“First of all, children are not commodities. They did not ask to be born, so they have every right to lead their lives in their own way. It is not our job to be a stumbling block in the lives of our children.” From her home in Pune, a sprawling city in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, Jayanti spoke animatedly via WhatsApp video call, mixing English and her mother tongue Bengali. This was in March 2021, amid India’s second emerging COVID-19 peak. I had, perforce, adapted to virtual fieldwork conversations. I could spot her vibrant green sari draped over a red and gold blouse. She interspersed her dialogue with a lively bell-like laugh.

To her friends who still look hopefully to their children to receive care, traditionally the most familiar elder care practice in India, Jayanti admonishes: “You must live your own life! You can’t say”–she mimicked a helpless, meek tone—“Oh, I’m going to live with, depend on, my son.” At age 81, Jayanta Banerjee lives alone herself, widowed since her forties when her husband died tragically in a bike accident while commuting to his university position just blocks from their home, with her two sons abroad—one in Canada, one in Australia.

Jayanti, the oldest person in her apartment complex, incites criticism and dismay from her neighbors by not relying much on hired help either. Neighbors, amazed and disapproving, often comment: 

“You are so old! You should not cook, you should not do this, you should not do that!” 

“Oh my God, she’s so old, and she’s still cooking?!”

“Look at her! Look at her bouncing around! Going out to buy vegetables!”

“But I say,” Jayanti counters, “Yes! I do all my own cooking with my own hands! … As long as you can do anything, just do it yourself!” “I want to be bold, and live life in my own way. Why should you give control of your life to somebody else?” At times invoking globally circulating discourses of healthy aging, independence, and invincibility, Jayanti calls herself “ageless,” “like good wine, that gets even better with age.”

“Indians, especially women after fifty, ‘just let themselves go,’” Jayanti remarks, using the English phrase. She acknowledges that some of this giving up is due to social pressure, referring to widespread Hindu Indian beliefs about old age being a time for retirement and accepting the natural vulnerabilities of later life. “But just because age happens, why shouldn’t you take care of yourself? … They are half dead! …   Don’t say, ‘Oh, I’m 80, so I need to lie down.’” 

Expressing her revolutionary spirit, Jayanti enjoys wearing red whenever possible—a color typically forbidden for widowed Bengalis like her and frowned upon for older Indian women in general, as it connotes sexuality, fertility, auspiciousness, and youth. By wearing red, she sees herself as “fighting against a social evil.” She proudly declares, “Good. I won a battle.”

After we speak, Jayanti eagerly sends by WhatsApp two recent photos taken in her vibrant red attire.¹

Jayanti declares, “I do not use my age as an excuse for leading a lousy life! So, I approach my life this way. I have my own dreams and aspirations. I live following those.” 

Jayanti’s dreams and aspirations resonate with common discourses circulating now in India, salient especially among the middle and elite classes, where globally inflected prescriptions for healthy, active, and successful aging are on the rise, evident in the flourishing of news media, government initiatives, non-profit organizations, consumer products, and everyday talk related to the values of healthy living, active aging, and independent self-care in later life (Lamb and Goswami 2024). Such trends underlie what Tannistha Samanta describes as “an emergent cultural movement” in India of the Third Age (Laslett 1989), focused on ideals of youthfulness, choice, self-expression, and pleasure—a “celebration of the project of the self where the responsibility to ‘age well’ rests with the individual” (2018, 94).

But who is this prescription—to age well as a project of the self—for? Who participates, and who doesn’t? Who can, and who can’t? What if bodily or cognitive frailty, and/or insufficient economic resources, and/or desires for coresidential intimacy make it impossible for a person to “age well” on their own as an independent self? Jessaca Leanaweaver (2023) asks, “In any one ethnographic context, at what moments and for what reasons do people crave, expect, offer, or withhold care? What does good care look like?” 

These questions permeate my fieldwork in India, the conversations and debates I have witnessed and engaged in over the past several decades. They are important to consider, because care is fundamental to understanding how persons relate to one another and to their bodies and selves over the life course—that is, to visions of what it is to be human, and how best to traverse the end phases of life.

Today, India’s extensive news media often highlights the theme of aging beyond the family as a modern trend. In such discourse, old age homes are frequently invoked as symbols not only of the modern abandonment of elders but also of a significant broader erosion of Indian culture and values, as illustrated in a Times of India Readers’ Blog on “Old Age Homes:” 

Today I am alarmed to see the growth of Old Age Homes across India. … We once lived unitedly as a joint family, … consisting of many generations living in the same home, all bound by a common relationship. … Today the joint family system is slowly fading away and will soon become extinct. … Once everyone in the family gets married and starts moving away to lead their independent life, finally on one fine day aged parents will be left alone to take care of themselves. … What an inhuman way of treating aged parents! How cruel are the children nowadays! … Unable to digest the ill-treatment meted out to them from their children, the aged ones silently move straight away to old age homes (Sargam 2019).

