further bullying at school, Rohit on his own accord adopted the strategy of accent-​switching. Now he speaks in an acquired British accent at school and in public spaces while he continues to use an Indian English accent with his parents and extended family networks. These experiences have profoundly impacted his leisure geographies and his parent’s leisure-​based parenting strategies. As Rohit dwelt on his subjective outlook on leisure, it became apparent that he creates meaning vis-​à-​vis leisure activities by sorting those that are ‘fun’ from those that are ‘boring’ as he put it: ‘I just like going, spending time outside. Going for [extracurricular] classes. Because it’s just fun, you can get bored easily here. Because even the weather’s not that good so I just go to all these classes. … [Otherwise] there’s nothing much to do. … I usually play with my friend outside but half the time the weather’s not good.’ The idea of leisure as an antidote to boredom is evident here. Much like that of other children in the study, Rohit’s daily life is compartmentalised across multiple adult-​supervised spaces such as home and school, with 74

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limited independent mobility. Amid these institutionalised geographies of everyday life, Rohit puts a premium on the respite and company of leisure spaces where he gets to spend time with other children in an informal or semi-​formal set-​up. Thus, Rohit’s leisure schedules and experiences are in constant dialogue with other spheres of daily life. His participation in a multitude of activities such as art, badminton and Taekwondo is shot through the balancing of fun and boredom where these twin notions are wielded to hierarchise everyday spaces, times and actions. The portrayal of leisure as a foil to the increasingly institutionalised lives of children, is also evident in the following extract from my interview with 12-​year-​old Chirag in West London where he highlighted the way leisure becomes meaningful to him primarily in relation to processes of institutionalisation, intra-​generational relationships and schoolwork: ‘It’s a good chance for me to be away from home. Otherwise, I’ll just be stuck at home with not much to do because when I’m at home, especially in the holidays, I don’t have much to do at all because there’s no homework. I mean I don’t like homework but if you get it, it’s a chance to do something at home rather than just sitting around watching some stuff, after a time it gets very boring. … [So, in leisure classes I get to] interact with friends. Also, I really enjoy most of the activities.’ Chirag’s views on organised activities complicate the simplistic narrative often found in the media that children today optimise their after-​school hours only for screen-​based leisure (Ives, 2018). Instead, he paints a picture where the spatial variance offered by leisure lessons is valued. His experiences are also contingent on how much he enjoys specific activities. The way Chirag and other children in my study see leisure opportunities as an antidote to boredom chimes with the thesis put forth by the sociologist of leisure Stebbins (2009). He argues that boredom that ensues in somebody’s free time is a coerced state, that is to say, it is ‘not something bored people want to experience’ (Stebbins, 2009: 10) and therefore it is farther from the idea of leisure. Chirag’s account reveals a similar evaluation of boredom. The sorting and balancing of activities through the invocation of the idioms of ‘fun’ and ‘boring’ also came across in eight-​year-​old Sonam’s reflection on the various leisure opportunities that she has continued with and those that she has jettisoned from her weekly schedule: “Music is just fun. … [But] I [also] used to go to scrabble [club] and now I don’t. Because I found it a bit boring.” The middle-​class British Indian children who took part in my research are fully aware of the financial bandwidth of their families and given the child-​centric approach to parenting that their parents champion they know 75

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that they have a say in their own leisure schedule. If they no longer enjoyed an activity, they understand that they will not be forced by their parents to continue with it. Against this backdrop, Sonam deploys the labels of ‘fun’ and ‘boring’ to categorise activities. These categories act as measuring rods for determining the relevance of specific activities in her life. In doing so, Sonam sets up the two notions as a continuum along which various activities are placed. Through time, every activity can and often does slide along this spectrum. Often, activities are not measured in absolute terms either. There are differences of degree erected by her, where activities can be a ‘bit’ boring or ‘just’ fun. The activities that the children have grown fond of, the ones they have embraced and not asked their parents to drop from their schedules, also often carry personal connotations for the children that make those activities more meaningful and enjoyable. Eight-​year-​old Jasleen, while talking to me about her Punjabi language lessons that her mother has arranged for her, said: “Most of my family know how to speak [Punjabi] and it would be good if I knew then I can speak to them.” Jasleen is eagerly awaiting the start of her Punjabi lessons at a nearby Gurdwara as she feels it will help her communicate with her elderly family members better, especially her grandparents and others in the family who prefer Punjabi over English in their conversations. Jasleen’s parents –​whom we met in the last chapter –​were born in the UK and grew up in households where Punjabi was regularly spoken but these days Jasleen and her parents speak exclusively in English at home. For her mother, Paramjit, the Punjabi lessons constitute a ‘skill’, which will help Jasleen to connect to her Sikh heritage. But for Jasleen it is more immediately relatable and affective, which is why she wants to make the most of this opportunity. Similarly, eight-​year-​ old Anandi related her experience of learning Gujarati in the following terms: ‘I know a little bit of Gujarati and a tiny, tiny bit of Hindi. … I speak English and Gujarati at home. … They’re quite nice languages. … When I go over to my dad’s and my mum’s house in India, the other people don’t really know English that well so I need to learn it [Gujarati] so I can speak to them.’ Anandi was born in the UK. Her parents are Gujarati-​speaking Jains, who grew up in India, and continue to speak in Gujarati as well as in English between themselves, often combining the two languages in the same conversation. However, Anandi (8) and her elder brother Chirag (12) prefer to interact in English with some use of Gujarati words. Anandi sees her learning of Gujarati as an opportunity to acquire a common vocabulary that she can utilise during her yearly visits to her grandparents’ houses in India where Gujarati is the medium of communication. 76

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What the narratives of Sonam, Chirag, Rohit, Aditya, Jasleen and Anandi illustrate is that time-​spaces of children’s leisure are immanently unstable, and children’s subjective connotations of leisure are constantly in flux. The children in my study eschew utilitarian or educative coding of leisure advanced by their parents (see Chapter 3) and instead set into motion a more immediate and relational understanding of leisure anchored in the flows of their everyday lives, spatial and temporal experiences, and relationships. They nurture a sense of belonging both to the activity itself and to the peers with whom they partake in that activity. These insights gleaned from children’s perspectives go against the grain of the relatively stable meanings that parents floated in the previous chapter vis-​à-​vis their children’s leisure lives and the way they spoke about different skills and cultural mores that leisure activities can inculcate in their children. In light of these findings, I argue that leisure is a site of struggle over meaning-​making where multiple connotations of leisure emerging from adults and children meet, mingle and clash with each other. Children’s deployment of the idioms of ‘fun’ and ‘boring’ offers fresh perspectives on the sociology of boredom, which has hitherto been built around adult experiences alone and connected to questions of work or employment (Mains, 2007; Frederiksen, 2014; Islam, 2020), which do not apply to the lives of the school-​going children I studied. In recent years, boredom has been acknowledged as a critical concept for social-​ cultural enquiry since it names the difficulties of experiencing meaning under the conditions of contemporary society marked by global capitalism, geographical inequality and an ever-​increasing stress on choice and mass consumption (Haladyn and Gardiner, 2017). Building on this emergent body of sociological scholarship on boredom, I argue that in my child participants’ accounts the idiom of “boring” pointed neither to ‘a timeless metaphysical conundrum’ nor to a ‘purely psychological state’ but instead represented ‘a diffuse affective experience’ (Gardiner, 2012: 38) or a ‘social emotion’ (Ohlmeier et al, 2020: 208) connected to their leisure lives. Their experiences of boredom attest to the processes of meaning-​making and meaningfulness (Barbalet, 1999) as well as to specific temporal relations (Bourdieu, 2000), which merit scrutiny. For the children, boredom is a metaphor of the quest for meaning in their everyday geographies where they act as leisure consumers sorting through options and making choices. At the same time, in a Bourdieusian vein, their idea of boredom denotes a relationship to time borne out of the discrepancies between subjective expectations and objective chances (Islam, 2020). Driven by subjective notions of fun and conviviality, children approach leisure options in the marketplace of leisure equipped with the resources of their parents –​they make decisions, reflect on their lived experiences of leisure and thereby continually reinscribe their leisure geographies. In this sense, the idiom of 77

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‘fun’ and ‘boring’ perform a political role as they are strategically wielded by the children to wrest control of their leisure biographies and engineer meaningful(ness). These ‘modalities of boredom’ (Gardiner, 2012: 47) are therefore embedded in broader social structures and they mediate children’s reflexivity as social actors. By illuminating how leisure is a generative yet under-​studied site for exploring issues of meaning-​making and consumption under neoliberalism, this section has pushed our understanding of children’s leisure in new directions. The problem of meaning-making, the quest for ‘fun’ and children’s relationship to time articulated through boredom are all reflective of their class location, resources and dispositions. Like other middle-​class children they lead heavily institutionalised lives and have significant wherewithal to play the leisure market at will, mostly in concert with parents. However, the narratives put forth so far do not represent the whole gamut of middle-​ class British Indian children’s experiences of leisure. As I will now show, the middle-​class class privileges and dispositions evident in children’s narratives so far are cross-​cut by their racial disadvantages and first-​hand experiences of racism within leisure spaces and beyond.

‘Indians smell like poo’: children navigating peer racism in leisure spaces When eight-​year-​old Aashka’s parents bought their current house, the performance of the local state schools in public examinations was a crucial criterion in their decision-​making. In the last chapter, we heard from her software engineer father and dentist mother about their informed choice to send Aashka and her brother Vineet (six) to high-​performing state schools in the neighbourhood because they wanted to channel the money saved from not paying for school fees into beneficial enrichment activities that can enable holistic development of their children and put them on the path to higher education and professional middle-​class jobs. The school that they have chosen for Aashka received high praise in Ofsted reports and its student body is multi-​ethnic, with a sizeable presence of South Asian children. In this academically well performing, multi-​ethnic school, Aashka’s everyday experiences of education and leisure have often been structured by racism from peers. While talking to me about her friends and the games they play in the school playground, Aashka displayed an awareness of racial boundaries between her South Asian and white friends. In a matter-​of-​fact tone, she told me “They’re [white children in school] normally rude about us. … All the white people make fun of us, Indians.” When I asked what made her say that she recounted the following incident from the playground involving one of the girls from her year group:

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‘There’s this girl called Molly and she said that Indians smell like poo because every time they go to the toilet, they do a number two. … She actually said it to Roshni and then I was standing right next to her and then heard what she said. … We told the rest of the girls and then what they did is they said to her that that’s not true. And then she said “Yes, it is.” And then she said how do you know? And then we said because we’re Indian’s we actually know what happens. … Then she got a bit upset because she heard that was not true and then told us off and then me and my friends told the teacher the entire story. And then she actually knew what was going on and then told Molly off and not us.’ This episode busts the myth that children are inherently racially innocent and shows how racial boundaries are drawn and redrawn through patterned relations between children within their everyday geographies. It equally foregrounds the agency of racialised minority children since Aashka and her friends (“the girls” in her words) banded together and confronted Molly and her racist stereotype. These Indian diasporic girls did not accept Molly’s pejorative depiction of Indians. They resisted Molly’s racialised discourse and sought redressal through the intervention of the teacher who they knew wields authority and can “tell Molly off”. The agency of these girls is dependent on their ethnic and gendered bonds and is configured by the space they inhabit within the school. I contend that this is not an isolated incident, and Molly is not the metaphorical ‘bad apple’ in an otherwise inclusive and anti-​racist society. In the preceding pages, we have encountered racist bullying of Rohit, which prompted his mother to enrol him into martial arts lessons, and he started adopting a British accent to prevent further bullying. The last chapter also contained multiple instances where children were called the ‘P-​word’ by other children in spaces of leisure, which in turn prompted parents to talk to their children about racial difference and racism. These recurring patterns, I argue, are symptomatic of a wider malaise of structural racism that bursts into the surface from time to time through these overt acts of racism but which is crucially not limited to or just about those visible inter-​personal incidents alone. To use Leonard’s (2014: 140) words, while it is important to call out the ‘bad apples’ (individual instances and perpetrators of racism) as Aashka and her friends promptly did, one should not sidestep the fact that the ‘barrel, tree, orchard, and farm’ will continue to produce these discourses until the root cause of structural racism is addressed. Middle-​class British Indian children like Aashka’s lived geographies of leisure are not exactly the ‘safe havens’ of ‘playful conviviality’ that Aitken (2004: 580) invoked but are contingent sites where middle-​class privilege is cross-​cut by structural racism. The British education system and

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the wider society not only embodies built-​in class biases that perpetuate the underachievement of working-​class children (see Reay, 2017), they are also structured by and help normalise “white middle-​class ways of being” (Archer and Francis, 2006: 45; emphasis added). Therefore, we cannot fully unpack middle-​class British Indian children’s leisurescapes without grappling with the way whiteness, structural racism and class privilege interact and mediate these children’s leisure experiences and associations. While Aashka and ‘the girls’ challenged racism and exploited the power structures of the school to seek what they understood as justice, this has not been the experience of everyone. West-​London based Koel (12) has been called ‘poo-​faced’ by white children twice within the last few years, both in spaces of leisure and consumption. The first time was in a shopping arena in Cornwall where her parents had taken her on summer holiday. As she was playing around in the children’s area, the white children present there called her ‘poo-​faced’ on account of her skin colour. The same happened on their next family holiday, in the Lake District. The nature of these spaces did not allow for swift addressal of these issues; there were, for example, no teachers like in Aashka’s school who can discipline the racist children. Instead, her parents had to take it upon themselves to reassure Koel that she is no way inferior to white children. Her mother, Aparna, later sat down with her and explained “how every human being should respect another” and encouraged her to stand up to racism in the future. Again, last year, in her school she was asked by a white girl from her year group “Is your father a taxi driver?” which was underpinned by the assumption that South Asians in London are usually taxi drivers. Koel came home and told her mother about it. Her mother lodged a formal complaint with her school, which is a fee-​paying all girls’ school not far from their home in West London. The school dismissed the complaint, treating the question posed by the white child as an off-​hand remark, but Aparna is convinced to the contrary. The racist and classist undercurrents of these encounters further throw light on the structural biases, prejudices and stereotypes that are built into the everyday spaces that children inhabit. They also demonstrate the fact that children are not inherently innocent of class-​or race-​based prejudices, and similarly children’s leisure spaces are not immune to these forces but are instead structured by them.

A child-​centred sociology of children’s leisure experiences While the last chapter provided a window into how middle-​class British Indian parents strategise about their children’s organised leisure and the meaning they attach to these activities, this chapter shifted focus to the children themselves –​the first-​order participants in these leisure activities –​to 80

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probe the way they experience and create meaning around their leisure engagements, especially their organised leisure activities. Building on existing research that has documented the rising trend of children’s organised leisure participation in quantitative terms, here I have presented interview narratives of the children who took part in my study to unpack what these leisure engagements mean to them, and what their lived experience reveals about the intersection between social class and race. The insights gleaned from children’s accounts enrich our understanding of children’s everyday geographies, leisure experiences and the way they navigate classed and racial boundaries. The parents in my study took a utilitarian view of leisure as a means to an end. However, the children invested in leisure for the pleasurable experiences that the activities themselves generate and the opportunities they engender for interactions and friendships. Leisure emerges here as a site of struggle over meaning between parents and children. Further, juxtaposing parents’ and children’s accounts revealed that parents do not unilaterally decide or impose leisure choices on children and neither do children have complete freedom or absolute choice as far as leisure activities are concerned. Instead, as actors placed in an asymmetrical power relation within the familial generational order, children and their parents actively negotiate leisure choices. This mechanism of negotiated leisure choices offers an entry point into understanding the microgeographies of children’s agency. Children’s negotiated leisure choices reflect the fact that children’s agency is located within the generational order. Situating the workings of children’s agency within both inter-​generational (parent–​child) and intra-​generational (child–​ child) social practices acknowledges children’s structural positioning and simultaneously draws focus on the fact that children are active agents within their everyday lives (Alanen, 2014; Leonard, 2016). This chapter has complicated the picture of middle-​class children’s leisure avenues as marked solely by class privilege by shedding light on how structural racism intersect with class privileges in redrawing the boundaries of leisure and in shaping children’s leisure experiences. Children’s leisurescapes are both and at once raced and class. These insights demonstrate that without simultaneous attention to white privilege and class politics we cannot fully understand what leisure means to children and how it impacts children’s lived geographies. The next chapter develops these arguments in new directions by using a temporal lens to unpack children’s leisure and its impact on the rhythm of family life.

