Women’s Lives and Social Insecurity in Indian Metropolises:
Reading Madhu Kankaria’s Fiction alongside National Labour, Time-Use, and Migration Data
Dr ManishKumar C Mishra
Associate professor
Department of Hindi
Abstract
This article places selected fiction by the contemporary Hindi writer Madhu Kankaria in dialogue with official Indian data on women’s labour-force participation, unpaid care, and migration. It does not treat literary characters as statistically representative cases, nor does it use national survey estimates as direct evidence for fictional lives. Instead, it develops an interdisciplinary framework in which literature functions as a source of socially significant questions while official datasets establish measurable patterns. The literary corpus includes publisher-verified works such as Sej Per Sanskrit (Rajkamal Prakashan, first published 2008), Pattakhor (Rajkamal Prakashan, first published 2005), and Khule Gagan Ke Lal Sitare (Rajkamal Prakashan, first published 2000), supplemented by other bibliographically verified novels used in the underlying project. The empirical discussion draws principally on the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2023–24, the Time Use Survey (TUS) 2024, and Census of India migration tables. PLFS records an urban female labour-force participation rate of 28.0 per cent for persons aged 15 years and above in 2023–24, compared with 20.4 per cent in 2017–18. TUS 2024 further demonstrates the gendered organisation of care: among persons aged 15–59, 41 per cent of women participated in unpaid caregiving compared with 21.4 per cent of men, and female participants spent about 140 minutes per day on caregiving compared with 74 minutes for male participants. The article argues that Kankaria’s sustained engagement with marginality, gendered constraint, social stigma, and institutional vulnerability can productively inform an empirical research agenda on metropolitan women, provided that literary representation and social-scientific evidence remain analytically distinct. It concludes by proposing a representation–reality matrix for future field research in Mumbai, Delhi, and Kolkata.
Keywords: Madhu Kankaria; Hindi fiction; gender; urban vulnerability; unpaid care; labour-force participation; migration; social insecurity; Indian metropolises.
1. Introduction
Contemporary Indian cities are sites of aspiration, employment, mobility, and cultural transformation, but they are also spaces in which inequalities of gender, class, migration status, housing, and access to institutions become sharply visible. For women, metropolitan life cannot be understood through employment statistics alone. Paid work interacts with unpaid care, mobility, family responsibilities, residential insecurity, social stigma, and access to public and welfare institutions. An adequate account of women’s urban lives therefore requires a multidimensional understanding of agency and vulnerability.
Madhu Kankaria’s fiction is particularly relevant to such an inquiry because her published oeuvre repeatedly turns toward social worlds marked by marginality, unequal power, addiction, religious and institutional discipline, violence, and women’s struggles for autonomy. Rajkamal Prakashan describes Sej Per Sanskrit as a novel centrally concerned with women’s inner conflict, social and economic inequality, injustice, and exploitation. The publisher presents Pattakhor as an attempt to understand the sociology of addiction within a narrative frame. Khule Gagan Ke Lal Sitare, first published in 2000, is likewise part of Kankaria’s established corpus of socially engaged fiction. These publisher-verified descriptions provide a reliable bibliographic foundation without requiring unverified quotations from editions that are not physically available.
The central methodological proposition of this article is that literary representation and social data should neither be collapsed into one another nor isolated completely. Fiction can reveal experiential structures, moral conflicts, and forms of vulnerability that are difficult to reduce to variables. National surveys, by contrast, establish population-level patterns through standardised measurement. The productive scholarly task is to bring these two forms of knowledge into a disciplined dialogue while preserving their epistemological differences.
2. Analytical Framework and Method
The study adopts an interdisciplinary literature–data approach. Literary themes are treated as sensitising concepts: they help identify questions worth testing empirically, but they are not counted as empirical observations. Official data are used only for claims that the relevant survey or census supports. No results from the proposed 600-respondent metropolitan field survey are invented or anticipated in this article.
