A woman wakes up around 4:00 A.M. and enters the kitchen. Half asleep and still tired, she begins cooking: parathas, eggs, tea, and other items as per the family’s wishes. She then wakes everyone up for sehri (the meal consumed before dawn by Muslims who are fasting for the month of Ramzan), and observes roza (fasting from dawn to dusk) herself. While everyone goes back to sleep after the morning prayers, she has to clean the kitchen and make breakfast for those who aren’t fasting.
Throughout the day, she has to care for the children and the elderly in the household, while she cooks, cleans, and observes her own fast and religious commitments alongside. If she works outside the home, she must also fulfil her obligations at her workplace. Iftar (the evening meal served to break roza) has to be a grand feast every day, bringing the family together around the dastarkhawn (a cloth on which food is laid out) after a full day of fasting.
While everyone enjoys the food, hardly anyone recognises the labour that goes into this process, let alone how all the work often falls on only one person. But the work doesn’t end here; it’s followed by rounds of cleaning, cooking dinner, serving food, and putting everyone to bed.
While she is the first to wake up, she is often the last to sleep after a long day of work. However, the same will happen again tomorrow and the day after that and so on. Who is this woman? She is you and me and countless other women toiling every day in their homes, without any recognition or equitable distribution of domestic labour.
Performing emotional, cultural, and culinary labour
The division of domestic labour is gendered, relegating women to the domestic sphere, wherein they are entirely responsible for the housework, caregiving, and affective labour. While today more and more women participate in paid work outside the home, they still have to do most of the unpaid housework, leading to a double burden and a lack of rest, sleep, and time for self-care.
However, this disproportionate burden is exacerbated during festivals. The romanticisation of Ramzan with its grand feasts, community gatherings, communal eating, and late-night markets conceals the everyday realities of the lives of Muslim women. Women who are responsible for preparing these elaborate spreads, enforcing a religious environment at home, and materially and emotionally enabling other members to observe their fasts, all the while fasting themselves.
The aesthetics of iftar form part of the tangible expressions of the social-religious performance. However, what facilitates this social performance is the unrecognised physical and emotional labour that women put into it, which is essential not only to maintain the ‘muslim family’, but also the community and religion. However, throughout this process, the women remain invisible.
The space, both physical and emotional, that religion can provide women to form social networks or friendships, which can enable their mobility and social reproduction, remains rather marginal.
While women and their labour are central to these socio-religious processes, this centrality of women within the community and social spheres is curiously absent. This leads to indiscriminate forms of oppression and exploitation in all spheres of existence, be that social, economic, familial, or even spiritual.
Feasts and gatherings also reinforce the public-private divide, which also restricts women’s mobility. While different sects follow different rules regarding women’s access to mosques, in a majority of cases, they are often denied access, citing infrastructural constraints. The space, both physical and emotional, that religion can provide women to form social networks or friendships, which can enable their mobility and social reproduction, remains rather marginal.
The gendered experience of Ramzan
A reel about fasting during Ramzan, in which a woman discusses not being able to fast during menstruation, saw a disparaging comment from a man claiming his mother fasted while on her period (people who are menstruating, pregnant, breastfeeding, receiving postnatal care, or are ill or travelling are exempt from fasting). This forces one to reflect not only on the gendered experiences of Ramzan but also on the unsaid obligations placed on women.
Men remain ignorant towards these experiences of women, which often stems from the stigma attached to discussing menstruation. Women, on the other hand, have to pretend to fast for the same reason. A person’s religiosity is also measured by their capacity to fast, pray, and engage in other religious practices. Thus, even when women are exempted from fasting, societal norms encourage keeping that fact hidden.
However, while women are exempted from fasting, labour is still expected of them. Women are still expected to wake up early to make sehri and prepare other meals. Such selfless and sacrificial behaviour is glorified, as in the abovementioned comment on the reel, and is also considered the epitome of religiosity.
Given the demands of unpaid labour placed on women, they have little time or energy to practise the core demands of their religion.
The month of Ramzan is characterised not only by fasting, but also as a time when believers practice discipline and spirituality, strengthen their bonds with the Almighty, engage in charity, and practice the sacrifice of nafs (greed). However, given the demands of unpaid labour placed on women, they have little time or energy to practise the core demands of their religion.
In such situations, the undue burden of housework and caregiving for the family is justified as being equally rewarding. Domestic work for women during Ramzan holds not just material but also spiritual significance. Often, the idea of sawaab (returns for good deeds) is associated with women’s unpaid work, spiritually valorising such labour, which means efforts to distribute domestic labour more equitably are seldom made.
About the author(s)
Tahseen Fatima is a PhD scholar at the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi. She has also been a research associate at the Centre for Labour Law and Advocacy, NLU Delhi. Her research interests include gender, labour, caste among Muslims, informality, and cinema studies.
Yameena Ahmad is a PhD scholar at National Law University, Delhi. She is an academic fellow at the Centre for Labour Law Research and Advocacy. Her interests lie in examining the aesthetics and invisibility of gendered work, migration, and gig work.