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5

Negotiated Temporalities: Leisure, Time-​Use and Everyday Life One of my research champions in the field, Rahul, introduced me to Ajay, a senior finance professional who lives in the home county with his wife Sonali, an accountant, and their son Kapil. Both Ajay and Sonali grew up in Hindu Punjabi families in the southeast of England where their respective parents had settled upon arrival from India some five decades ago. When I first contacted him, Ajay was quite keen to participate in my study. As we spoke over the phone late one evening, after he had returned home from work, he informed me that he had consulted his wife and son and that I could come round to do the interviews one weekend. But finding a suitable time, he confessed, was the biggest obstacle. Ajay described how every hour outside paid work and school time was meticulously planned, with weekends set aside for ‘family time’, which generally included going to the cinema, taking their son to activities, eating out and having ‘fun’: each unit of leisure scheduled into the calendar. Where to find the time for face-​to-​face in-​person interviews while making sure that much coveted ‘family time’ is not sacrificed? As he put it “Our weekdays are very busy, but weekends are busier” and continued “but we will try and find a time for you to come over”. When I requested that he keeps me informed, he responded with “Hanji”. Despite the fact that we had spoken in English throughout the call, his last word was a North Indian expression meaning ‘sure’ or ‘okay’, which he used under the assumption that as an Indian I will understand it. After trying for a few weeks, Ajay and Sonali could not take out a block of time from their weekend to meet me as that would encroach into their ‘family time’, which is extremely precious to them. Although Ajay, Sonali and Kapil did not end up participating in the interviews, my interactions with Ajay over the phone on multiple occasions illuminated key concerns around the symbolic constructions of time, leisure and family practices that resonated in profound ways across

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the ten middle-​class British Indian families I researched. Time in these families is a quantified commodity that is finite, in high demand and therefore precious. The parents I spoke to mount various kinds of –​what Hochschild (2013) calls –​‘time strategies’ to navigate temporal demands of paid work, commute, children’s school and leisure schedules, and household obligations to find scopes for ‘doing’ family time. Meanwhile, children’s time-​use in these families too reveal the need for dexterous scheduling as the set hours of schooling and organised activities are reconciled with family leisure, parental regulation of ‘screen-​time’ and avenues for unstructured leisure among others. These multifarious concerns over and understandings of time that congeal around children’s and parents’ leisure experiences merit careful examination. While many in low-​paid and insecure employment often simply endure gruelling hours at work, picking up multiple shifts or overtime to make ends meet, and therefore put on hold any expectations of fun or meaningful time in everyday life or defer these to the future (Hochschild, 2013), middle-​class professionals often have a greater degree of control over their work schedules and possess the means to engineer family activities despite busy schedules (Lareau and Weininger, 2008). The latter was certainly the case with the families I visited. The parents did not endure overstretched workdays or defer family activities. Instead, they utilised the resources and opportunities including support structures that they enjoy as middle-​class home-​owning professionals to create meaningful experiences for their children either at home or outside notwithstanding their own busy work patterns. Ajay and Sonali occupy one end of this spectrum where family time is very efficiently scheduled and guarded while the other families I studied were less strict with such scheduling but were nonetheless conscious and strategic about how they used clock hours. The pace of family life has been at the centre of academic debates for several years now, with scholars pointing to the shifting nature of work in the post-​industrial economy, technological transformations, logistical demands of children’s extracurricular activities and spread of dual-​earner families as some of the key drivers behind the relentless speed of everyday life in middle-​class families (Hochschild, 1997, 2012, 2013; Darrah et al, 2007; Berhau et al, 2011; Ochs and Kremer-​Sadlik, 2013; Beckman and Mazmanian, 2020). We are told that professional middle-​class families are ‘busier than ever’ (Darrah et al, 2007), feel ‘always rushed’ (Sullivan and Gershuny, 2018) and are tethered to ‘crazy’ work schedules (Schulte, 2014). These studies mostly revolve around adults’ ‘work-​family interface’ (Brannen, 2005) with a focus on working parents’ experiences of work-​life balance and the effort that goes into the creation of ‘quality time’ with spouse and children. Barring a few notable exceptions (Pocock and Clarke, 2005; Brannen et al, 2012; Harden 83

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et al, 2013; Strazdins et al, 2017) children’s lived experiences of time within families and the impact of parents’ lengthy working hours on their leisure experiences are under-​explored. In the UK, large-​scale quantitative studies provide some insights into the way children spend their time. Data from the UK-​based Millennium Cohort Study, which is a longitudinal project tracking 19,000 babies born in 2000/​2001 over the years, reveal that at ages 7 and 11 these children were engaged in a wide array of activities every week among which sports and physical activities, watching television, using computers, indoor play and doing activities with parents were particularly popular (Meroni et al, 2017). Analysing 8-​to 16-​year-​old children’s time use patterns from three nationally representative UK time use surveys conducted in 1974–​5, 2000–​ 2001 and 2014–​15, Mullan (2019) found that between 1975 and 2015, there has been a decline in children’s outdoor play and time spent in paid work and housework and a marked increase in their screen-​based leisure and home-​based activities. These statistics help us appreciate the changes that have occurred in the way children in the UK spend their daily hours and their links to broader social transformations such as the proliferation of digital technologies, greater dominance of education and risk anxieties around children’s outdoor safety. However, there is a need to expand these lines of enquiry. To begin with, these quantitative studies are race-​blind and do not collate data about race and ethnicity. Further, we do not hear directly from the children themselves about the meanings they attach to their own and their parents’ time use patterns and how they subjectively experience time especially leisure time. Therefore, in this chapter, I draw on interview narratives of parents and children as well as drawing activities with children and apply a temporal perspective on children’s leisurescapes. I interrogate the way time mediates leisure opportunities within families and how leisure time is mobilised. Overall, time is conceptualised across participating families as a finite resource with three key manifestations vis-​à-​vis children’s daily lives: family time, screen-​time, and alone time. Running through the accounts of parents and children is the construction of leisure as a negotiated temporality. Resonant with Finch and Mason’s (1993) work on family responsibilities, these negotiations involving parents and children are either explicit wherein time issues are openly discussed and settled between family members or are implicit in which case avenues for leisure are worked out without direct conversation around its temporal boundaries. As this chapter unfolds, I will foreground the temporal dimensions of leisure within middle-​class British Indian families and the way they are shot through spaces, relationships and materialities. This discussion offers a unique understanding of the shifting time-​use patterns of children as well as the landscape of work and leisure in contemporary Britain. 84

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Time crunch and busyness: making family leisure possible The parents I interviewed talked at length about the busyness of everyday life and the way they negotiate daily schedules: shuttling back and forth, commuting to work, taking their children to school and organised activities, going grocery shopping, doing household chores, and looking after their children. Several of them outsourced portions of these responsibilities, if they could, to free up time. Many of the UK-​born parents in the study called on their own parents, who live in neighbouring areas, to pick up their children after school and look after them until they get back home from work. These support structures –​or what Beckman and Mazmanian (2020) call ‘scaffolding’ –​help keep the household running despite the competing schedules and time crunch. The parents of India-​born parents live in India, and as a result these scaffolding structures in the form of grandparents doing part of the school and activity run are simply not available to them. Some, however, create scaffolding structures by hiring child minders or parents of their children’s peers to do school pick-​ups on their behalf. Others still, enrol their children into after-​school activities that are held in the school premises so they can pick them up later in the evening on their way home. This time management labour of parents underscores the fact that typical office hours are not aligned with school timings, and consequently parents have to draw on their own resources to coordinate these schedules and make things work for themselves and their children. If fitting work-​day with school-​day was not enough, all of the parents in my study created more time coordination work for themselves –​what Berhau et al (2011) describe as ‘activity management labour’ –​by enrolling their children into multiple after-​school activities, factoring in the perceived benefits of these lessons as I illustrated in detail in Chapter 3. This kind of co-​ordination, supervision and activity management work has broadened the parameters of parental duties, as parents feel obligated not only to cultivate their children’s educational credentials, embodied cultural sensibilities and soft skills in a concerted fashion but also create shared memories and quality family time that will deepen their bonds with their children and contribute to the latter’s holistic development. And they set out to accomplish these objectives while also pursuing high flying careers, putting in long hours at work, meeting deadlines and being reliable; in other words, chasing the myth of the ideal worker in the knowledge economy (Beckman and Mazmanian, 2020). To borrow Lim’s (2020) words, professional middle-​ class parents in my study experienced the apparent ceaselessness of parenting responsibilities as they attempted to transcend these temporal flows and succeed at their perceived duties as parents and workers. Sumit, who occupies a senior management role at the London office of a multinational corporation, described joint family activities such as going 85

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out for a meal with his wife and daughter as ‘important’ and then elaborated on the temporal context in which they occur: ‘We quite like to go and eat outside as a family. … It’s important because this is the only family we have here. … I mean just the three of us, we are the best friends and we look out for each other. … I’m so busy. I go to the office at about 7:30 am, I leave with her [daughter Koel] and I come back home at 8:30 or 9 pm. … And then weekends, Saturday just comes and goes so I take her to her horse riding and this and that, and swimming.’ Sumit lives in West London with his daughter, Koel (12), and wife, Aparna. Every day he leaves home at 7:30 in the morning and drops Koel off at school on his way to work. The commute to work takes more than an hour and given his position within his organisation, with overall responsibility for selling and negotiating his company’s software portfolio, he never manages to get back home earlier than 8:30 or 9 in the evening. Aparna had quit paid-​ work soon after Koel was born and is now a stay-​at-​home parent. She picks Koel up from school and drives her to activities all through the week. In the weekend, it is Sumit’s turn to do the activity runs, take Koel to swimming and horse-​r iding lessons. The demands of paid-​work coupled with parental duties leave little room for Sumit’s family activities. Having grown up and completed his undergraduate studies in India, Sumit and Aparna got married in their hometown of Kolkata and a few years later left for Germany together where they both completed MBAs. They moved to the UK 12 years ago, a country where they have no family or kin. As Sumit puts it, Koel and Aparna are the only family he has in the country. Therefore, it is important to him that he makes the most of the weekend to spend time with his family, eat out and go for long drives in the home counties. Family leisure emerges in this context as a way of ‘looking out for each other’, a means of ‘doing family’ and an instrument for cementing family bonds especially in the absence of wider family or kin in the country Sumit and his family now call home and of which they are naturalised citizens. Sumit’s emphasis on the importance of family leisure is juxtaposed with his busyness, and the multiple demands placed on his waking hours that need to carefully managed and negotiated to ensure these smaller blocks of ‘quality’ family time can be teased out and enjoyed even if greater quantity of such time is impossible to eke out of his intense weekly schedule. IT consultant Jaswinder works in Germany for three days a week, and then flies back to the UK to work from home for the remaining two weekdays, leaving the weekend free so that he can spend time with his family and escort his children to their leisure activities. For most of the week, it is his wife Paramjit who manages their son’s (age seven) and daughter’s (age eight) 86

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school and activity schedule. Jaswinder is therefore keen to accommodate family activities within this hectic work and travel schedule. When I asked him about family leisure, he spoke about the various activities they do together as a family: ‘We all play board games, we watch movies together, we go shopping together, we will go to the park together, we will go on little breaks together. … Their time with us and our time with them is precious because I guess, the older they get the less of these times and these memories. You know, these … are the happiest times of your life, your time as a child, magical moments, and times with your parents. They are to be enjoyed to the fullest.’ For Jaswinder, time is not only a limited resource to budget and spend wisely but also an entity upon which symbolic meanings can be ascribed as he describes the lived time of childhood as ‘magical’. And it is this symbolic quality of the time that children spend with their parents that buttresses the need for family leisure in these families despite the busy schedules of work, school, and organised activities. This symbolic construction of family leisure as one of togetherness and memory-​making, was echoed by Jaswinder’s daughter Jasleen as well, who made a drawing about a typical weekend evening when she watches films with her parents and younger brother. When asked about the drawing (see Figure 5.1), she described her experience thus: ‘I like watching [movies] with my family because some movies make me and my family laugh and then we would just talk about how funny it is and then it would just make us smile and then we would just cuddle each other. … We get to be happy together and we have fun and then we could all be a happy family.’ Jasleen’s drawing and interview excerpt bring into focus the forms of mutual interactions, self-​disclosures and intimacies that operate within the microgeographies of family leisure. While watching the film together, Jasleen and her family members are occupying the same physical space of the sofa and the audio-​visual narrative unfolding before their eyes is mediating their interactions about the content. Jasleen enjoys these shared experiences and looks forward to them. Moreover, the films themselves evoke emotions such as laughter and precipitate shared memories. These films are often chosen by parents with the content in mind. In my interviews with parents, concerns were frequently expressed about levels of violence and portrayal of sexuality in films. These are the factors parents bear in mind while selecting films that are deemed appropriate for family viewing. 87

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Figure 5.1: Jasleen watching films with her family in the living room

Across participating familiar, Bollywood films were especially popular. Although most children cannot understand Hindi dialogues while watching Bollywood films, they read the English subtitles as they watch. Both India-​ born and UK-​born parents recalled their childhood experiences of watching Hindi films with their family and friends, and spoke passionately about their favourites actors and film songs. The connection between Hindi films and the British Indian diaspora has been particularly significant. Communal watching of Hindi films became a popular leisure activity for South Asian families in Britain throughout the later decades of the 20th century (Tyrrell, 1998; 88

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Dudrah, 2002; Puwar and Powar, 2004). Such leisure activities contributed heavily towards the development of diasporic consciousness and cultural identity, besides facilitating the formation of ethnic social networks through common spaces of cinema-​going. These ‘social cinema scenes’ (Puwar, 2007) –​that is, weekend viewings of Hindi films held either in hired school halls or in ‘Indian picture houses’ –​were particularly sought after by these diasporic families for there was hardly any representation of South Asians on mainstream television in the UK except for the BBC’s 30-​minute early Sunday morning ‘ghetto slot’ (Zuberi 1995: 36, qtd in Hutnyk, 2000: 236) of Nai Zindagi Naya Jeevan (New Ways, New Life), which broadcasted discussions in Hindi-​Urdu followed by a few minutes of music. These community cinema spaces were soon replaced by home viewing of Hindi films on rental VCR (see Gillespie, 1995) and later through TV channels that periodically broadcasted Hindi films (see Kabir, 2001). From the early 1980s, Channel 4 started broadcasting Hindi films on a regular basis, as part of its agenda on ‘multicultural programmes’, which played a catalytic role in bringing Hindi cinema to mainstream attention in the UK (Kabir, 2001). The way UK-​born parents spoke to me about their memories of watching these films –​either recorded from Channel 4 or via rental VCRs –​ every weekend with their parents and siblings in the 1980s–​90s shows how the shared leisure activity of watching Hindi films extended beyond the immediacy of the act and served to coalesce shared memories and shore up cultural codes and cinematic knowledge. Moreover, in the 1990s Bollywood increasingly incorporated Indian diasporic characters and (sub)plots into the diegesis of popular films, which often spoke directly to these diasporic audiences (Dudrah, 2012; Dwyer, 2014). Indeed, it has been argued by Dudrah (2006: 169) that in Britain, Bollywood films offer ‘those diasporic South Asians that partake in its activities a wider set of representations and possible lives than those offered in mainstream Western cinema’. Further, the social milieu in which the India-​born parents in my study grew up was pervaded by Bollywood films and its various facets such as popular film dialogues, dance numbers, songs and costumes. As a mass entertainment industry and integral part of the leisure landscape, Hindi cinema impacts upon every aspect of social and cultural life in India, etching itself into India’s public imaginings, nostalgias, and desires (Mishra, 2002; Dwyer, 2014). Coming from different historical contexts, UK-​born and India-​born parents share the common goal of creating opportunities to expose their children to the world of Hindi films via family viewing of these films on weekend evenings –​the only part of the week that is not occupied with other commitments and activities. Through these carefully negotiated time-​spaces of shared family viewing of Hindi films, the parents seek to nurture a common cross-​generational pool of cultural references and aesthetic sensibilities that flow from Hindi films. These shared acts of leisure therefore connect individual biographies, memories and cultural histories 89

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in unique ways. These instances also underscore the affective economies of family leisure as encapsulated in Jasleen’s description of conviviality and the tactile acts of cuddle around the television. When children drew and talked about cross-​generational family leisure, they also made references to how time commitments of every family member make it difficult to indulge in activities together. While drawing about baking cookies with her parents and sister (see Figure 5.2) nine-​year-​old Saumya complained about the dearth of such opportunities and wished she had more scope within her daily life for hanging out with her elder sister and parents, doing activities together and having a good time: ‘I think we should spend lots of time together because we don’t always get the chance. Sometimes sister might be studying, or my mum might be cooking, or my dad might be cleaning, or I might be doing a club.’ Figure 5.2: Saumya baking cookies with her family

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Saumya’s elder sister is usually busy with her GCSE preparation, and her parents both go out to work –​her father is an IT project manager and mother a school teacher. When at home, her parents are mostly occupied with housework with her mother doing the bulk of the daily cooking while her father helps with odd chores and cleaning. In most participating families where both parents are in remunerated employment, it is often the mother who disproportionately shoulders the ‘second-​shift’ (Hochschild, 2012) at home, undertaking most of the food-​work and caring responsibilities even when their husbands ‘get involved’ in housework. It is through the coordination of the competing schedules of Saumya’s school and after-​school clubs, her sister’s schoolwork, and her parents’ work and household chores, that joint family activities, such as the scene she drew, are engineered. The study of family leisure compels us to go beyond the individual leisure actor centric definitions of leisure and think about the family as the unit of enquiry. This in turn raises important questions about the inclusivity of our approach to family leisure; whether racial and classed differences in family structures, ideals and routines are accounted for (Harrington, 2001). The stark qualitative differences in the temporal rhythm of family life between working class and middle-​class households has been widely written about (see Lareau and Weininger, 2008; Lareau, 2011). However, even among middle-​ class professionals the flexibility of working hours varies by occupation. On the whole, the IT, software and banking professionals in my study had more flexible work patterns than those working in medicine, dentistry and education because the former were able to work from home for part of the week, much before the pandemic hit, and use those opportunities to do school and activity runs for their children. But there were some exceptions to this pattern. The children across the study displayed an awareness of the temporal rhythms of family life and leisure, especially the way their parents’ work schedule impacted the possibility of family time. During my one-​to-​one interview with her, eight-​year-​old Aashka offered a reflexive account of her father’s busyness and work-​related burnout and how these impact her family leisure experiences. She chose to draw about board-​game sessions (see Figure 5.3), which are quite popular in her family. While describing these sessions, which involve both her parents and younger brother, Aashka spoke about the subdued involvement of her father in these sessions on account of his work-​induced exhaustion. Pointing to her father in the picture she said: Aashka: Utsa: Aashka:

My dad is sleeping on the sofa. … He always sleeps on it. He’s tired and normally really lazy. And what makes him so tired? The thing that makes him tired is computing all day. … So, he makes up like [computer] games and he does that sort 91

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of stuff [at work]. [During board-​game session at home] He normally hides his head under the pillow and then you can always see a bit of his hair because there’s a rip in the pillow. … He just answers the question [lying on the sofa] and my mum like moves it [the block on the playing board, on his behalf]. The board game Aashka referred to involves several multi-​coloured pieces, which are moved around the board for every correct answer given to questions written on an accompanying pack of cards. Owing to his exhaustion from commuting and long days at work, Aashka’s father, Alpesh –​ a software engineer by profession –​feels too tired to get actively involved in the game but still participates passively wherein his wife Swati, a dentist, moves the pieces on the board on his behalf. Alpesh works full time but Swati has recently switched to part-​time work because of her childcare responsibilities. Alpesh, much like other professionals in the knowledge-​ based economy, is not only pressed for time but is also at the receiving end of occupational stress and exhaustion. His firm does not allow him Figure 5.3: Aashka playing board games with her family

Note: figure is poor quality due to the original type of paper used.

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to work from home and therefore he has to commute to central London daily. Further, as a senior employee he often has to work extended hours to see through major projects. When I carried out fieldwork in 2017–​18, people in full-​time employment in the UK were working longer hours per weeks than all other country in Europe except Greece and Austria (Eurostat, 2021). Surveys from that time also suggest that Britons were spending more time commuting to work than any other country in the continent (SD Worx, 2018), with Londoners like Alpesh having the longest work commute within the UK (Lloyds Bank, 2019). The issue of her father’s work-​induced exhaustion broached by Aashka goes beyond long office works and lengthy commute. There is now considerable evidence that suggests that racialised minority professionals, those who have succeeded in getting a foothold in their sectors, do not experience career progression at the same rate as their white peers and are more likely to be clustered at the bottom of the very top in their organisation (Saggar et al, 2016; CIPD, 2017), which adds to their work-​related stress as they attempt to go over and beyond to reaffirm their worth and go up the career ladder. I argue that these wider professional contexts need to be considered to fully understand Alpesh’s work-​induced fatigue, which cannot be reduced to his individual circumstances alone. It has structural roots in terms of UK work cultures, public transport and housing crises, which add to commute time and racial inequalities in career progression. The work-​ related stress and burnout then have knock-​on effects on Alpesh’s family life and the time he gets to spend with his children, playing games like the one Aashka drew about.