3. Women’s Labour-Force Participation in Urban India
The PLFS Annual Report 2023–24 provides a useful national baseline for examining women’s economic participation. In usual status (principal plus subsidiary status), the labour-force participation rate for urban women aged 15 years and above was 28.0 per cent in 2023–24. The corresponding urban female rate in 2017–18 was 20.4 per cent. The increase is significant as a long-run descriptive trend, but it should not be read as evidence that gendered constraints have disappeared. Labour-force participation indicates entry into or availability for economic activity; it does not by itself measure job quality, income control, safety, continuity of employment, care burdens, or access to social protection.
Figure 1. Urban female labour-force participation rate, ages 15+, India. Source: PLFS Annual Report 2023–24, MoSPI.
4. Unpaid Care, Time, and the Material Conditions of Agency
The Time Use Survey 2024 makes visible a dimension of women’s lives that conventional employment measures cannot adequately capture. Among persons aged 15–59, 41 per cent of women participated in unpaid caregiving for household members, compared with 21.4 per cent of men. Female participants spent about 140 minutes per day in caregiving, compared with 74 minutes among male participants. The survey also reports that women participating in unpaid domestic services spent approximately 305 minutes per day in 2024, down from about 315 minutes in 2019.
These findings matter theoretically because agency has material preconditions. The ability to seek employment, travel across the city, participate in education, use public services, or sustain social networks is partly structured by control over time. A literary analysis of women’s autonomy therefore becomes stronger when it distinguishes symbolic or psychological agency from the temporal and economic resources that make choices practically possible. Kankaria’s women-centred fiction can be read within this wider analytical horizon without claiming that any fictional character is statistically represented by TUS estimates.
Figure 2. Participation in employment-related activities and unpaid caregiving, ages 15–59, 2024. Source: Time Use Survey 2024, MoSPI.
Figure 3. Average time spent on unpaid caregiving per participant, ages 15–59, 2024. Source: Time Use Survey 2024, MoSPI.
5. Migration, Metropolitan Space, and Social Insecurity
Migration is indispensable to the study of metropolitan women, but it requires careful operationalisation. Census of India migration tables distinguish migrants by place of last residence, duration of residence, reasons for migration, age, sex, and economic activity. These dimensions suggest that a future city-level study should not reduce migration to a binary distinction between ‘local’ and ‘migrant’. Duration of residence, reason for movement, housing tenure, documentation, work status, and access to services may shape vulnerability in different ways.
Kankaria’s fiction repeatedly directs attention toward socially marginal worlds and to the pressures produced by stigma, unequal institutions, and precarious life conditions. Such literary material is valuable for formulating questions about who can claim urban space, who has access to secure housing and institutional assistance, and how women negotiate family, work, safety, and social judgement. Yet the relationship remains interpretive rather than causal: Census migration tables cannot validate a fictional episode, and a novel cannot establish a migration rate.
6. Madhu Kankaria’s Fiction as a Source of Social Questions
A publisher-verified corpus helps prevent bibliographic uncertainty. Rajkamal Prakashan records Sej Per Sanskrit as first published in 2008 and currently available in a 2025 second edition of 228 pages. Pattakhor was first published in 2005 and is listed in a 2023 second edition of 212 pages. Khule Gagan Ke Lal Sitare was first published in 2000 and is listed in a 2017 third edition of 172 pages. Rajkamal’s author catalogue also identifies Salam Aakhiri, Sookhte Chinar, and Hum Yahan The among Kankaria’s novels. Where exact editions of the latter works are used in a final journal submission, their title-page and copyright-page details should be checked directly before page-specific quotation.
Table 2. Proposed translation of literary concerns into field-research indicators. This is an analytical framework, not a statement of measured results.
7. Discussion: From Representation to Empirical Inquiry
Three conclusions emerge from the official data. First, women’s urban labour-force participation has risen over the longer PLFS series, but participation remains far from gender parity. Second, unpaid caregiving remains strongly gendered, both in participation and time spent. Third, migration must be analysed through duration, reason, economic activity, and related household conditions rather than as a single undifferentiated category. Together, these observations justify treating metropolitan women’s social insecurity as multidimensional.