Navigating ‘screen-​time’ and screen-​based leisure Another key dimension of time in relation to children’s leisurescapes in these families is ‘screen-​time’. It is situated in the context of children’s screen-​ based leisure, which is part of children’s wider ‘casual leisure’ (Stebbins, 1997) geography as outlined in Chapter 2. With the expansion in ICTs, a ‘constellation of always-​on and always-​on-​hand mobile media’ (Lim, 2020: 2) have become pervasive within middle-​class homes, producing digitally connected families. Against this backdrop, some scholars have even started to characterise children of today as the ‘touch-​screen generation’ (Nikken, 2021). The growth in children’s digital leisure –​that is, leisure time-​spaces based around ICT devices –​has spawned widespread debates, which on the one hand see children as ‘digital natives’ (Prensky, 2001) and informed consumers of ICT in their own right while on the other posit that children lack an adequate sense of responsibility or emotional competence to match their growing technological abilities (Wyness, 2012). Consequently, children are treated as particularly vulnerable to the new set of dangers including 93

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those around bullying, sexualisation and mental health that the internet and digital media have reportedly amplified (Finkelhor, 2011). The parents I spoke to saw their responsibility as one of making sure that their children are engaged in productive activities and not spending too much time on computers, mobiles, tablets or video game consoles. The dentist and mother of two, Swati told me: ‘I know that if you give her a computer or give her a tablet, she will quite happily just watch rubbish on YouTube and stuff. And it’s just trying to get her away from that because I know if I’ve got a week off and I spend it with them then the TV doesn’t go on at all and we’ll be doing other things. And as soon as the TV is on, let’s say if I’m busy doing something, they can watch TV for hours and hours and just be brain dead. And it’s like no, can you do something else instead.’ Swati therefore believes in diverting her children’s attention away from television and tablet and guiding them towards “something else” that can foster learning. Later in the interview, she gave the example of the family board game Trivial Pursuit, which is built around questions and answers, because in her words it enables “more learning” as opposed to screen-​based leisure, which is unproductive and will make her children “brain dead”. Swati’s concerns were shared by most parents in my study who echoed the narrative of risk and harm that saturate the advice often given to parents with respect to digital media (Clark, 2012; Livingstone and Franklin, 2018). For instance, the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) (2015) in its guidelines recommended that ‘any strategy that reduces TV viewing and other leisure screen-​time may be helpful’ in keeping both children and adults healthy (NICE, 2015: 9). These discourses have spurred the practice of –​what Lim (2020) describes as –​‘transcendent parenting’ wherein parenting obligations have broadened considerably with urban middle-​class parents exploiting media technologies to assist their children, guide them through online spaces, and keep an eye on them on an endless loop with little respite. Indeed, arguments suggesting that parents ‘carry the primary responsibility for guiding their children’s media behaviour’ (Sonck et al, 2013: 96) are ubiquitous, which serves to shift the responsibility from social institutions to individual parents to ensure that children are taking utmost advantage of the educational opportunities of digital media and are prepared for future careers in the media-​rich society while avoiding its potential risks and harms (Livingstone and Helsper, 2008; Livingstone et al, 2017). These discourses resonate with what IT programme manager Manoj, the father of Suraj (11), told me in reference to digital leisure and screen-​time: “Your job [as a parent] is not just to take them to school, drop

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them off and then let them sit in front of the TV. Your job as a parent is to make sure they’re engaged, able to fulfil anything that they choose to do.” Driven by the need to maximise opportunities and minimise risks, most parents in my study operationalised a ‘restrictive mediation strategy’ (Sonck et al, 2013), which involved setting time limits on children’s screen-​based leisure and channelling their children’s free time into pathways that parents deem more productive. They saw these interventions as integral to their identity as parents, and as the right thing to do, with the idea of screen-​ time acting as a framework for their decision-​making. In this sense, parents’ restrictive mediation of their children’s screen-​based leisure has become part and parcel of the ‘moral rationality’ (Duncan, 2005) of contemporary middle-​class parenting. There was no reported instance in the data where parents actively monitored children’s online activities afterwards or used digital technologies for surveillance. Although some younger children in the study were not allowed by their parents to own personal mobile phones, children regularly used a range of media technologies including computers, videogame consoles and smart television either by themselves or with other family members. As parents put in place restrictions on ‘screen-​time’ children came to navigate the time-​restrictions in their own way, often carving out spaces which parents felt unable to physically monitor. Meanwhile, as already pointed out, parents too are navigating multiple layers of external interventions, which continually implore them to curb their children’s screen-​time. Screen-​time regulation is therefore not only a temporal manifestation of parental concerns over children’s digital leisure but also one of the key arenas of children’s everyday leisure where ideals of good parenting are being refashioned. The way children and their parents navigate ‘screen-​time’ vis-​à-​vis children digital leisure illuminate the workings of the familial generational structure. Ankit (12) lives at the edge of London with his older brother Vishal (15) and their parents, Shekhar (entrepreneur) and Jyoti (housewife). I visited his family home during the summer holidays. While I was interviewing Jyoti one-​to-​one in the living room, Ankit knocked, came in and handed Jyoti his mobile phone. Jyoti then typed in the password and handed the phone back to Ankit. Ankit left the room with a smile on his face. We continued with the interview and afterwards, while talking to me about Ankit’s everyday life, Jyoti referred to this incident and explained: ‘[A couple of months ago] He just started answering back. He wants things his way. … That’s why he was banned from using his phone. I’ve changed the password, that’s why he came down to ask me the password. … So yesterday I said to him “You can have half an hour twice a day” so he gets it for one hour. And because he listened to

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me, I said today he can have it for 45 minutes twice a day because otherwise he was getting a bit bored.’ Here time limit on mobile usage is encased within a framework of reward and punishment. Owing to Ankit’s perceived insolence, his mother, Jyoti, confiscated his iPhone, which he got as a present last Christmas. Ankit uses his phone mainly to play games and to chat with his friends. Given that his school was closed for summer holidays, and he was spending most of the time at home, these screen-​based leisure activities gathered greater importance for him. This has possibly prompted Ankit to modify his behaviour towards his mother, in an effort to ‘earn’ his mobile ‘privileges’ back albeit with an attendant time restriction. He has managed to impress his mother and move the time limit from one hour to one-​and-​a-​half hour per day. Jyoti too concedes that without his phone Ankit was getting a “bit bored” during the summer holiday. But my entry into the domestic space reconstituted the temporal rhythm within the house since I had engaged his mother in a one-​to-​one interview in the living room for about an hour. He took advantage of the in-​between time thus created and got his phone unlocked by his mother. As Jyoti was busy with the interview and not keeping time of Ankit’s mobile usage, he used that opportunity to work around the prevalent limits and ‘squeeze’ more time out of it. Although Ankit’s mother sets restrictions on the amount of time he can spend with his mobile phone, she does not monitor his online activities or filter the content available to him. He uses social media application like Instagram and Snapchat to stay connected with his friends, and there was no evidence that Jyoti monitors these usages. Most of Ankit’s mobile ‘privilege’ is spent playing games. At the time of my visit, he was regularly playing a mobile game named Fortnite and even avidly followed a video blogger on YouTube called ‘Ninja’ who livestreamed himself playing Fortnite every day. In discussing mobiles and games, Ankit told me: “I have an iPhone X, so in my opinion it’s the best gaming mobile thing that you can get. But there’s not many mobile games, they should bring more mobile games out.” He is not only aware of the latest mobile technologies but also has current knowledge about which games are available on which platforms as he prefers playing Fortnite on his iPhone rather than on his Xbox game console. Nevertheless, he put his game playing and mobile usage into perspective as he explained: “I have my own room. [But] I don’t have any technology in my room apart from my phone. A phone has a lot of radiation. So, I don’t play at night or something.” Ankit is therefore not only navigating parental mediation but also actively managing potential risks from mobile usage at night that he has come to know about in a climate saturated with media reports on the supposed harms and risks posed by media technologies (see Blum-​Ross and Livingstone, 96

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2016). This comports with previous studies that found that children are aware of potential harms that can come from their use of digital technologies and in response they often devise forms of self-​regulation (Green and Hannon, 2007). Aashka (8) too finds a way to work around the screen-​time restrictions that her parents have imposed. Earlier, we heard from her mother Swati who is keen to make sure that Aashka is not “brain dead” from too much screen-​ time. Although Aashka does not have a personal mobile phone, she has access to a tablet computer, which she uses to watch videos and play games. Her usage of this tablet computer for leisure is, however, time-​restricted by her parents. On the days that both Alpesh (full-​time software engineer) and Swati (part-​time dentist) go out to work, Alpesh’s parents collect Aashka from school and look after her until Swati gets home. Aashka’s grandparents are more lenient with screen-​time than her parents and Aashka is aware of these differences. She exploits this opportunity to compensate for the restrictions that prevail in the presence of her parents. While talking to me about her daughter’s ICT use and digital leisure activities, Alpesh reflected on this phenomenon: ‘She spends time with her grandparents and her brother [till we get home], and they just play. They watch things on tablets. We [my wife and I] don’t allow them to watch tablets all the time. So, they have restricted times on that when we are around, but we have no control over the times when the grandparents are there [and we are absent].’ To fully unpack Aashka’s navigation of screen-​time restrictions, it is an imperative to draw out the cultural dimensions of inter-​generational relationships within Indian families. As Lamb (2002: 306) has documented, in Indian families reciprocal love between generations is often conceived of either in terms of ‘samman’ (respect), which is ‘a form of love flowing up from juniors to seniors’ or ‘sneha’ (affection), which signals ‘a form of love flowing down from seniors to juniors’. Therefore, depending on where you are positioned within the generational hierarchy, your intimate relationship with others in the family is defined either by ‘samman’ or ‘sneha’. The exchange of the two is not equivalent but equitable and ‘samman’ is entangled with the concept of generational hierarchy within the family. Similar ideas were echoed in Jutlla’s (2013) study with Sikh families in Wolverhampton. In my study, the parents’ relationships with their children were, as one mother in the study puts it, a ‘mixed bag’ of being ‘cool’, ‘playful’ and ‘strict’ with no expectation of or adherence to notions of hierarchical respect on the part of parents; the parents’ relationships with their own parents, however, were embedded in the cultural perception of ‘samman’ for elders, which in practical terms meant that parents like Alpesh 97

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did not enter into a conflict with their own parents over children’s ‘screen-​ time’. At the same time, the expansive flow of ‘sneha’ from grandparents to grandchildren was instrumental in creating a more lenient disciplinary order where time restrictions on tablet use is suspended. In these contexts, children navigate two layers of culturally coded generational structures, vis-​à-​vis their parents and grandparents, and use the opportunities afforded by the latter to recompense for the time restrictions that comes with the former. Children’s agency therefore emerges as not only context dependent but also relational and multi-​layered, fostered through immense reflexivity about the workings of culturally coded multiple generational structures and their concomitant power relations. The narratives about Aashka (8) and Ankit (12) illustrate how children’s digital leisure practices as negotiated temporalities play out within the generational structures of the family. Their stories of wayfinding open a window into the relational dynamics of parent–​child relations wherein children do not simply follow or conform to parental restrictions but actively reflect on and find their way around those restrictions by either appealing to parents or by taking advantage of time-​spaces that their parents cannot physically police. The case of Aashka, for instance, further demonstrates how the parent–​child generational structure within the nuclear family intersect with other generational regimes such as grandparent–​parent relations and grandparent–​grandchild relations, which bear specific cultural connotations linked to these families’ ethnic background. Children such as Aashka are aware of the power dynamics within and across these (multi-​) generational structures, and they are capable of exploiting their affordances. Moreover, the children do not have an uncritical appraisal of digital leisure. Instead, as Ankit’s excerpt shows, children are aware of the risks associated with ICT use, and they do exercise forms of self-​mediation. Equally, there is little evidence to suggest that children unequivocally prefer digital leisure above other activities while parents are perpetually struggling to get their children to shun excessive digital media use. Such a simplistic narrative does not obtain, as 12-​year-​old Chirag’s observation shows: ‘I especially like when we all play a board game together like Monopoly. … It’s a good chance to be with the family because most evenings … she’s [sister Anandi] on the laptop watching what she wants, I’m playing the Xbox for one hour plus, my dad is on his laptop or doing work on his phone and my mum is doing art … [and] she’s on her emails as well. … It is very diverse, no one really talks to each other, everybody is doing their own stuff. So, I like when we do things together.’ While arguing in favour of more shared family leisure activities, Chirag drew a sketch illustrating a board game session with his parents and sister (see 98

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Figure 5.4: Chirag playing board games with his family

Figure 5.4). Thus, screen-​based leisure of children or their screen-​time for that matter cannot be seen in isolation –​it is part of a wider ecosystem of media technologies that pervade contemporary homes and are continually part of the daily lives of both parents and children. Further, Chirag’s positing of screen digital media use by family member cast fresh light on the way various genres of leisure are inter-​locked and each activity becomes meaningful only in relation to another.

‘Alone time’ and the ‘being and becoming’ of children The children who took part in my study engaged in a variety of solitary and unstructured leisure in their ‘alone time’. These leisure activities, which belong to the genre of children’s ‘casual leisure’ (Stebbins, 1997) as explained in Chapter 2, capture the intimate geographies of leisure outside organised activities or family-​based cross generational leisure, and are often short-​lived, ad-​hoc and temporally distinct from other aspects of children’s daily leisure encounters. Children’s alone time has been described as an ‘experiential niche’ and seen primarily through the lens of passivity and negative emotions (Larson, 1990) while in a Goffmanian sense, alone time –​unencumbered by the constrains placed on our behaviour by others –​is time spent ‘back stage’ (Goffman, 1959) and therefore rich with possibilities for thinking about subjectivities and lived identities. Indeed, I argue that the interstitial temporal segments in which these largely ‘nonconsumptive leisure’ (Stebbins, 99

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2009) –​that is to say, leisure experiences that do not require much investment in goods and services, and for which costs are low or negligible –​take place illuminate children’s simultaneous being and becoming. Here I expand on Uprichard’s (2008) thesis of children as ‘being and becoming’ which foregrounds the temporality of childhood and posits the child as a social actor engaged in the construction of their own everyday lives and the world around them both in the present and in the future. Further, children as well as adults are always immersed in a multiplicity of becoming-​withs through their interaction with other humans and materials in everyday life (Haraway, 2008; Horton and Kraftl, 2018). I therefore deploy the notion of being and becoming to signify the temporal experience of children as both present and future agents as well to highlight the ongoing process of world-​making in which children are involved within the time-​spaces of solitary leisure. Amid their busy schedules of organised leisure lessons, collective family activities, school days and homework, children who took part in my study often carved out short spans of solitary leisure, which they exploited to play on their own, draw, listen to music, read books and ‘relax’ in a host of different ways. During my interviews with them, I asked them directly about the way they experience alone time. Insights into these solitary leisurescapes also came to light in unanticipated ways during conversations with children and their parents. For example, while I was talking to eight-​year-​old Anandi about her daily activities, she introduced me to her teddy bears and described the way she played with them: ‘I spend time with my teddies. … [O]‌ne is really small, [second] medium small, [third] medium big and [fourth] big. When I’m sleeping, I’m on my own so the big one reminds me of my dad. The medium big one reminds me of my mum. The medium small one reminds me of my brother. And my small one reminds me of me. I sleep with them. So, I’m like the real people are here so I don’t feel lonely when I sleep with them.’ Anandi here highlights the embodied nature of her interaction with the teddy bears and the affective registers of care that envelop this human–​material contact. In the quote she explains how she resolves her solitude in her bedroom at night by constructing and inhabiting an alternative, imaginative world peopled by teddy bears who stand in for her intimate family members, thereby sculpting new socialities of leisure without the presence of other humans. The apparent anthropomorphism at play here can be understood by considering the materiality of the teddy bears. As Woodyer (2010) points out, it is the textility of the teddy bear –​the feel of its ‘fur’ on touch –​that lends itself to anthropomorphism, making it seem more human-​like than most other toys and helps establish an intimate relationship between the 100

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child and the teddy bear. The materiality of the cuddly toy thus facilitates the construction of affective ties between the teddies and Anandi who bring them into her personal space of the bed at night. When Nieuwenhuys (2011: 411) raised the question ‘Can the teddy bear speak?’, she argued that ‘the teddy bear … though inanimate … has agency and may even be able to [metaphorically] speak’. Put differently, the human agency of the child and the material agency of the teddy bear are co-​dependent and relational. In her attempts to make sense of the world around her and finding her feet in it, Anandi engages with different objects around her including toys, interprets them in her own ways and it is through this process that the teddy bear ‘acts’ as Anandi herself puts it: “So I’m like the real people are here so I don’t feel lonely when I sleep with them.” Thus, Anandi becomes with her teddy bears. Multiple temporal registers coincide within Anandi’s play space and are articulated through her toy relationships. At one level, it is her alone time, and she is by herself. At another, there is a temporal segmentation of the day where her solitude is marked by the fact that it is night and her bed time. Anandi’s alone time, play time, night time and bed time are entwined. It is the converge of the night time and the bed time that makes her solitary leisure with the teddy bears possible. These temporal and spatial dimensions of Anandi’s solitary leisure practices provide a template for understanding child agency vis-​à-​vis leisure, as she interprets the world around her in her own ways by drawing on casual leisure activities. Her solitary leisure engagements enable her to resolve her predicament of loneliness in a way that makes sense to her. Building on relational and new material feminist approaches to childhood (see Bordonaro and Payne, 2012; Taylor et al, 2012), we can locate her agency not in fictions of independence and neoliberal individualism but in relations of interdependence with other human and non-​human actors. This amounts to an opening up of ontologies that disperses agency across the human and the non-​human and considers the ways in which children’s agency is ‘assembled and infrastructured’ within and across a plethora of social-​material assemblages (Oswell, 2016) including child–​toy relationships. This approach to theorising children’s agency in the context of everyday, casual leisure pushes forward a new politics of child-​centred research. As Esser et al (2016: 8) put it, a theory of child agency ‘that does not wish to simply transfer fictions of Western autonomy from the adult male subject to children must … not denigrate dependency and the need for care.’ Thinking from the grounds up and taking seriously the cross-​cutting webs of dependency and social-​material relationships that children construct and nurture through acts of solitary leisure in their ‘alone time’ opens new avenues for a more relational sociology of childhood that does not privilege or fuel neoliberal individualism. 101

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Just as Anandi has become entangled in bonds of intimacy and care with her teddy bears, eight-​year-​old Sonam too organises her alone time around her cuddly toys whom she assigns the role of pupils in her pretend classroom. Although Sonam did not mention it to me when I interviewed her, her mother, Divya, reported about the play while talking about her daughter’s everyday activities. Presumably, Divya has seen Sonam play in her room on one or more occasions as she described the play sessions in the following terms: “She enjoys … spending time with her soft toys and talking to them and pretending they are [students], and she’s the teacher. She plays a game of role model very often. So, she likes to be the teacher.” Sonam is not alone in creating a pretend classroom in her bedroom and conscripting her collection of soft toys as her pupils as part of her solitary leisure, which in this case takes the form of object play. Nine-​year-​old Shruti too orchestrates a pretend classroom in her alone time where she assumes the role of the teacher. However, unlike Sonam, she uses pillows as students as she revealed during her interview with me: “I draw on my whiteboard and pretend to make my own game up. Like I have lots of pillows with faces. Then I pretend that they are all students and I’m the teacher.” Sonam’s and Shruti’s cases s are instances of what Opie and Opie (1969) call ‘pretend play’. In both cases, the child created a pretend classroom within the confines of her own space without the presence of adults and took on the role of the teacher while treating material objects such as cuddly toys and pillows as her pupils. Over the decades, such teacher–​student themed role-​plays have been found to be particularly popular among children (Opie and Opie, 1969; Elbers, 1996; Corsaro, 2012; Willett et al, 2013) who often play these games with peers. Rather than viewing this form of pretend play as sites for children to rehearse future adult roles, as developmental psychologists often do, I draw on Corsaro’s (2012) work on children’s play cultures to contend that these instances of sociodramatic play are concerned with the expression of social power where children mobilise the affordances of play objects and map new forms of socialities. When seen through the conceptual prism of generational order (Alanen, 2011), the classroom exemplifies a generational structure wherein the adult position (that of the teacher) exists only in relation to the child position (that of the student), and the power relationship between the two is one of asymmetry. Therefore, by pretending to be teachers and in the absence of those positioned in society as adults, both Sonam and Shruti are temporarily assuming a superordinate role and exercising the power that comes with it. This superordinate social position is simply not available to them in their everyday lives. Thus, by engaging in this pretend play, they are not only turning the tables on real school but actively seeking out and displaying social power in a space –​their bedroom –​where it will go unchallenged, which in turn will reinforce their superordinate position. 102

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From Anandi, Sonam and Shruti’s cases, it is evident that constructions of solitary leisurescapes –​a leisure of one’s own –​are made possible when ‘alone time’ and ‘own space’ coincide. Like other children in my study, all three of them have their own rooms where they sleep, do homework and spend their alone time engaged in various forms of leisure. Their rooms are media rich and multifunctional. They house play paraphernalia like toys, games, craft materials, ICT devices and story books. The presence of these leisure ingredients coupled with segments of unscheduled time enable them to indulge in forms of spontaneous, unstructured play, which offer a creative leisure outlet beyond organised activities and collective leisure that happen in the presence of adults or are adult-​controlled. Their middle-​class privileges need to be recognised to fully understand the way these children are able to establish the boundaries of their ‘alone time’, and the kind of activities they are able to engineer (see Banaji, 2017). The way children organised their solitary leisure geographies was also inflected by gender, age and their ethnic identities. While the girls in my study spent most of their alone time drawing, reading and playing with soft toys, the boys devoted theirs to play video games. Consistent with previous studies (Kinzie and Joseph, 2008; Masanet, 2016), there was a clear gender difference across participating families vis-​à-​ vis children’s attitude towards video games: all the boys in the study played them regularly while very few girls had access to or showed interest in video games. And age differences played a role here too. The child participants aged 11 and 12, especially boys, were more likely to partake in screen-​based leisure while on their own rather than play with toys or engage in pretend plays. As Ankit (12) told me during his interview: “It’s more technology and that’s just how people would chill nowadays.” For him, ‘chilling’ –​that is solitary leisure and relaxation –​is mediated through his game console and mobile phone. Another 12-​year-​old, Koel described to me how her personal mobile phone doubles up as an instrument to play games as well as a vehicle for listening to songs via internet-​based applications like Spotify. In some cases, such media-​r ich geographies of casual leisure were imbued with racial and ethnic connotations. For instance, Suraj, an 11-​year-​old boy, avidly follows the YouTube vlogger Lilly Singh, who was better known at the time of the interview by her YouTube channel name “IISuperwomanII” which then had over 40 million subscribers. Suraj’s father told me that Suraj spends too much time watching these videos: “He [Suraj] is on the iPad all day … watching the videos … [of] SuperWoman.” Lilly Singh is a Canadian Indian of Punjabi background who makes and uploads comedy videos on YouTube where she play-​acts everyday scenarios often featuring her fictional parents, Paramjeet and Manjeet, who are played by Lilly herself. In these videos she draws on the idiosyncrasies of Indian parents and her own experiences of being a racialised minority woman in 103

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Canada to deal with a host of social issues from a feminist and anti-racist standpoint. Singh’s YouTube videos have earned her global fame and at the time of my interaction with Suraj in 2017 she was one of the top ten highest-​paid YouTube stars in the world with over $10.5 million in earnings (Forbes, nd). The fact that Suraj –​who much like Lilly Singh is of an Indian Punjabi background –​enjoys watching these videos as a solitary leisure activity and relates to Singh’s comedy sketches about her Punjabi migrant parents illuminates how race and ethnicity make tracks within children’s solitary leisurescapes and the way children like Suraj develop a sense of identification with Indian diasporic content creators on social media who represent issues and stories that he can relate to. In this way, Suraj participates in fields of online interaction and consumption that link Indian diasporic actors across transnational space, informing their lived identities in the offline world.

Remapping the timescapes of leisure By recognising ‘the central importance of time for understanding the way that families are organized and live their lives’ (Daly, 2001: 2), I have adopted a temporal lens to illuminate key facets of children’s family and casual leisure experiences. Time is conceptualised across these middle-​class British Indian families are a resource that needs to be carefully leveraged to create openings for family leisure or by children to pursue various casual leisure activities. The recurring idea of leisure as an inter-​subjective and negotiated temporal experience is encapsulated in the accounts I have presented in this chapter. Such lived understandings of leisure within families fly in the face of definitions that posit leisure as an individual residual experience or free time obtained after paid work and housework are done (Roberts, 1981; Schor, 1991). The analysis here has shown that time in leisure is entangled with spatial, generational and material contexts. The temporal appraisal of children’s leisure geographies and leisure-​ based parenting practices has uncovered the way class, race and ethnicity are implicated in the temporal experiences of the families I studied. The demands of parents’ occupation and relative flexibility of working hours, length of commute, and availability of ‘scaffolding structures’ (Beckman and Mazmanian, 2020) such as grandparents and childminders are key to whether and how opportunities for cross-​generational family activities are co-​constructed by family members. As Harrington (2001: 343) has pointed out, family leisure time can and often does assume a plethora of different form or entail various levels of organisation, and experiences of it can differ widely too ‘depending on whom in the family you ask’. By including the voices of both parents and children, and looking at time issues vis-​à-​vis family leisure from multiple vantage points within the family has produced 104

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a multi-​layered understanding of the way individual biographies and family lives are shaped by wider, historical forces and how family leisure can act as a means for families to engage with or challenge structural constrains. Also noteworthy in the spaces of family leisure were forms of cultural consumption linked to ethnic and familial fields, such as watching Bollywood films together, which help nurture a cross-​generational pool of Indian popular culture. The way children’s ‘screen-​time’ is navigated within families also revealed how time issues are enmeshed with culturally coded generational structures and the way children’s agency are dependent on spatial and temporal considerations. Insofar as parents were considered, screen-​time regulation embodied their concerns over children’s digital leisure and safety. Similarly, children’s mobilisation of ‘alone time’ offered a frame for understanding children’s subjective meaning-​making, the heterogenous nature of their casual leisurescapes, their relational agency, and their beings and becomings as present and future agents. Today, time no longer suffers from ‘conceptual deprivation’ (Daly, 1996: 2) in family studies with a welcome growth of research that interrogate time issues in everyday family practices (Morgan, 2011; Beckman and Mazmanian, 2020). However, issues of time in relation to children’s family life and leisurescapes continue to be insufficiently theorised. More often than, leisure has been cast in family studies as ‘residual time’ (Schor, 1991) rather than a core aspect of ‘family practices’ (Morgan, 1996) around which time is budgeted and negotiated among family members. Where acceleration of family life in middle-​class professional households are discussed, children’s experiences are seldom heard. This chapter has addressed these gaps in the extant scholarship and in doing so has underlined the ways in which class and race are entwined within the timescapes of children’s leisure. Developing this critical leisure studies approach further, the next chapter unpacks the cultural politics of leisure within middle-​class British Indian families through a focus on relationality and place-​making practices.

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Relating, Place-​Making and the Cultural Politics of Leisuring In his flagship BBC Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed, the sociologist Laurie Taylor dedicated an entire episode in May 2021 on migrants in London. As part of this broadcast, Taylor and his academic guests reflected on how the historical and contemporary cultural landscape of the city has been shaped by centuries of migration. Describing his own everyday encounters as a Londoner, Taylor (2021) commented: ‘Living in what can be claimed to be the most cosmopolitan city on earth, like many other [white] English residents, I have only occasionally become properly aware of its status as a migrant city through my encounters with such cultural events as the Notting Hill Carnival, the Chinese New Year in Soho, or the Diwali celebration in Trafalgar Square.’ Taylor’s (2021) lament of having had only a passing engagement with London’s identity as a migrant city sits alongside an acknowledgement of the key role that community-​based leisure spaces –​such as the Diwali festivities organised every year in Trafalgar Square –​play not only in the collective life of migrant and diasporic communities but also in facilitating inter-​cultural dialogues and educating ethnic ‘others’ about diverse cultural heritages and directing place-​making within the city’s urban multiculture. The fact that leisure spaces such as these, often brought into being for a short span of time through the effort of volunteers, prompt ‘many … [white] English residents’ of the city otherwise oblivious of London’s long history as a migrant city to ‘become properly aware’ of its rich cultural diversity –​or ‘super-​diversity’ to use Vertovec’s (2007) term –​demonstrate the political role of leisure as a site for reinforcing ethnic pride, directing ethnic place-​making and facilitating cultural exchanges across ethnic boundaries. Therefore, any discussion of leisure within racialised minority communities needs to pay attention to 106

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the cultural politics of leisure: that is to say, the way leisure extends far beyond individual experiences and effects, and is a key player in forging social ties, mediating inter-​community relations and carving modes of belonging. The previous chapters have reinforced the need to adopt a relational and processual view of leisure as ‘doing’ –​or what I call ‘leisuring’ in short –​to fully grasp the dynamics of leisure as a social phenomenon that unfolds within contexts of social inequality and power relations. In extending these conversations, in this chapter I draw on interview narratives with parents and children as well as my fieldwork observations to cast fresh light on the cultural politics of leisuring vis-​à-​vis middle-​class British Indian households. My aim here is to illustrate some of the profound ways in which children’s and families’ leisure engagements implicate relationships, cultural flows, and power structures in the context of the urban multiculture of London and its environs. I argue that the leisure spaces constructed by these diasporic families not only have an internal function in terms of cross-​generational reproduction of classed and racial identities and dispositions but also embody an external function in terms of mediating social relationships with others and contributing to inter-​ cultural exchanges. I contend that we can better understand the cultural politics of British Indian children’s leisure once we have discerned the way these internal and external functions of leisure interact. In doing so, my intention is not to come up with an exhaustive catalogue of the many ways in which the politics of leisure plays out in the participating families but to illuminate some of the key themes embedded in the cultural politics of these families’ leisure, thereby paving the way for thinking more critically about the internal and external functions of leisure. .

Leisuring as relating: social relationships as relationships of play The child participants in my study had two main modes of play in their daily lives: in-​person play in their everyday spaces and screen-​based play. The former typically involved unstructured, tactile games that children played with other children, mostly peers and siblings, in everyday spaces such as school playgrounds, community spaces, leisure centres and homes. On the other hand, screen-​based play involved children either playing by themselves or with friends who occupy the same online space while inhabiting different offline settings. As children described these leisure actions, they also reflected on the role these activities play in cementing their relationships with others. The intimate connections that children establish with others, both within and beyond their families, play a significant part in shaping their understanding of and engagement with the world around them, and it therefore merits dedicated attention. 107

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Successive surveys by the pan-​UK network Playday (2013, 2008) have found that although there is a positive attitude towards children’s play and outdoor activities among children and their parents in the UK, most children do not play outdoors or explore the local area on their own owing largely due to parental anxieties around traffic risks and danger from strangers. Similarly, when Mullan (2019) looked at UK children’s time use patterns from 1975 to 2015 he too noted that children today are spending a more home-​based life than previous generations, driven by dramatic increase in screen-​based activities, increase in homework and greater risk anxieties that keep children from outdoor spaces. Therefore, it is not surprising the children I spoke to for this project did not engage in unsupervised outdoor play and had limited independent mobility. Instead, they circulated between adult-​supervised spaces that their parents deemed to be safe for them and conducive to their holistic development. However, notwithstanding the institutionalisation of their daily lives, the children in my study seized what I call ‘interstitial’ time-​spaces, that is to say time-​space in-​between scheduled activities to create ad-​hoc opportunities for play, thereby cementing their relationship with friends as evident from the following quotes: ‘During lunch we just play, there’s this game called Last Man or the other name is Bulldog. There’s one person in the middle. Everyone else is on the other side. You have to run across without the person in the middle touching them and saying Bulldog.’ (Suraj, 11) ‘Thursday my mum drops me off to my friend’s house and then we play for a little while and then we have to get ready to go to school. Normally we just play Connect4 or we do this wheelbarrow thing where my friend lies down on the floor and then I lift her feet up. And then with her hands she needs to move forward. She always falls flat on her face.’ (Aashka, 8) ‘[In the school playground] I play “It” [with my friends]. So, someone is the catcher, they’re call It and there’s a runner and you have to run around and run around. The catcher has to catch the person and say “It” and then the person who catches is now the “Itter” and the other person has to run away from them.’ (Anandi, 8) These excerpts from my one-​to-​one interviews with Suraj, Aashka and Anandi respectively, capture some of the important ways in which children mobilise, for the purposes of play, such interstitial time segments as lunch breaks in school or the waiting time at a friend’s house before going to school. The fact that I did not observe children play in real time, in their own leisure spaces, is a methodological limitation of this study. Nevertheless, the interview 108

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narratives drive home a number of key aspects of the way leisure mediates children’s inter-​personal ties and shine light on the mechanisms through which games and lore circulate among children and their (dis)continuities across time and within a defined geography. They also highlight the fact that tactile games have not been completely replaced by screen-​based leisure and that the former still has a prominent place in children’s leisure cultures today. Although the predominant site of play has shifted, from unsupervised streets and outdoors to largely adult-​supervised spaces, tactile offline games played by children endure. The games named by Suraj, Aashka and Anandi carry their own cultural history, and hence they connect multiple generations of childhood peer cultures in Britain. The game ‘Bulldog’ that Suraj describes is categorised by Opie and Opie (1969) in their monumental compilation of children’s games from across Britain as a ‘catching game’ wherein the task of the eponymous player (the Bulldog) stood in the middle of the playing field is not to run after other players but to intercept them as they attempt to cross from one side to the other. On the contrary, the game of ‘It’ that Anandi describes is a ‘chasing game’ (Opie and Opie, 1969) where the ‘Itter’ runs after other players in an attempt to turn them into an ‘Itter’ by physically touching them. In both these games, of the catching and chasing varieties, tactility plays a decisive part as ‘touch with the tip of the finger is enough to transform a player’s part in the game’ (Opie and Opie, 1969: 62). Qualitatively different from ‘Bulldog’ and ‘It’, Aashka’s favourite ‘the wheelbarrow’ is a ‘racing game’ (Opie and Opie, 1969), which is played in dyads where one player attempts to walk on their hands as the other holds their feet. These games have been part of the social geography of children’s playscapes in the UK for decades. Large-​scale studies about children’s games such as Opie and Opie’s (1969) classic ethnographic work from some five decades ago and Roud’s (2010) relatively recent documentation have both found ‘Bulldog’ to be particularly popular among primary school-​age children across Britain. Versions of the playground game ‘It’ as described by Anandi are known by different names in different parts of the UK. In the 1960s Opie and Opie (1969) produced a map showing the geographical patterns of the different names of this game such as ‘Tig’, ‘Dets’, ‘Dobby’, ‘Touch’ and others (see Opie and Opie, 1969: 64–​8). Interestingly, they found London-​based children called this game ‘He’ whereas ‘It’ was the name of choice for children in parts of west country, Cambridgeshire and the then county of Huntingdonshire. This raises important questions about the way names of children’s games and their content flow across historical and geographical contexts. The fact that London-​based Anandi has come to know that particular game as ‘It’ rather than ‘He’ –​as London-​based children several decades ago did –​gestures towards patterns of continuity and change that underwrites intergenerational circulation of play cultures across time and space. Rather than seeing this transference of game cultures, their names and rules, as unidirectional flows 109

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from children of the past to those in the present, or even as representative of an insular children’s ‘collective culture, enduring and separated off from the adult world’ (James et al, 1998: 99), the excerpts show a more dynamic process at work. While talking about ‘Bulldog’, Suraj later told me that he got to know about the game from his Taekwondo instructor Kevin who taught some of the children the rules of the game on the sidelines of his Taekwondo lessons. Suraj then introduced the game to his school where his friends embraced it. Therefore, far from being ‘separated off’, these play cultures endure through a relational dynamic between adults and children wherein children co-​construct and partake in their peer cultures by appropriating cultural information from adults to address their own social worlds and relationships. Reading these interview extracts in relation to each other highlights the fact that play is an inter-​subjective social process through which children constitute themselves into friendship groups. The idea of friendship is particularly generative in this context for thinking about children’s intra-​ generational bonds and for this reason I join forces with those (Thrift, 2005; Blatterer, 2015) who argue that the model of intimacy and social relationship signalled by the term ‘friend’ is important in and of itself and should not be subsumed under neighbouring concepts of community or networks especially in the case of children. Relatedly, recent sociological studies on children’s friendships (Carter and Nutbrown, 2016; Iqbal et al, 2017; Vincent et al, 2018) have stressed its role as a site where children come to grips with social differences and deploy their agency in negotiating evolving social relationships. These processes are also spatial, connected to the affordances of the place, which children must negotiate (see Blazek, 2011). Seen from this perspective, Suraj’s, Aashka’s, and Anandi’s accounts of play lay bare the key role that unstructured tactile games play in mediating and cementing their relationship with their friends and the way these processes play out in adult-​supervised spaces such as school playgrounds or leisure centres. Drawing on these narratives of play, a case can be made that children’s relationship with their friends rest on the dynamics of mutual association, disclosure, intimacy and playfulness encapsulated in play sessions, and indeed friendships can be viewed as relationships of play. Looking at this association between friendship and play, however, does not equate to championing romantic visions of childhood innocence. Instead, as I have shown in detail in Chapter 4, children’s leisure spaces including that of play are racialised and classed. The children in my study inhabit middle-​class spaces, and the risk perception that keeps them away from unsupervised outdoor spaces also means that they have extremely limited contact or interaction with classed ‘others’. However, these middle-​class spaces they inhabit and pass through –​such as their school, home and consumption outlets –​are fractured by racial hierarchies that marginalise the presence of racialised minority children. In Chapter 4, Aashka recounted how 110