Literature contributes something different. It can bring stigma, bodily vulnerability, family control, institutional discipline, addiction, and marginality into the same narrative field, thereby showing how analytically separate policy categories may be experienced simultaneously. This insight supports a field instrument that measures employment, housing, care, mobility, safety, documentation, social protection, and social networks within a single architecture. It also supports qualitative interviews capable of explaining why women with similar measurable characteristics may experience the city differently.
The proposed representation–reality matrix offers a safeguard against confirmation bias. Each literary theme should be paired with an independently defined field indicator; quantitative findings should then be interpreted alongside qualitative evidence, and disagreement between the literary and empirical domains should be reported rather than suppressed. Such a design allows Hindi literary studies to enter a rigorous interdisciplinary conversation with gender studies, sociology, migration studies, and urban research.
8. Implications for the Proposed ICSSR Major Project
The analysis suggests five refinements for the associated field project. First, ‘displacement’ should be operationalised through migration status, duration of residence, housing insecurity, and portability of services rather than used as an undefined umbrella term. Second, unpaid care and time poverty should constitute a separate analytical domain. Third, the literary corpus should be declared in advance and verified against publishers or the exact editions used. Fourth, the questionnaire and interview schedule should map directly onto the representation–reality matrix. Fifth, national PLFS and TUS estimates should be used as contextual baselines, not as substitutes for Mumbai-, Delhi-, and Kolkata-specific evidence.
A 600-respondent stratified purposive survey, supplemented by in-depth interviews, focus-group discussions, and case studies, can therefore be justified as an exploratory comparative design rather than a prevalence survey. The project’s strongest contribution would lie in identifying combinations of vulnerability—such as informal work plus insecure housing plus high care burden—and explaining how women themselves understand and negotiate those combinations.
9. Conclusion
Reading Madhu Kankaria’s fiction alongside official social statistics can strengthen the public relevance of Hindi literary scholarship when the distinct evidentiary status of literature and survey data is respected. PLFS documents a substantial rise in urban women’s labour-force participation over the longer survey series, while TUS demonstrates the continuing gender imbalance in unpaid care. Census migration tables provide the conceptual architecture needed to analyse mobility through reason, duration, sex, age, and economic activity. Kankaria’s fiction, meanwhile, keeps attention on the lived complexity of marginality, constraint, and agency that aggregated statistics cannot narrate.
The value of an interdisciplinary approach therefore lies not in claiming that fiction ‘proves’ social data or that statistics ‘verify’ literature. It lies in constructing better research questions. A carefully designed metropolitan field study can test which vulnerabilities persist, which have changed, and which new forms have emerged in contemporary urban India. In this sense, the movement from literary representation to empirical inquiry is both methodologically defensible and socially productive.
References
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Kabeer, N. (1999). Resources, agency, achievements: Reflections on the measurement of women’s empowerment. Development and Change, 30(3), 435–464.
Kankaria, M. (2000). Khule Gagan Ke Lal Sitare. Rajkamal Prakashan. (Publisher record: 2017, 3rd ed., 172 pp.).
Kankaria, M. (2005). Pattakhor. Rajkamal Prakashan. (Publisher record: 2023, 2nd ed., 212 pp.).
Kankaria, M. (2008). Sej Per Sanskrit. Rajkamal Prakashan. (Publisher record: 2025, 2nd ed., 228 pp.).
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Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India. (2024). Periodic Labour Force Survey: Annual Report, July 2023–June 2024.
Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India. (2025). Time Use in India, 2024.
Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India. (2011). Census of India 2011: Migration Tables D-03 and D-06.
Roy, A. (2005). Urban informality: Toward an epistemology of planning. Journal of the American Planning Association, 71(2), 147–158.
Note on Sources and Quotations
All numerical claims and figures in this article are based on official Government of India statistical publications. Bibliographic details for the three principal literary texts discussed above were checked against Rajkamal Prakashan’s official catalogue. No direct quotation from Madhu Kankaria’s fiction has been included because the exact page images of the editions cited were not available for verification. This avoids attributing fabricated or edition-mismatched quotations to the primary texts.
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