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white children in her school “make fun of us, Indians” and went on to share an anecdote where one of her white peers proclaimed “Indians smell like poo”, which upset her and prompted her to challenge this racial stereotypes and lodge a complaint with the teacher. Play spaces are therefore politically charged arenas constructed by classed and racial boundaries, which engender possibilities for intra-​generational friendships as well as contestations. These processes complicate the dominant narrative that runs through current media discourses, policy documents and much of academic writing, which promote play as an overwhelmingly positive thing, a panacea for the educational, developmental and public health challenges that children face by making them physically and mentally agile and guiding them away from sedentary activities (Frost, 2010; Yogman et al, 2018; Sahlberg and Doyle, 2019). These simplistic notions of play and their benefits overlook the long history and contemporary manifestation of play as an arena of power where the play practices of racially and ethnically marked children have often been seen in deficit terms and where these children routinely face surveillance, violence and prejudice (Bryan, 2020). Therefore, we cannot fully appreciate the social implications of children’s play cultures without considering how belonging and exclusion/​inclusion are constructed by children within spaces of play (Juutinen et al, 2018). Gender is also key to the way children’s play spaces are organised and belonging is constructed therein. Most of the participating children in my study acknowledged that their networks of play, and thus of friendship, comprise almost exclusively of same-​sex peers. As the nine-​year-​old girl Shruti put it: “I don’t like [playing with boys] … because they’re very rough. They always like football a lot and they play very roughly and stuff.” Boys too seem to have boys-​only groups with whom they played most of the time, and online video games were particularly popular among them: ‘We do play Fortnite together. We all do that together. You can play against each other [online]. So, the most you can get in a party is four but there’s usually a lot of people online.’ (Ankit, 12) ‘I play quite a lot on the Xbox. … 75 per cent of the times I play with my friend. So, we organise a time to play. Normally I play in the evening. … I like it a lot and also, I can talk with my friends, [and] play with my friends that way.’ (Chirag, 12) Ankit and Chirag here illustrate how gender homophily is brought into being within their everyday life through shared playing of synchronous online games, where their friends come to occupy a shared online space even though they are based in different offline settings. I further argue that through these practices of online gaming and the shared leisure arena it creates 111

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between friends that children co-construct themselves as gendered subjects and, in the case of Ankit and Chirag, their online gaming with same-​sex peers is directly linked to the construction and performance of masculinity. The role of leisure in mediating patterns of relationships within children’s lived geographies is in no way restricted to intra-​generational bonds with peers. It also envelopes children’s intimate relationships with family members including parents and siblings. Every child participant in my study, except for one, had a sibling and their interaction with their siblings often revolved around myriad forms of unstructured, informal leisure at home and outside. For example, eight-​year-​old Anandi here talks about playing with her 12-​ year-​old brother in the back garden of their West London home: ‘We play badminton outside. You know that net there, we just put the ball over. I go on the bed and play a pillow fight with him. We make dens together. I really like playing with him [brother], without him I wouldn’t be as happy as I am right now.’ Just before I arrived at Anandi’s house on a Sunday afternoon in late summer, Anandi and her brother Chirag were informally playing badminton in the back garden. They decided they wanted to play badminton that afternoon, but they did not have a net. Their parents stepped in and made a makeshift badminton ‘net’ by tying together two pieces of fabric (see Figure 6.1), which presumably were old ‘dupattas’ (a form of Indian scarf). I argue that these India-​born parents’ resourcefulness in coming up with such an improvised solution, an innovative fix that works with available even discarded household resources to produce something useful, draws upon the everyday culture of ‘jugaad’ prevalent in India. Jugaad is a northern Indian expression for ‘improvisation, quick-​fix, intermediate solutions that allow everyday life to Figure 6.1: ‘Jugaad’ badminton in the back garden

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somehow function even in the absence of permanent, durable infrastructures’ (Kaur, 2016: 314). It has been increasingly acknowledged in recent years that it is the attitude of jugaad that underpins various aspects of social life including economic activities in India (Jeffrey and Young, 2014; Badami, 2018). Therefore, when middle-​class high earning professionals like Anandi’s parents enact the idea of jugaad, they are drawing upon an embodied social practice of the everyday that they grew up with in India. The leisure space engineered in the back garden is not only cementing the relationship between Anandi and her brother, Chirag, but also linking together multiple cultural registers across a transnational field wherein jugaad is mounted in the diaspora. In many of the families I visited, the children had intimate links with members of their extended family spread across translocal and transnational boundaries. Suraj (11) has cousins in the US where his mother’s siblings live. When I interviewed Suraj one-​to-​one, he told me about the way he mobilises media technologies to keep in contact with his US-​based cousins as captured in the following quote: “I was at my grandma and grandad’s house because my mum and dad were out. And so, my cousin Aman in America, he Facetimed me and said hi Suraj. And just told me that he started playing football for a team and plays a defender.” Unlike white British families, cousin relationships in many Indian families are treated as sibling-​like relationship, which has led to the coinage of Indian English terms such as ‘cousin-​brother’ and ‘cousin-​sister’, which were used widely by several parents and children in my study. Suraj has cousins in India and the US, with whom he keeps in touch via video calls and text messages. As is evident from this interview extract, leisure pursuits are dominant themes around which his online conversation with cousins unfold and these synchronous video conversations themselves become a form of causal leisure activity for him. Casual acts of leisure contribute positively to parent–​child bonds as well. During my interview with him, IT contractor Vikas, father of Sonam (8) and Ekta (13), told me how he mobilises everyday spaces of casual leisure to strengthen his relationships with his daughters as well as to establish a connection between his childhood in India and his daughters’ childhoods in the UK: ‘I put them [daughters] to sleep most days, at least three or four times a week. I read them a story. [I read] whatever she has or Tinkle Digest, which I used to read when I was young, so I brought them from India. It’s a very Indian type of comic.’ The act of reading bedtime stories described by Vikas posits reading as a social rather than a solitary activity. Later in the interview, he commented that this bed-​time routine of informal story-​reading is a means to “build 113

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a bond between us”, thereby mooring the non-​consumptive leisure act of story-​reading to the social process of fathering. It is not any other text that he chooses as a facilitator of these ‘bonding’ sessions but a particular Indian children’s magazine called Tinkle Digest that he grew up reading. Tinkle was created in India in 1980 as an English-​language children’s comic magazine by the publishing house of Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) (which translates into English as ‘Immortal Picture Stories’), which was at that time an immensely popular English-​language children’s magazine in India (McLain, 2009; Chandra, 2008). Brought to the market as a response to Western comic books, ACK carved its niche among urban, English-​ speaking, middle-​class children in India with its glossy, illustrated fortnightly issues featuring stories of heroism of mostly men drawn from India’s history, religious texts and mythology (Sreenivas, 2010). Tinkle was conceived by illustrators and editors of ACK as a more contemporaneous and cosmopolitan comic magazine for children younger than typical ACK readers. It regularly invited its child readership to contribute stories and had a recurring cast of non-​religious comic characters drawn from everyday life like Suppandi and Shikari Shambu (Hunter Shambu) (Chandra, 2008; McLain, 2009). Just like ACK, Tinkle targeted urban, English-​speaking, middle-​class children like Vikas who grew up in a city in western India and went to a fee-​paying English-​medium school. Therefore, Tinkle is not only embedded in 38-​ year-​old Vikas’ childhood memories but is also emblematic of his own social locations as a relatively privileged middle-​class child in 1980s’ India. Now, bringing back current editions of Tinkle from India for his daughters has become a part of his biannual visits to India and his reading of Tinkle to his daughters at bedtime helps establish links between multiple generations of children’s leisure cultures across transnational time-​space. Furthermore, it can be argued that Vikas’ effort at exposing his daughters to –​what he describes as –​“a very Indian type of comic” gathers a greater urgency since at the time I conducted fieldwork for this project only 4 per cent of all 9,115 children’s books published in the UK had Black and racialised minority characters, and only 1 per cent of those books had a racialised minority main character (Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, 2018). Against this backdrop, Tinkle Digest with its cast of Suppandi, Shanti and Shikari Shambu among others offers to Sonam and Ekta a set of visible representations of Indian characters that are not present in the vast majority of children’s literature available to them in the UK. Therefore, the casual leisure space wherein Sonam (8) listens to stories from Tinkle Digest being read aloud by her father, Vikas, at bedtime is an illustration of the way parents’ involvement in children’s casual leisure can become vehicles for transmitting cultural memories and developing positive ethnic and racial identity in their children. The children’s accounts I have presented here shed light on the way various kinds of casual leisure activities contribute towards cementing children’s 114

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intra-​and inter-​generational relationships and their politics of belonging. The time-​spaces of everyday unstructured leisure become potent sites for the circulation of intangible and embodied leisure cultures that connect the leisure lives of today’s children with that of children in the past. For instance, the stories I have shared here illuminate how children’s tactile games are passed down informally through generations of British childhoods. At the same time, emergent forms of online gaming culture offer a window into how contemporary children’s leisure cultures are simultaneously informed by the historical context of the society they inhabit as well as by the novel leisure activities that are coming into being through technological innovations (see Sen, 2014a, 2014b). The examples also illustrated that these processes of leisuring unfold within classed, gendered and racial boundaries that befuddle established romantic ideals that often accompany discussions of children’s play in the global north (see Louv, 2008; Frost, 2010). Having unravelled the cultural politics of leisuring within middle-​class British Indian families through an exploration of children’s intra-​and inter-​generational relationships, I will now proceed to look closely at another important way in which the politics of British Indian families’ leisure culture manifests itself: minoritised ethnic leisure practices as vehicles for place-​making in multi-​ethnic Britain.

Leisuring as place-​making in the diaspora Every year, since 2001, London’s Trafalgar Square has played host to a day-​long public celebration of the Indian festival of Diwali, which attracts the attention of Londoners as evident from Taylor’s (2021) reflections at the beginning of this chapter. The festival of Diwali, which is observed by Hindus, Sikhs and Jains alike, is celebrated on the public square through a range of embodied cultural practices including live performance of Indian dance and music, and lighting of the ceremonial lamp. Diwali is a religious occasion that marks, or so the popular Hindu mythology goes, Lord Ram’s return to his kingdom after slaying the ten-​headed demon Ravana and ‘rescuing’ his wife, Sita, as depicted in the ancient Indian epic Ramayana. The Diwali day each year is determined by the Hindu lunisolar calendar and therefore it is different every year, falling either in October or early November. Notwithstanding the exact date of Diwali as per celestial movements, ‘Diwali on Trafalgar Square’ or DOTS as it is often branded as, is supported by the office of the Mayor of London and is organised on a Sunday within a few weeks of the actual Diwali day to maximise attendance. This in itself is emblematic of the accommodations that characterise diasporic religious lives wherein key religious occasions are often rescheduled to weekends so that more people can take part (see Mukherjee, 2022). When I visited DOTS on a mid-​October Sunday afternoon in 2016, I was greeted with the sights, sounds, smell and other embodied dimensions of 115

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this Indian cultural festival in the heart of London. One end of the square hosted a temporary stage while the other three sides were flanked by rows of makeshift stalls selling Indian snacks and sweets, natural medicines, sarees, travel vouchers, meditation kits and charity coupons to name just a few. There was also a small exhibition put up under a marquee to educate people about Indian soldiers who fought in the First World War. A group of children presumably of Indian heritage soon took to the steps of Trafalgar Square, right in front of the National Gallery, and broke out into a series of carefully choreographed dance performances that prefaced a day of Diwali celebrations. The children matched their steps to the tunes of Hindi and Gujarati music that exalted Hindu gods and goddesses. They watched over their shoulders and kept track of their peers, improvising the moment they faltered. Within this dancing troupe were two children essaying the role of the Hindu mythical couple –​Ram and Sita –​while three others hopped around the steps masquerading as the mythical monkeys of the same epic Ramayana, carrying mock-​pieces of rock with the letters R, A, and M written respectively on them. The ancient epic has it that a troop of monkeys who were devoted to Lord Ram helped build a footbridge across the ocean by floating unsinkable pieces of rocks bearing Ram’s name thus helping him and his followers cross over to the other side and fight the demon king Ravana who had abducted his wife. This scripture-​inspired choreography paved the way to a day full of dancing and singing, this time from the stage set up right across the steps on the other side of the Square. Besides this performance, there was a dedicated marque called ‘Children’s Zone’ within the row of stalls in front of the National Gallery. In that ‘Zone’ children could participate in a Ramayana-​inspired activity: a human-​size portrait of the ten-​headed demon Ravana stood at one end and children could score points by shooting suction-​cup arrows and attaching them to one of Ravana’s heads. Across the Square, groups of adult performers grooving to popular Bollywood numbers breezed in and out of the stage all day, punctuated by folk dances from different regions of India and children appearing at regular intervals to display their acquired knowledge of Indian dance forms. For instance, a troupe of children came to the stage and danced to the popular Bollywood song “Indiawaale” (which literally translates as, ‘we Indians’), waving the Indian national flag and on another occasion a group of children dressed as Indian soldiers performed a silent parade on stage in commemoration of the Indian soldiers’ contribution to the First World War. As discussed in Chapter 3, there are now scores of Indian dance academies across the UK with a large concentration in London which offer regular lessons to children in Bollywood and other Indian dance forms. Several parents I interviewed had specifically sought out such opportunities for their children as a way of enacting ethnic and racial socialisation where Indian 116

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dance forms were understood as valuable ethnic cultural capital that could be passed on to the next generation. Situated in central London, Trafalgar Square gets its name from the British Naval victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. It is emblematic of white British military pride with Nelson’s column standing in the middle of the public square. The one-​day Diwali event that I have described here reinscribed the white colonial space of Trafalgar Square and transformed it –​however temporarily –​into a vehicle for the celebration and assertation of cultural pride by racialised minorities like the British Indians. In other words, through the festival and the live performances these diasporic subjects are engaged in ‘place-​making’. A place is ‘space plus meaning’ (Donofrio, 2010: 152), and it can be of varying sizes ‘from the small-​scale of a room … to the large scale of a farm or a city’ and beyond (Sack, 2003: 4). Any space can therefore be transformed into a place through the process of ‘place-​making’, that is by imbuing the space with symbolic meaning and this newly created ‘place’ has the potential to inform identity construction (Donofrio, 2010; Massey, 1998). By channelling cultural heritage in the form of performing arts and festivities, British Indians are able to direct place-​making at the heart of the contemporary ‘super-​diverse’ London (Vertovec, 2007), a city that consolidated its global prominence at the height of the British Empire through surplus appropriation from its colonies such as the Indian subcontinent (Mukherjee, 2010). Moreover, by lending greater visibility to their physical and non-​physical expressive culture, Indian diasporans forge a multi-​ethnic sense of belonging within London’s urban multiculture. The organisation of a festival of this scale draws upon the effort of a group of British Indian volunteers (mostly of Gujarati and north Indian heritage), and in turn the festival brings together and facilitates the expansion of these diasporic social networks. These occasionally produced community leisure spaces are also generative of the claims that diasporic groups advance for greater recognition and preservation of their cultural heritage in a society structured by whiteness. I further argue that the place-​making function of British Indian leisure occasions like public Diwali celebrations in central London, which extend beyond individual families or personal pursuits, contributes to and bolsters this diasporic community’s city-​making practices. Glick Schiller (2015: 109) defines city-​making ‘as an ongoing enactment of multiple trajectories that include neoliberal globe-​spanning restructuring as well as various quests of city residents, both migrant and non-​migrant, for forms of urban life that provide them with meaningful lives, equality, and social justice’. This expansive view of city-​making, where the city itself is no longer understood as a bounded unit, create affordances for interrogating the function of everyday leisure in city-​making as demonstrated by the example of Diwali celebrations I have presented here. London, founded by invading Romans, 117

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has been a migrant city for over two millennia and its growth as the nerve centre of the British empire and a global metropolis has further attracted people from all corners of the globe, especially from British (ex)colonies, which explains the immense diversity of national and ethnic identities seen in the city today (Panayi, 2020). We, therefore, need to think simultaneously about the global networks of power linked to colonialism and neoliberalism that have been restructuring London’s boundaries, cultures and economy, as well as the ways its residents actively shape its daily life, institutions and political economy (Glick Schiller and Schmidt, 2016). Seen through this lens, community-​based public leisure practices mounted by racialised minority diasporic groups emerge as powerful tools through which groups like British Indians in London are able to shape urban socialities and claim their status as city-​makers and not mere residents of a city whose social imaginaries and cultures are fixed and bounded. In mobilising cultural heritage and practises, these festivals as diasporic place-​making and city-​making exercises also fulfil an important pedagogical role. The places produced through community-​based leisure facilitates the comingling of Indian and non-​Indian Londoners, thus helping the latter appreciate Indian cultural expressions as evident from Taylor’s (2021) proclamations before. This pedagogic process also extends –​as we shall see in greater detail later –​to Indian diasporic children growing up in the UK and their ethnic and racial socialisation through leisure. Meanwhile, there are internal divisions within the Indian diaspora that these spaces throw into relief. For instance, the particular cultural expressions found within the DOTS platform are tied to Gujarati and northern Indian communities as evident in their use of Hindi and Gujarati music as well as the performance of a grand Garba (a circular dance form from Gujarat) as the focal point of the celebrations. The particular version of the Ram and Sita story narrated through the dance performances is one among several hundred versions of that story that circulates across South and Southeast Asia (Ramanujan, 1991; Richman, 1991). The version presented in Trafalgar Square derives from Valmiki’s Sanskrit text and is the most prevalent telling of the Ram and Sita story and is routinely invoked in northern India by the Hindu upper castes to be the authoritative account at the exclusion of more radical versions that are circulated orally among marginalised communities in other parts of India (Thapar, 2014). This cultural politics of mythology adds another layer of complexity to the Diwali festival. Based on these reflections, I argue that in purporting to reproduce and showcase an authentic Indian culture at the heart of London, this festival produces a particular upper caste, middle-​class, north/​west Indian assemblage of tangible and intangible heritage that centre the heteronormative family. The festival, which is sponsored by several Indian companies and corporate houses, also establishes neoliberal ostentation as a metonym for Indian culture. The political economy of these events 118

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merits wider examination. At the turn of the last century, the government of India undertook a series of policy reforms to actively reach out to and court the global diaspora, extending a cultural citizenship to them based around shared historical links. These changes in the framing of the diaspora in India coincided with and were indeed fuelled by the economic reforms unleased since the early 1990s that sought to attract foreign investment in the country and therefore the Indian diaspora subject came to be articulated in terms of neoliberal citizenship (Mani and Varadarajan, 2005). Today, this complex web of cultural citizenship, ethnic pride, neoliberal values and wealth shape a large section of Indian diasporic community spaces and the DOTS platform is no exception. Apart from major festivals with pan-​Indian-​diaspora appeal, there are a range of regional/​religious festivities that too assume importance as sites for enacting and transmitting cultural heritage to Indian children growing up in the diaspora. Aparna and her husband, Sumit, for instance, are middle-​ class, upper-​caste Indian Bengalis living in London. Their daughter Koel is 12. Aparna –​who holds an MBA and is currently a housewife –​often takes her software programmer husband and daughter to attend Bengali cultural festivals in and around London. Aparna who grew up in a Hindu household now describes her religious identity as “atheist or agnostic” and adds that “I’m not teaching my daughter to be Hindu.” Nevertheless, she feels the need to engage in certain practices linked to her cultural-​religious background so that her daughter can appreciate her cultural background as a diasporic Bengali: “I don’t have a puja room [shrine] in my house, I don’t do regular prayers or anything. … [But] I do Saraswati Puja at home, only so that my daughter gets exposure to the culture, you know.” Aparna engineers ethnic cultural capital transmission through place-​making at two different scales. Despite being a self-​declared “atheist or agnostic”, she celebrates Hindu religious festivals like Saraswati Puja –​which is particularly popular in West Bengal –​every spring at her London home by erecting a ‘place’ for the worship of Saraswati (the Hindu goddess of learning and performing arts) within the domestic space of her living room. An icon of the goddess is also kept in the living room all year round. She also takes her family to Durga Puja celebrations in London. Durga Puja is a Hindu multi-​day religious festival celebrated mostly by Hindus Bengali in autumn every year and it is considered to be the biggest festival in the Indian state of West Bengal where both Aparna and her husband Sumit grew up. Indeed, Durga Puja has been described as the ‘single most important festival in Bengal’s rich and diverse religious calendar’, an annual event that ‘outstrips anything [else] that happens in Bengali life in terms of pomp, glamour, and popularity’ (Ray, 2017: 1126). Here in the diaspora, Durga Puja is taken beyond its religious frame and understood as a Bengali social event where the cultural activities surrounding the religious occasion are important in 119

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their own right. Several Durga Puja celebrations are currently organised by diasporic Indian Bengali groups across the UK –​by a recent estimate the number stands at 70 with the majority of these events held within Greater London (see Mukherjee, 2022). Unlike in West Bengal, where installations housing the Durga idol are put up in public spaces, these diasporic Durga Puja celebrations happen indoors, almost exclusively in hired venues such as community centres, event spaces and church halls. Much like the Diwali festival in Trafalgar Square, these pujas are often organised over the weekend without strictly adhering to the exact timings of the Bengali lunisolar calendar that lays down the timetable for the ritual worship of the goddess. During the festival –​which typically lasts for five days but is often condensed into a weekend affair –​the idol worship and rituals are accompanied by a busy schedule of cultural activities. Such adaptations to the staging of Durga Puja festivals in the diaspora has been noted elsewhere in Europe and North America, and ethnographic studies have also underscored the importance of these community leisure spaces for the performance of a transnational Bengali Indian identity and its crucial role in binding diasporans into ethnic social networks (McDermott, 2011; Banerji, 2019). During my fieldwork visits to several Durga Puja venues across London, it was noteworthy that all the venues had designated space in their schedule for children’s activities and a stage was often set up for cultural performances that showcased Bollywood numbers and Bengali dance music (in particular Tagore songs and old film songs) among other acts. By partaking in these celebrations, Aparna’s family alongside many other Indian Bengalis in London are contributing to a community place-​making process: a discursive re-​inscription of the cultural geographies of London and the production of a Hindu–​Bengali place that does not exist throughout the year for this sub-​ national diaspora. In this sense, Durga Puja festivals held in London actively feed into diasporic city-​making processes where the urban based sociality is transformed through these cultural practices. The place of ethnic-​religious celebrations so produced assumes a pedagogic role for Aparna who argues that her daughter Koel will learn to appreciate her Bengali cultural heritage through her immersion in these community-​based leisure spaces. Similarly, Mitra (2015) in their ethnographic study of community-​based Saraswati Puja organised by Hindu Bengalis in Pennsylvania, United States, found that diasporic parents made concerted efforts at passing down community traditions and cultural values to their US-​born children through immersion in these spaces. Aparna’s narrative also demonstrates how community-​based leisure activities in the diaspora serve as vehicles for place-​making and city-​ making as well as a conduit for the (re)production of cultural identities in a ‘super-​diverse’ (Vertovec, 2007) city like London. In other words, the co-​creation of community leisure spaces through festivals contributes to the 120

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development and nurturance of diasporic identities and social networks, and positively shapes urban socialities in a city that has been home to migrant communities since its very inception. By negotiating these social spaces within their country of settlement, a sub-​national diaspora like Indian Bengalis are able to reinforce their cultural identity, weave co-​ethnic social networks and in the process hand down non-​physical cultural heritage to their children who are now growing up in the diaspora. It must also be pointed out that the diasporic social networks that these Durga Puja celebrations draw upon and help expand, have class and caste connotations built into them for most of the organisers and participants are middle-​ class, upper-​caste Hindu Bengalis who project their cultural heritage as the ‘authentic’ diasporic expression of Hindu–​Indian Bengaliness. In this way, place-​making and ethnic cultural capital are co-​constitutive processes which direct attention to the multi-​layered cultural politics of leisure among diasporic communities. When the case of DOTS and that of indoor Durga Puja festivals are set alongside each other, what emerges is a picture of the multi-​scalar politics of leisuring insofar as middle-​class British Indian families are concerned. By multi-​scalar politics of leisuring I refer to the varying scale and scope of place-​making practices engineered through collective acts of diasporic leisure practices at home, in hired indoor venues, and in public spaces. When seen in this wider perspective, of networks that connect multiple spatial registers, we realise that the effects of middle-​class British Indian families’ leisure practices extend far beyond individual wellbeing and experiences –​as psychological approaches to leisure tend to highlight –​and implicates wider social and cultural geographies and feeds into processes of urban transformation and re-​imaginings. And in this scenario, the figure of the child is pivotal. Not only is there a prominent presence of child participants in these community leisure spaces, but the very raison d’être for organising these events in the first place is to channel intangible cultural heritage and practices to the next generation alongside reinforcing ethnic pride, connecting with co-​ ethnics, and advancing claims for greater recognition of racialised minority cultural presence in a multi-​ethnic context that privileges white middle-​class cultural expressions.

Thinking of cultural politics: leisure beyond an individualistic lens In this chapter, I have drawn on interview narratives of parents and children as well as my fieldwork observations to unpack the cultural politics of leisure as manifested through the processes of relating, place-​making and city-​making. Each of the preceding thematic sections has drawn attention to the ways in which leisure mediates social relationships and power 121

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structures. Based on these insights, it is evident that leisure in the lives of middle-​class Indian diasporic families cannot be reduced to individual psychological dimensions. As Harrington (2001: 353) has pointed out, all too often leisure theorists take the individual as the unit of analysis defining leisure as ‘intrinsically motivated, freely chosen enjoyable time and activity of individuals’ (emphasis added). Experiences of leisure activities, especially those that Stebbins (2009, 1997) calls casual and non-​consumptive leisure, are situated in the wider context and therefore their significance extend far beyond inter-​personal encounters. Examining the cultural politics of leisure has uncovered the interplay between what can be described as the internal and the external functions of leisure insofar as the families in my study are concerned. By internal function of leisure, I refer to the implications that leisure practices have for the immediate social world of the child, and it encompasses notions of identity, personal relationships, memories, belonging and class/​cultural reproduction. On the other hand, leisuring within these families also contributes to processes at a macro-​level, as evidenced through the examination of place-​making and city-​making practices presented here, which can be understood as the external functions of leisure. These internal and external functions are continually in dialogue, feeding off each other. There has been a recent growth of interest in children’s personal relationships and the processes through which children get to know those around them and nurture intimate connections with others (see Davies, 2015). However, the role that leisure plays in these processes is under-​explored and not fully appreciated. The narratives I have put forward in this chapter have directed the spotlight on leisure and its role in mediating a ‘whole constellation’ (Jamieson et al, 2006) of children’s personal connections including those with family members, siblings and friends that cut across generational structures. Children in my study often found themselves in institutional contexts surrounded by others, where casual leisure practices played a salient role in creating opportunities to develop intimate connections and knowledge of others. As Mason and Tipper (2008: 155) point out, children’s experiences and knowledge of others ‘are often highly tactile, tangible, sensory, and textured and based on a very embodied and closely observed familiarity’. And casual leisure practices such as in-​person and online games, reading and conversations are occasions for such forms of personal knowledge and connections to develop. At the same time, not all experiences created through these leisure interactions were positive, and I have shown instances of racial and gendered boundaries being drawn and notions of belonging being negotiated within the microgeographies of children’s casual leisuring. Hence, this dimension of the cultural politics of children’s leisure deserves greater scholarly attention than has been the case so far. The racialised minority middle-​class families that took part in my project occupy an ambivalent social location of simultaneous class privilege and 122

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racial disadvantage. They live in London and its extended suburban belt, a region that encompasses immense ethnic and racial diversity. London consolidated its global prominence at the height of British colonialism through surplus appropriation from the colonies, especially the Indian subcontinent (Mukherjee, 2010). And it is through those colonial and post-​colonial links, that migration flows between India and the UK were established. Today, London is a ‘super-​diverse’ (Vertovec, 2007) city where people from a wide range of ethnic and national identities live alongside each other. Nonetheless, the city region embodies a paradoxical mix of structural racism and a thriving urban multiculture (see Back and Sinha, 2016). Against this backdrop, the collective leisure activities of Indian diasporic groups leave their marks well beyond the domestic realm. My observation data from festival sites and other community leisure settings have demonstrated that collective leisure occasions serve as potent vehicles for these diasporic subjects to direct place-​making in a multi-​ethnic city shaped by colonialism and whiteness. By doing so, these forms of leisuring lend greater visibility to racialised minority cultural expressions and reinscribe the existing power relations however short lived. Building on these insights, I have also charted the ways in which these place-​making practices contribute to city-​making and in reframing diasporic subjects as active agents in the restructuring of London and its socialities. These findings open new avenues within leisure studies, where the link between place-​making and leisure has been under-​ explored. In the few instances where leisure scholars have engaged with these issues, the focus has remained on the part everyday leisure spaces can play in urban renewal and revitalisation initiatives (Florida, 2002; Johnson, Glover and Stewart, 2014). Beyond such instrumental initiatives alone, I have demonstrated how acts of minoritised community-​based leisure actively shape and help transform the everyday spaces, institutions, and social imaginaries of a city like London from the grounds up. Grasping these processes create new opportunities for thinking about the way race and ethnicity shape the leisurescapes of middle-​class British Indian families and that of the wider society in which they participate. Moreover, by putting the emergent scholarship exploring the links between diaspora and city-​making (Glick Schiller 2015; Glick Schiller and Schmidt, 2016) in conversation with critical leisure studies and the sociology of children’s leisure, the arguments presented in this chapter have the potential to pave new paths of research inquiry on leisure, diaspora and urban life.

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Concluding Thoughts The purpose of this book is to help develop a nuanced understanding of the way social inequalities and identities are re-​produced across generations through leisure, with a specific focus on the interplay of social class and race in the context of global geographical inequalities on one hand and the persistent structures of classed and racial disparities in the contemporary UK on the other. These issues have never been more relevant and pressing than in the aftermath of the COVID-​19 pandemic, which has focused public attention on inequalities in our society and prompted reflections on the tools we need to address them. When I conducted the fieldwork for this book in 2017–​18, the COVID-​19 pandemic was still a few years away. When it hit the UK and the country went into lockdown in March 2020, the everyday lives of children and their families including those who took part in my project changed in unprecedented ways. For several months on and off between 2020 and 2022, schools closed their doors to most children (except for those whose parents were deemed as essential workers), leisure facilities became out of bounds and for many adults working from home became the norm (Aspinall, 2022). Over this period, hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives to SARS-​CoV-​2 (the virus that causes COVID-​19), and many families and communities were left devastated. At the time of writing, the lockdown and most other public health measures imposed in the wake of the pandemic have been lifted. Schools, leisure centres and most offices have opened again with little or no pandemic-​ related restrictions. As we reflect back on the pandemic and look forward to building a post-​pandemic future, there are several important lessons that must be learned, and issues of social inequality and childhood are at the heart of these debates. The pandemic far from being a great equaliser, has shone fresh light on the deep and often hidden structures of inequality in our societies: those already disadvantaged pre-​pandemic, including people in lower income strata, those of racialised minority backgrounds or those who live in over-​crowded housing, were more likely than others to contract the disease in the first place and the various containment measures put in place by 124

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the government too disproportionately affected these disadvantaged sections of society (Maestripieri, 2021; Nazroo and Bécares, 2021; Blundell et al, 2022). The working from home arrangement lent itself best to many middle-​ class office-​based jobs whereas it was simply not applicable to those working in hospitality or manual labour occupations (Nolan, 2021). In education, the consequences have been stark. Evidence shows that in the academic year 2020/​21, disadvantaged pupils in England (usually those in receipt of free school meals) lost more learning than their affluent counterparts as the country went into lockdown, further widening the attainment gap especially in younger year groups (Renaissance Learning and Education Policy Institute, 2021; Education Endowment Foundation, 2022). The way the pandemic has exposed striking inequalities in health, employment, education and housing among others has fuelled fresh conversations about the need to combat inequalities and build a fairer and more just society as we come out of the pandemic. Germane to these efforts is a thorough understanding of the way inequalities are maintained and reproduced across generations so these chains can be broken. By pointing out the fact that the direct and indirect impacts of the pandemic were felt differently by different groups in the same society, Maestripieri (2021) has called on sociologists to focus on the relationship between multiple axes of inequality if we are to of fully grasp the scale of inequalities or tailor policies to address them. Social class and race are among the most important axes of inequalities in the UK (Gore, 2020; also see Sandset, 2021), and we need to think more critically about the way they implicate each other and shape social formations, opportunity structures and life chances. Among the many key sites where these complexities play out, education has received considerable attention especially for its role in promoting or thwarting upward social mobility (see Reay, 2017). However, through this book I want to take these questions to a new direction. It is my contention that children’s leisure plays a pivotal role in this regard, often in conjunction with education, and we need to develop our understanding of the way social inequalities and identities are articulated and (re)produced through the time-​spaces of children’s leisure –​ something that has been long overdue. The book is based on several months of fieldwork in and around London where I visited family homes pre-​pandemic, sat down and spoke with busy middle-​class British Indians parents and their children. I heard their everyday stories, dreams and frustrations. Above all, I got a sense of how leisure as an aspect of daily life is negotiated within a complex web of expectation, aspirations, material constrains and challenges of time. The families I studied are relatively economically advantaged and the children I spoke to have access to a whole range of support and role models within their families. Some of the parents in my study –​especially those who worked in IT, banking and software –​already had an established pattern of 125

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flexible working pre-​pandemic, combining a few days of working-​from-​ home with working-​from-​the-​office. But a few others, the teachers and medical professionals, would have been designated as key workers during the COVID-​19 lockdown and would have continued to go to work. Despite these logistical challenges, the children all had their own rooms to study and relax, and their university-​educated parents had academic resources to help them with their studies, if needed. The insights into their pre-​pandemic life and their parents’ child-​rearing strategies can help explain some of the reasons as to why middle-​class children have come out of the pandemic with fewer learning losses than their less-​well-​off peers. Moreover, the stories of these families are particularly generative portals for thinking through the interactions of race and class and the way they shape the landscapes of childhoods and parenthoods in contemporary Britain. The data offered me a window into constructions of middle-​classness in racialised minority contexts, the relational agency of children, the mechanisms through which classed and racial identities are enacted through leisure, and the way the impact of leisure exceeds far beyond individual psychologies and encompasses wider processes of social transformation. Their pre-​pandemic life which I captured through my study offer unique understanding of how these professional middle-​class British Indian parents and their children negotiate class advantage and racial disadvantage –​processes that have wider relevance today as we work towards dismantling systemic inequalities and the structures that produce them. In the preceding chapters, I have drawn on interview data gathered from parents and children as well observation vignettes to explore the different ‘genres’ of children’s leisure –​structured, family and casual –​and to illuminate the ways in which race and class interlock within these leisure geographies, with implications for exploring inequalities, identities and relationships. This concluding chapter builds on and synthesises the insights gained throughout the book and draws together the key contributions of this work to the interdisciplinary fields of childhood studies, family studies and leisure studies and the sociology of race and class.

Middle-​class parenting and race It is well established in current scholarship that middle-​class parents perceive their parenting responsibilities differently from their poor and working-​class counterparts, and that they utilise the considerable volumes of economic, cultural and social capital at their disposal to shore up further advantage for their children, helping them achieve educational success and land lucrative professional jobs (Devine, 2004; Vincent and Ball, 2007; Pugh, 2009; Lareau, 2011; Reay, 2017; Wheeler, 2018). What is less clear and under-​ explored in this context is how race overlaps with and implicates social class 126

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in the construction of intensive leisure-​based parenting ideologies (Archer, 2011; Rollock et al, 2015). This is largely because the majority of studies on middle-​class parenting practices in the UK centre the experiences of white middle-​class parents and universalise middle-​classness and whiteness as Reay et al (2011: 206–​7) point out: ‘the white middle-​classes continue symbolically to represent the ideal towards which others should aspire; paradoxically the social grouping with all the culture but none of the ethnicity’. It is this dominant imaginary that posits the white majority as ethnically unmarked and plays down the role of whiteness in shaping white middle-​class parenting practices, while at the same time ethnically marking minorities and understanding their lives solely through the lens of cultural difference and deviation from the white norm (Sayyid, 2006, 2004). Thus, focusing on racialised minority middle-​class families opens up a space for further interrogating differentiations within the middle-​classes, which has hitherto been undertaken in relation to factors other than race (Vincent, 2001). My research with professional middle-​class British Indians expands our understanding of middle-​class parenting ideologies in contemporary Britain. The parents in my study have achieved considered class privilege; they possess academic credentials from top universities, work in high-​paid secure jobs in the upper echelons of the knowledge-​based economy and own their own homes. They are in short, models of educational and career success. However, their economic success does not make them immune to the dominant racial hierarchies that ascribes positive values to whiteness and posits all racialised minorities as socially and culturally inferior. The leisure-​based parenting ideologies, as enacted by participants in my project, were infused by this dual classed and racial subjectivities. Within the arena of middle-class British Indian children’s leisure, the interlocking effects of class privilege and racial disadvantage played out in a number of different ways. First, the parents devoted a significant portion of their time, energy and money in enrolling and accompanying their children to multiple organised activities on weekday evenings and weekends with an eye to developing the social networks and soft skills sets of their children. They drew on their work identities, and their ring-​side view of how the professional world functions to ensure their children have the best education as well as coveted behavioural competencies and skills so they can fit into and flourish in elite educational and work settings, which are structured by white middle-​classness. These parents are also aware of the vastly unequal global economic landscape where their children will have to compete for a few prized positions in a labour market that is continually changing. There is increasing evidence that indicate that employers in highly remunerated professionals look out for candidates’ modes of self-​presentation, body language and communication styles –​all of which build on their reserves of dominant cultural capital –​as proxies to decide whether the person will 127

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fit into and get along within their organisation comprised largely of white middle-​class people (Friedman and Laurison, 2019; also see Claytor, 2020). This set of ‘ascribed skills’ have gathered huge momentum in recent decades (Warhurst et al, 2017). While schools provide children with credentials that unlock the pathway to higher education, these academic merits alone will not be enough in breaking through structural barriers and making it in the elite professions. Therefore, the parents whom I interviewed took a strategic approach and handpicked activities that will help their children cumulatively develop a wider repertoire of soft skills that are valued in elite, white-​majority settings. These leisure-​based parental ideologies need to be understood in the context of an expanding commercial leisure industry that is specifically targeting children and the fact that the geographical inequalities produced by globalisation has meant that people need to compete for jobs across national borders where a richer and more diverse skill set and achievements beyond education will come handy. At the same time, the parents in my study utilised their class resources to enrol their children into activities linked to their Indian background so that their children develop a positive ethnic identity, appreciate their Indian heritage, amass ‘ethnic cultural capital’ (Lan, 2018) and learn to deal with racism. Leisure therefore is at the forefront of parental efforts at class reproduction as well as ethnic and racialisation of their children. This whole ecosystem of middle-​class British Indian children’s organised adult-​directed leisure activities is therefore shaped by parents in ways that equip their child with both the dominant species of cultural capital that will help them succeed in white-​majority settings as well as ethnic cultural capital, which will help them integrate with their transnational Indian family better and develop a positive image of their Indian cultural identity and family history. When combined, these two sets of cultural capital will generate cultural flexibility in children and enable them to ceaselessly navigate racial boundaries and find their feet in the professional spheres. Not only that, certain elements of ethnic cultural capital such as knowledge of Indian languages can potentially open new career opportunities for these children in the future as the growth of the Indian economy is increasingly being noted in business circles. In this sense, cultural capital amassed through leisure activities can contribute to the generation of economic capital for these children in the future (see Reeves and de Vries, 2019). I will further illustrate this issue of cultural capital in the following section.

Race, class and cultural capital As a core species of class resources, Bourdieu’s (1986, 1984) notion of ‘cultural capital’ has assumed great importance within cultural sociology and the sociology of class. In Bourdieu’s thesis, cultural capital stands for the social advantages derived from the possession of certain legitimate cultural 128

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resources. These cultural resources not only include ‘objectified’ cultural goods such as books, paintings and musical instruments, and ‘institutionalised’ markers such as academic qualifications but also entail embodied ‘long-​ lasting dispositions of the mind and body’ (Bourdieu, 1986: 17). These embodied qualities are critical tools and ‘know-​hows’ that can be leveraged by those who possess them in securing structural advantages in an unequal, class-​stratified society. Unlike economic resources, cultural capital does not dimmish when deployed. Instead, it can in very tangible ways be converted into social and economic capital and used as a status marker by middle-​class people who often possess a large reserve of these scarce cultural resources in society. However, discussions of cultural capital within British sociology have more often than not equated it to whiteness and in effect middle-​ classness (which is defined by higher volumes of cultural capital) has been positioned as an exclusively white phenomenon (Archer, 2011; Reay et al, 2011) while at the same time whiteness itself has been left unnamed and unacknowledged. Consequently, the majority of extant theorisations of cultural capital do not acknowledge or delve into the way race and ethnicity mediates cultural capital. My analysis of middle-​class privilege as experienced and enacted by racialised minorities like British Indians adds to our growing understanding of the fact that ‘cultural capital is always already a racialised construct’ (Wallace, 2019: 159) and therefore its content and value varies between white and racialised minority middle-​class contexts (Carter, 2003; Banks, 2012; Meghji, 2019; Claytor, 2020). Building on this strand of scholarship in cultural sociology, mostly produced in relation to the Black middle-​class in the UK and the US, throughout this book I have outlined the existence and circulation of two forms of cultural capital within middle-​class British Indian families, each providing valuable yet different kind of benefits. These are dominant species of cultural capital and ethnic cultural capital. Dominant cultural capital encompasses educational credentials as well as those legitimate, high-​brow cultural tastes and knowledge that have historically been the reserve of white elites and middle classes. Therefore, possession of these dominant cultural resources enable parents and children in my study to successfully navigate majority white settings and achieve recognition from others. Alongside this form of cultural capital, I also unravelled the workings of another species of embodied cultural resources, tastes and knowledge that are embedded in the ethnic and racial identities and families histories of these middle-​class British Indian households. This can be understood as ethnic cultural capital, a term first coined by Lan (2018) in the context of migrant Chinese parents in the US. Lan’s (2018) conceptualisation of ‘ethnic cultural capital’ is different from the idea of ‘ethnic capital’ which has been used both in the UK and in the US in relation to racialised minorities (Modood, 2004; Zhou, 2009) to denote social-​cultural resources that vary both in 129

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degree and kind across ethnic groups, but it fails to capture the dynamic nature of ethnic positionings and risk homogenising ethnic groups. For Lan (2018: 127) ethnic cultural capital entails ‘a dynamics process of cultural negotiation in which immigrant parents selectively mobilize their cultural heritages and sometimes mix and match it with values and practices in the new country’. Working with the idea of ethnic cultural capital has not only helped me articulate the distinctive practices of racialised minority middle-​ class parents but also shine light on the fact that ethnic and racial identities are not primordial but context-​dependent and are subject to change (Modood et al, 1994; Hall, 1988; Modood, 2007). I have also directed attention to the way the parents and children in my study combine these two species of cultural capital to activate cultural flexibility or what Radhakrishnan (2011, 2008) in the context of middle-​class Indian diasporans has termed ‘cultural streamlining’ –​a process by which these transnational professionals reproduce a set of desirable cultural norms in the diaspora that are compatible with their present class circumstances. Indeed, cultural reproduction in diasporic families is a political task, where ‘culture’ emerges as ‘an arena for conscious choice, justification, and representation’ (Appadurai, 1996: 44) informed by anxieties around cultural continuities as illustrated by the narratives of the parents in my study. It is this arena of culture that is significant in its own right and is pivotal to the construction of diasporic identities in these families –​and leisure spaces offered a unique vantage point to witness and unpack these dynamic processes.

The politics of children’s leisure Despite repeated assertion by leisure researchers that ‘leisure remains fundamental to understanding the inequalities of contemporary, globalized society’ (Spracklen et al, 2017: 10), the study of leisure per se has lost much of its appeal and visibility within mainstream sociology (Stebbins, 2018). True, the sky is not falling on leisure studies and scholarly activities in the field continues to grow (Henderson, 2010). Yet, the risk of intellectual isolation has been repeatedly flagged by leisure scholars over the last few decades (Samdahl and Kelly, 1999; Parr and Schmalz, 2019). At these moments of self-​reflection, many leisure scholars have called upon researchers in the field to build bridges with other communities of scholars to lend greater visibility to leisure scholarship and make an impact beyond the field of leisure studies alone (Deem, 1999; Shaw, 2000; Fletcher et al, 2017). This book is an exercise in that direction. I have brought leisure studies in dialogue with childhood studies and family studies to achieve a critical, in-​depth understanding of the everyday leisure geographies of middle-​class British Indian children and to interrogate the role of leisure in reproducing identities and inequalities. 130

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At the heart of this book lies a critique of the adult-​centric assumptions that run through contemporary definitions and theories of leisure within leisure studies. I have argued how existing tools and typologies for researching leisure are not fit for purpose for understanding children’s leisure experiences especially when it comes to racially marked middle-​class children. This state of affairs is particularly grim given the fact that article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) –​which 196 countries are part of –​explicitly talks about the ‘the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts’. These rights are yet to be realised, and it also must be stressed that the language of rights itself individualises the child and the act of leisure. However, given the policy focus on this area, it is unfortunate that leisure studies has not fully come alive to the question of children’s leisure and children’s right to leisure. Hence, through this book I have introduced and operationalised a tripartite model of three ‘genres’ of children’s leisure to map and analyse the time-​spaces of children’s leisure activities and how they relate to each other. I hope this conceptual map will prove useful to others working on children’s leisure. Its capaciousness and flexibility make it possible for it to be modified and reworked in other contexts as a tool for opening up new avenues in the critical sociological study of children’s leisure. Rojek (2010: 181–​2) argues that the time-​spaces are leisure is akin to a ‘Swiss cheese’: ‘although outwardly coded and represented as “free” it is punctured with holes or “eyes” which channel data about competence, relevance and credibility at the most unexpected times and in the most improbable places’. Going beyond individualised notions of perceived choice and freedom, and building on Juniu and Henderson’s (2001: 8) contention that leisure is always ‘socially structured’, I argue that leisure experiences are shaped by larger inter-​personal and social forces that are historically situated. Therefore, interpreting narratives of British Indian children’s everyday leisure involved a process of what I call ‘double anchoring’, that is to say simultaneously embedding specific leisure actions within the flow of everyday life in these families and the communities in which they live, while at the same time charting the ways in which these personal stories are linked to wider structures and processes, as instantiated by the use of leisure occasions to direct minoritised ethnic place-​making. Social inequalities in the UK are on the rise, with the latest evidence showing a six-​fold difference in income levels between the top 20 per cent and the bottom 20 per cent of households, making Britain one of the most unequal economies in Europe (Dorling, 2015; IPPR, 2018; McGuinness and Harari, 2019). These figures are only set to get worse because of the economic downturn triggered by the COVID-​19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. As far as families are concerned, the extent of these inequalities 131

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are further reflected in educational attainment as even within the top 10 per cent of ‘high-​achieving’ pupils the gap between middle-​class and working-​ class students is 33 months in mathematics and science, and 32 months in reading (Jerrim, 2017). Scholars have rightly directed attention to school education as a key site where inequalities are produced, with a long-​term effect on future income, health and life chances to name a few (Lareau, 2011; Dorling, 2015; Reay, 2017). To fully understand the mechanism through which these inequalities are sustained and reproduced it is an imperative to investigate child-​rearing ideology and everyday practices of middle-​class parents who possess considerable class privilege and attempt to pass them on to their children (Ball, 2003). While the focus has been on educational strategies of parents, I have built on the works of Zinnecker (1995) and Lareau (2011) among others to show how children’s after-​school leisure spaces play a crucial role in equipping children with skills and competences that are much valued in higher education and elite professions, but which are not always provided to children by schools. Since there is a class difference in who gets to participate in a variety of such paid-​for leisure activities, the soft skills and cultural capital difference between middle-​class and working-​ class children have worsened. This aspect of my research reinforces the need for greater intellectual investment in leisure research within sociology if we are to achieve a rounded understanding of the multiple pathways through which social inequalities are perpetuated and reproduced. Education and leisure activities, in this case, complement each other. Parents in my study hardly saw leisure as a foil to education. Rather, they saw the benefits of organised leisure in particular as a form of value addition. The stories I have harnessed and the processes I have unpacked are also defined by the context of my study. London is a ‘super-​diverse’ (Vertovec, 2007) city with a rich and long history of receiving migrants (Panayi, 2020). It is home to one-​third of all Indians living in England and Wales (Office for National Statistics, 2018b). As residents of London and its surrounding region, middle-​class British Indians in my study often mount community-​ based leisure programmes and celebrations in the public spaces of the city. In doing so, they reinscribe the social and cultural geographies of the city which are structured by the legacies of colonialism and white privilege. These community-​based leisure spaces, erected through the voluntary labour of middle-​class diasporans, act as vehicles for racialised minority place-​making and assertion of ethnic pride. They also help educate younger generations of British Indians as well as ethnic others in the city about the cultural practices and histories of India albeit in a highly selective and sanitised way. Through these acts, British Indian community leisure contribute to the process of city-​making and help transform urban socialities. These aspects of leisure within middle-​class British Indian families take us beyond individualised framing of leisure –​as psychologists of leisure tend to do –​and bring into 132

Concluding Thoughts

sharp relief the complex nature of leisure and its imbrications with broader social structures and processes.

Relational dynamics of child agency Assertions around children’s agency and children’s role as social agents in their own right have been central to the emergence of the ‘new’ sociology of childhood. In the early years of the development of the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies, this notion of children’s agency was widely used but left ‘inadequately theorised’ (Prout, 2000: 16). In the last two decades, this situation has undergone a sea change. There is now a growing body of conceptual literature on child agency and its boundaries. Broadly speaking, extant theorisations of children’s agency fall into two camps. One locates agency as an individual quality or competency of children that is negotiated within their lived geographies. The other camp embraces a relational approach that treats agency as dependent and incomplete, produced through children’s relationship with other social actors and materialities (see Esser et al, 2016; Oswell, 2016). Based on the narratives of middle-​class British Indian children in my study, I have pushed forward this relational understanding of children’s agency and delineated its links to generational, temporal and social-material processes. For instance, the narratives that parents and children constructed around the need for structured leisure activities diverged in the sense that each brought to bear a different set of subjective meaning to the very same act of leisure. Parents overwhelmingly took an instrumental view of organised leisure activities of their children, articulating the benefits of leisure in distinctive idioms that spoke of the future that they see for their children. For these parents, being able to initiate and facilitate a slew of structured leisure activities was pivotal to their perception of ‘good’ parenting. For children too leisure activities were not completely autotelic, but the meanings they ascribed to leisure participation were connected to their present circumstances rather than to the future benefits that leisure can potentially offer in terms of career and educational success. Children also did not simply internalise or imbibe parental messages about leisure, but ‘interpretively reproduced’ (Corsaro, 2012) those narratives by creatively reworking and personalising them. For instance, several children in my study received messages about the benefits of certain structured leisure activities from their parents and thereafter distilled and reimagined those activities through the notions of ‘fun’ and ‘boring’: embracing the ones that seemed ‘fun’ to them and jettisoning the ones that they deem as ‘boring’. They also came across as reflexive social actors who were aware of their relative privilege in the neoliberal marketplace of leisure and also wielded their power as consumers of competing leisure options. In no way were they passive receptacles of parental dictums or mere 133

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representatives of the so-​called ‘back-​seat generation’ (see Karsten, 2005). The agency that underpinned children’s meaning-​making and behaviour in these leisure contexts was dependent and relational in nature rather than an individual and inherent quality –​a product of their interaction with peers, parents, siblings and market forces and not reducible to any one factor. In a similar vein, children’s navigation of screen-​time restrictions imposed by parents offered yet another occasion for capturing the workings of children’s relational agency. In the discussion in Chapter 5, it was evident that age and generational regimes are key to the articulation of children’s agency when it came to screen-​time limits around digital leisure activities. Children reflected upon and deftly navigated the generational structures and power relations within the home to create opportunities for digital leisure despite restrictions imposed by parents. The regular presence of grandparents in the lives of some child participants in my study meant that they had to navigate two layers of culturally coded generational structures within their family networks, that is parents and grandparents. They used their understanding of how each set of relationship worked in terms of notions of respect, love and power differentials, and then exploited the opportunities afforded by one to recompense for the restrictions that come with the other. Children’s agency therefore emerges as not only context-​dependent but also complex and multi-​layered, fostered through immense reflexivity about the workings of multiple generational structures and their concomitant power relations. Through my analysis of children’s leisure experiences and meaning-​ making, I have taken the debate on children’s agency to new directions and highlighted the salience of generational structures to the everyday geographies and agency of children. This is a particularly timely contribution to debates within the social studies of childhood, since in a recent intervention Punch (2020: 137) has mounted a robust critique of childhood researchers’ lack of engagement with ‘generational order’ because of which ‘the importance of generation and age as key social variables have become diluted’ within childhood studies. She also called for greater dialogue between empirical work and theorising in matters related to children’s generational order. In this book, I have taken on the challenges and invitations posed by Punch (2020) and used the framework of generational order to take our understanding of children’s lives geographies beyond the polarities of structure versus agency and created a framework for a more nuanced and culturally sensitive understanding of the interdependent and relational nature of children’s daily lives and leisure engagements. These arguments provide further impetus and fuel to the development of the ‘relational sociology of childhood’ that draws focus on the generational structures in which children’s daily lives and relationships are embedded (Alanen, 2012). By charting the way race and class jointly shape the leisure experiences of middle-​class British Indian children and the parents’ leisure-​based 134

Concluding Thoughts

child-​rearing practices, I have highlighted various key facets of children’s lived geographies and the cultural politics of parenthood and childhood in racialised minority middle-​class contexts. Leisure, I argue, lies at the foundation of how ideal childhoods and parenthoods are imagined and enacted in contemporary Britain, yet these leisure spaces are hardly ever scrutinised by sociologists interested in question of social identity, inequalities, cultural consumption and urban multiculture. I hope that this book will foster fresh conversations within sociology about the salience of leisure practices, the intersection of race and class within parenting ideologies, the generational structures of childhood and the relational nature of children’s agency. These ideas have a lot to offer in a post-​COVID world where we want to better understand the way social inequalities impact the lives of children and families in order to develop tools that can break these cycles and create a more equal and just society. As Reay (2017: 186) correctly points out ‘no class is an island’ and we therefore need to think about the relational dynamics of class and the same holds for race. To fully understand the realities of class inequalities, we must grasp the way those with relative class advantage hoard resources and strategically play the education and leisure market to corner positional advantages for themselves and their children just as we document the consequences of these actions for those who do not have access to these class resources. Similarly, to understand racial inequalities we need to consider how those at the receiving end of racial hierarchies navigate these structures and combat racism in its multiple and everchanging forms while we also develop insights into the workings of white privilege and the conditions that hierarchise and racialise groups of people.

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163

Index A accents  60–​1, 74 achievement-​oriented leisure  33, 45 active versus passive leisure  33 activity management labour  2, 53, 85, 86 adult-​centrism  30–​1, 131 affordability of activities  70, 71 African American families  63 after-school activities  3, 5–6, 34–5, 49–51, 56, 58, 60–4 see also structured/organised leisure agency, children’s  choice of activities  71 dropping out  54 and friendships  110 gender  79 microgeographies of  81 negotiating leisure choices with parents  68–​72 often seen as lacking  4, 27, 33 relational dynamics  27–​8, 70, 98, 110, 133–​5 solitary leisure  101 theories of  27–​8, 30 Aitken, S.C.  67, 79 Alanen, L.  21, 25, 27, 32, 81, 102, 134 alone time  99–​105 Amar Chitra Katha (ACK)  114 anti-​racism  14, 59–​63 Appadurai, A.  130 autonomy, children’s  27, 75, 101, 108 B Back, L.  63 ‘backseat generation’  2, 4, 65, 134 baking  90 Ball, S.  10, 34, 43, 64, 67 Beckman, C.M.  85, 104, 105 becoming-​with  100 bedtime stories  113–​14 being and becoming, children’s  99–​105 belonging, sense of  4, 56–​7, 122 Berhau, P.  85 ‘between two cultures’  2, 13 Bharatnatyam  55–​6, 58

Black middle class  4, 11, 66–​7, 129 Blatterer, H.  30–​1 board games  91, 94, 98–​9 Bollywood  2, 54–​5, 88–​9, 116, 120 bonding/​family connection  38, 71, 85–​6, 112–​14 see also family time boredom, relief from  73–​8, 133 Bottero, W.  10 Bourdieu, P.  9–​10, 77, 128 boxing  70–​1 British Indian, definition of  9 ‘Bulldog’  108, 109, 110 busyness  83, 85–​93 C capitalism  77 see also neoliberalism career progression  13, 46, 59, 64, 93 caste  56, 121 see also upper caste casual leisure  39–​41, 93, 99, 113, 122 ceaselessness of parenting responsibilities  85–​6 chasing games  109 childcare  after-​school activities as  35, 85 outsourcing  85 childhood, sociology of  25–​8, 31, 130, 133 children’s books  114 children’s leisure, studies into  4–​8, 28, 29–​32 choice of leisure activities, child-​parent negotiations of  68–​72 city-​making  117 civic assets, access to  11 class and race  see race and class intersections class bias/​classism  80 class identities  10 see also middle-​class parents; working-​ class parents class processes  10 class resources  69–​70 Claytor, C.P.  2–​3, 50 Cohen, P.  63 collectivist cultures  13

164

Index

colonialism  8, 12, 52, 57, 117, 123, 132 combat sports  61 commercial leisure industry  5, 64–​5, 67, 68, 128 communication skills  48 community leisure spaces  115–​21, 123 commuting  93 ‘concerted cultivation’  3, 22–​3, 34, 43–​4, 64–​5 contributions to household, children’s  38 Corsaro, W.A.  102, 133 cost of leisure activities  5, 43–​4, 78 cousins  113 COVID-​19  7, 8, 124, 126 cricket  56–​7 critical sociology  14, 24–​42, 123, 130, 131 Csikszentmihalyi, M.  73 cultural capital  10, 44, 47, 51, 59, 65, 69–​70, 126–​30, 132 cultural competences  6 cultural flexibility  2–3, 51, 65, 128, 130 cultural heritage  115–​21 cultural identities  4, 8, 13, 20, 52, 56 cultural politics of leisure  106–​23 cultural streamlining  130 Cunningham, H.  32

location of best schools  11, 78 multi-​ethnic schools  78 of participant children  16 private education  3, 16, 45 private tuition  47 racism in  60, 74 religious education  52 state schools  45, 46, 78 Elias, N.  31 Elley, S.  35, 43 embodied competences  47 emotional resources  66 emotional worth of children  37–​8 enrichment activities  34, 49, 59–60, 78 see also structured/organised leisure entitlement, sense of  66–​7 Esser, F.  101 ethics approval  15 ethnic cultural capital  44, 51, 52–​65, 69, 89, 119, 128–​30 ethnicity as social construction  8–​9 ethnography  34, 41, 57, 66–​7 exhaustion, parental  91–​2 exoticisation  22 extended family  56, 74, 113, 122, 134 see also grandparents

D Daly, K.J.  104, 105 dancing  54–​6, 116, 118, 120 data collection  15–​16 de Vries, R.  51, 65 decolonialism  57 Delale-​O’Connor, L.  7, 44, 63 digital activities  5, 39–​40, 93–​9, 134 see also screen-​based leisure; video games digital natives  40 discipline  95–​6 disruptive collaboration  31–​2 Diwali celebrations  115–​17, 118, 121 doing family  86 Donofrio, T.A.  117 double anchoring  131 draw-​and-​simultaneous-​talk  18 drawing, as research method  18–​19 dual-​earner families  35, 83 Dudrah, R.K.  89 Dumazedier, J.  7, 73 Duncan, S.  65 Durga Puja  119–​20, 121

F Facebook groups  15, 19 family as unit of enquiry  91, 122 family leisure studies  37–​9 family time  37, 82–​3, 86, 87, 88–​91, 104–​5 fathering  36, 56–8, 114 fathers  bedtime stories  114 sport  36, 56–​7, 58 feminist scholarship  14, 101 ‘ferrying’ of children  36 see also activity management labour films  87–​9, 105 financial impact of leisure activities  5, 43–​4, 78 Finch, J.  84 flexible working  91, 104, 126 Floyd, M.F.  68 football  61–​3 Fortnite  96, 111 Fox, K.M.  31 freedom, and leisure  29 Friedman, S.  47, 67 friendships  70, 73, 108, 110–​11, 122 fun/​boring idioms of leisure  72–​8, 133 Furedi, F.  6, 35

E education  academic success  13, 71 British schools do not teach Indian heritage languages  52 COVID-​19  124, 125, 126 grammar schools  16 inequality gaps  132 lack of minoritised cultural heritage  52

G gaming  96, 97, 103 Gardiner, M.E.  77, 78 gender  alone time  103 choice of activities  57–​8

165

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and friendships  111 generational agency  69 generational order, conceptual lens of  21, 27–​8, 81, 102, 134 Ghuman, P.A.S.  13 Gillis, J.R.  37 Glick Schiller, N.  117, 118, 123 globalisation  49, 77, 127 Golash-​Boza, T.  9 ‘good parenting’ indexes  34, 35, 36, 95, 133 Gordon, D.  31 Gouldner, A.W.  29 grammar schools  16 grandparents  85, 97–​8, 134 Green, K.  35, 36, 39, 64, 67 H Hall, S.  8–​9, 12 Harrington, M.  37, 91, 104, 122 Hays, S.  35 Henderson, K.A.  31, 32, 33, 130, 131 heritage languages  52–​4, 76 heterogeneity within Indian diasporic communities  58 Hindi films  88–​9 historical situatedness of leisure  12, 115–​21, 131 Hochschild, A.R.  83, 91 Holloway, S.L.  40 Holt, L.  28 household items from India  55 household work  91 I ICT devices  40, 93–​9 see also screen-​based leisure ideal childhood  6, 35, 135 ideal worker  85 improvised solutions  112–​13 independence, children’s lack of  75, 108 independent mobility  75, 108 Indian accents  60–​1, 74 individualism  13, 101, 132–​3 inequality gaps  5, 8, 10, 124–​5, 131–​2 information leaflet for participants  20, 22 institutional racism  59 institutionalisation of childhood  36, 75 instrumental views of leisure (parents’)  22–​3, 46, 133 see also investment in children’s future intensive approaches to parenting  6, 35 interdependencies  101 inter-​generational inequalities  125 inter-​generational relationships  97, 112, 134 interstitial time segments  108–​9 interviews  17–​18 investment in children’s future, leisure as  5–​6, 34, 35, 44–​51, 65, 70, 127

Irwin, S.  35, 43 ‘It’ (chasing games)  109 J James, A.  110 joint family leisure  14 Jordan, A.B.  20 ‘jugaad’  112–​13 Juniu, S.  32, 131 Jutlla, K.  97 K Karsten, L.  2, 4, 6, 38, 65, 134 Kelly, J.R.  29, 32 Kick It Out  62 kin terms  20, 61 knowledge economy  46, 85 L Lamb, S.  97 Lan, P.-​C.  44, 51, 58, 128, 129–​30 language  accents  60–​1, 74 heritage languages  52–​4, 76 of interviews  17–​18 Lareau, A.  3, 4, 5, 6, 34, 36, 43, 50, 52, 63, 64, 66–​7, 83, 91, 132 Laurison, D.  47 leisure politics  130–​2 leisure studies  24, 29–​32, 130, 132 see also children’s leisure, studies into leisure-​oriented child-​rearing  3–​4, 7, 68 Leonard, M.  32, 79, 81 life skills, parents aiming to help children learn  45–​8 see also ‘skilled’ child Lim, S.S.  40, 85, 93, 94 London  as choice of research location  15–​17 commuting  93 cosmopolitanism  106, 123 Diwali celebrations  115–​16 Durga Puja  119–​20 as migrant city  117–​18 multiculturalism  132 superdiversity  15, 106, 117, 120–​1, 123, 132 M Maestripieri, L.  125 Mandell, N.  21 martial arts  60, 61 Mason, J.  84, 122 Mayall, B.  21, 26, 27, 28, 31 Mazmanian, M.  85, 104, 105 meaning-​making, leisure as site of struggle for  77, 81 Meghji, A.  50 methodology  14, 17

166

Index

microgeographies of family leisure  81, 87, 122 middle-​class parents  availability of time  83 cultural capital  129 definition of ‘middle-​class’  10–​11 description of UK middle-​class Indians  11–​14 and race  126–​8 and time children spend in structured leisure  34 urban consumption infrastructure  38 white middle-​class normativity  7, 37, 80, 127, 128, 129 see also race and class intersections migration  12–​13, 21, 50, 59 Millennium Cohort Study  84 Mitra, S.  120 mobile phones  95, 103 ‘moral rationalities’  65 Morgan, D.H.J.  105 mothering  35–6, 91 mothers  ‘good mothers’  36 household work  91 Mukherjee, A.  117, 123 Mukherjee, U.  7, 120 Mullan, K.  5, 84, 108 multiculturalism  15, 106, 117 multi-​scalar politics of leisuring  121 music lessons  69–​70, 72 N Nai Zindagi Naya Jeevan  89 national identity  57 negotiated temporality, leisure as  84–​5 negotiating leisure choices with parents  68–​72 neighbourhood  11, 19, 45, 65–7, 69, 72, 78 neoliberalism  15, 27, 50, 68, 78, 101, 118, 119, 133 Nieuwenhuys, O.  101 Nikken, P.  93 nonconsumptive leisure  39–​40, 99–​100 O observation methods  19 Om Shanti Om  2 online activities  see screen-​based leisure online spaces, parenting in  6, 40, 94 Opie, I.  102, 109 Opie, P.  102, 109 out-of-school activities  34 see also structured/organised leisure outdoor play  35, 41, 84, 108 outside help, using  85 P pace of family life  83 Panayi, P.  118, 132

parental determinism  6, 35 parent-​child relationships  6, 68–​72, 98 parents’ own leisure  36 parks/​playgrounds  61–​2 participant observation  19 participant recruitment  15 participatory drawing  3, 18–​19 part-​time work  45, 92 Petherbridge, D.  18 place-​making in the diaspora, leisure as 115–​21, 123 play  41, 100–​1, 102, 107–​15, 122 Playday  108 playground games  109 post-​colonialism  12 post-​industrial economy  83 power dynamics  intergenerational  21, 37 peer racism in leisure spaces  80 pretend play  102 Prensky, M.  40, 93 pretend play  102 private education  3, 16, 45 private tuition  47 privatisation of leisure  37–​8 Punch, S.  18, 134 Punjabi language classes  52–​3, 76 Purkayastha, B.  58 Q ‘quality time’  83 quitting activities  70, 75–​6 R race, as social construction  8–​9 race and class intersections  conclusions on  135 cultural capital  126–​8 middle-​class British Indians  59–​63, 80, 81 most prior studies ignore  4, 37, 44 understanding classed privilege  8–​11 see also ethnic cultural capital race-​blind, previous studies have been  4, 7, 9, 84 racial hierarchies  9, 59, 110, 127 racial ideologies  9 racial socialisation  52–​63 racialisation  59–​63 racism  bullying (racist)  60–​1 challenging  59 in children’s organised leisure spaces  58, 59–​63 and friendships  110–​11, 122–​3 institutional racism  59 London  15 overlap of biological and cultural difference  9 peer racism in leisure spaces  78–​80

167

RACE, CLASS, PARENTING AND CHILDREN’S LEISURE

in schools  60, 74 in sport  62–​3 stereotypes  74, 79, 80, 111 structural racism  12, 59, 60, 63, 79, 80, 123, 126 Radhakrishnan, S.  130 Ray, M.  119 reading  113–​14 Reay, D.  5, 7, 34, 36, 43, 64, 67, 80, 127, 132, 135 Reeves, A.  51, 65 reflexive social actors, children as  71 relating, leisure as  107–​15, 122, 133–​5 relational dynamics  27–​8, 70, 98, 107, 110, 133–​5 see also friendships; inter-​ generational relationships relaxation  100, 103 religious education  52 religious festivals  119–​20 see also Diwali celebrations religious identity  54, 119 research methods  3, 17 research participants  15–​17 researcher identity  20–​2 researcher–​researched dynamics  21 restorative functions of leisure  73 rewards and punishments  96 risk management  95, 96–​7, 108 Rojek, C.  131 Rollock, N.  4 rooms, children’s  103, 126 Roud, S.  109 S Sack, R.  117 safe haven, leisure as  67 safety concerns  35, 84, 95, 96–​7, 108 ‘samman’ (respect)  97–​8 scaffolding structures  85 scheduling  82–​3, 85 Scott, J.  14 screen-​based leisure  casual leisure  40 gender  103 managing screen time  94, 98–​9 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE)  94 negotiating leisure choices with parents  93–​9 parental control over  93–​9 relational dynamics  107, 134 statistics on  5, 84 video games  40, 94–​7, 103, 111–​12, 115 second shift  91 self-​confidence  47, 67, 71 self-​defence  60, 74 Sen, H.  67, 115 sense of belonging  4, 56–​7, 122

Shannon, C.S.  34–​5, 73 Sharma, A.  22 Shaw, S.M.  37 siblings  112, 122 Singh, Lilly  103–​4 Sinha, S.  63 Sivanandan, A.  12 ‘skilled’ child  44–​51, 64, 127–​8, 132 Smart, C.  19 smartphone ownership  5, 95, 103 ‘sneha’ (affection)  97–​8 ‘soccer moms’  36 social advantages  36 social capital  10, 126 social circles  6 social class, definition  9–​10 see also race and class intersections social construction of childhood  37, 49 social inequalities  29, 34, 36, 131–​2 social interactions  41 see also relating, leisure as social leisure  33 social media  96 social mobility  12, 16, 50, 125 social networks  71, 85, 89, 107–​15, 121 social skills  48 sociology  adult-​centrism  30–​1, 131 assumptions  29 child-​centred sociology of children’s leisure experiences  80 of childhood  25–​8, 31, 130, 133 critical sociology  14, 24–​42, 123, 130, 131 leisure research in  7, 130 methodology  14 race and class concepts  9–​10 soft skills  44–​6, 49–​50, 64, 127–​8, 132 solitary leisure  39, 99–​105 Sonck, N.  94, 95 spaces, children’s own  103 see also rooms, children’s spending on leisure activities  5, 43–​4, 78 sport  36, 56–​7, 73 Spracklen, K.  32, 33, 130 state schools  45, 46, 78 stay-​at-​home parents  16, 47, 71, 86 Stebbins, R.A.  7, 32, 33, 39, 40, 75, 93, 99, 122, 130 stereotypes  74, 79, 80, 111 strategic parenting  6 stress, parental  93 structural racism  12, 59, 60, 63, 79, 80, 123, 126 structured/​organised leisure, definition  33–​7 Such, L.  3, 7, 36 superdiversity  15, 106, 117, 120–​1, 123, 132 support structures  85 see also extended family; social networks

168

Index

surveillance of children  95, 111 symbolic capital  47 symbolic qualities of time  87 T Taylor, Laurie  106, 118 Tebbit-​test  57 television  89, 93 see also screen-​based leisure temporalities, negotiated  82–​105 time strategies  83 time use studies  5, 84, 108 Tinkle Digest  114 Tipper, B.  122 Tomlinson, M.  49 ‘touch-​screen generation’  93 toys, playing with  100–​1, 102, 103 transcendent parenting  94 tuition  47 Tyler, I.  10 U UCAS applications  47–​8 UK Household Longitudinal Study  51 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)  131 university applications  47–​8, 73 unstructured/​casual leisure  39–​41, 93, 99, 113, 122 unsupervised play  35, 108 upper caste  55, 59, 118–19, 121 see also caste Uprichard, E.  100 utilitarianist views of leisure  74, 77, 81 V Valentine, G.  40 Vertovec, S.  15, 106, 117, 120, 123, 132 video games  40, 94–​7, 103, 111–​12, 115 Vincent, C.  34, 64, 67 voices, children’s  importance of  4, 7, 131

methodology  14 negotiating leisure choices with parents  68–​72 power dynamics  21 previous studies ignore  67 research methods  18 W Wallace, D.  51, 129 Warhurst, C.  49, 50 Weininger, E.  83, 91 Wheeler, S.  35–​6, 39, 64, 67 White, A.  18 white cultural capital  51 white middle-​class normativity  7, 37, 80, 127, 128, 129 whiteness  3, 7, 51, 58, 80, 123, 127, 129 women  ‘ferrying’ of children  36 ‘good mothers’  36 household work  91 leisure  38 Woodyer, T.  100–​1 working hours, parents’  83–​4, 85, 86, 91, 93, 125–​6 working-​class parents  access to economic/​social/​cultural capital  126–​7 educational achievement  80 experience of racism  59 leisure participation  34, 36, 91 temporal rhythms of life  91 work-​life balance  83 Y YouTube  103–​4 Z Zelizer, V.A.  37 Zinnecker, J.  36, 132

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