Yet, my fieldwork both with those living on their own, like Jayanti, and with those living in India’s new old age homes, yields much more varied and nuanced narratives. Many interlocutors feel that they want to and “should” learn to cultivate independent ways of aging for today’s world. At the same time, they tend to convey generational independence not as a natural, assumed, or taken-for-granted way of living, as one often finds in North America, but rather as a lifeway to be critically considered and negotiated. A common sentiment is that we should not take independent living to the extremes witnessed in the West, and that accepting the human need for care and inter/dependence over the life course is of value.

During the pandemic, through conversations with older Bengalis via WhatsApp video calls and phone, my research assistant Nilanjana Goswami and I were struck by the thoughtfulness with which they debated independence versus interdependence. These discussions highlighted how central these themes were to decision-making about living arrangements, care, and wellbeing in old age. The elders we spoke with reflected on the landscape of social change, noting that the ways they were raised and had cared for their own parents—almost always in multigenerational households—often no longer applied. They expressed the need to navigate a new terrain of social change, selectively adopting and rejecting aspects of globally circulating images of healthy and active aging, particularly those from the West. Some even questioned, “Why should we ape the ways of the West?” (Lamb and Goswami 2024).

Retired industrialist Samrat Ghosh, age 80, had visited his two children living abroad in America and noticed that people there are “fitness freaks,” commenting: “Staying fit is important for them, as they need to do everything on their own.” 

Jogesh Mondal, age 71, who self-identifies as a member of the lower middle class and worked before retirement as a manager for Coal India, remarked: “I have never been lucky to visit America but I have heard that kids when they turn 18 are cast out of their homes by their parents, to fend for themselves. If an individual can drive out their own child when the child turns 18, then such individuals have to look after themselves after they turn 60. They have to learn to live alone.”

Amarnath Banerjee, a 70-year-old retired bank official, remarked how, to him, the Western idea of active aging associated with independence is a “selfish concept.” He elaborated: “I don’t agree with the American concept that being active means doing your own work. Rather, we should focus on cooperation and helping each other. Minding one’s business’ implies self-centeredness. … Higher faculties like love emerge through cooperation.”

At age 67, retired schoolteacher Mala Ghosh and her husband manage independently. She does not want her married children, settled abroad, to return to India for their care. However, she acknowledged they will soon start looking for a good old age home, challenging the Western notion that dependence can be avoided.  She remarked: “In old age, you have to be dependent. You can’t be not dependent all your life.”

At any life stage, solo living apart from kin is still not a highly familiar or accessible way of life for most people in India (Lamb 2022). National housing statistics illustrate this stark contrast: In the United States, 28 percent of all households consist of individuals living alone (Klinenberg 2012, 4-5), and in several major European cities, the percentage of one-person households exceeds 50 percent (Kislev 2019, 4). In India, only 4.09 percent of households were single-person in 2015-2016, a modest increase from just 2.4 percent in 1992-93 (Purkayastha et al. 2022, 58). 

A single woman who had chosen to move into an old age home while only in her forties explained her decision, remarking: “Living cannot happen alone (eka to thaka jae na). No one at any age can live alone.” 

At the same time, class and income profoundly shape aspirations and possibilities for navigating care in later life. Most of India’s old age homes are expensive—some lavishly so—catering only to the financially comfortable middle and elite classes. For those without readily available kin to rely on, or whose children are living abroad, these facilities can represent security and opportunity. Yet, they remain financially out of reach for the majority of the population.

Malobika, a never-married woman residing in the West Bengal Government Working Girls’ Hostel in the Gariahat neighborhood of Kolkata, is approaching her sixties. She dyes her graying hair black to maintain her job as a sales clerk, aware that her age could otherwise hinder her employment opportunities. Although she is annoyed by the hostel’s strict rules, she clings to the security it provides. In her small makeshift kitchen, with a kerosene stove and tin tea kettle on the floor of her shared room, she prepares tea and contemplates her insecure future. 

She wonders: “What will happen to me when I get old? Who will look after me? … Old age homes are so expensive! Who would take me there? I have absolutely no one.” 

She addresses me: “You have children. So, you have nothing to worry about. But me? I won’t be able to do anything about it! I have neither children nor money. … The main thing is that you need money. Without money, you can’t do anything.”

This conversation took place in January 2020. Soon, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged across India and much of the nation went into lockdown, I came to learn that Malobika had been laid off from her job as a home goods sales clerk. I reached her from the US by phone, and she was in great distress, with only a few months’ savings in the bank. I and one of my local research assistants, who had become very fond of Malobika, wired her some money. At the same time, Malobika’s brother came down with COVID-19 and requested Malobika to come nurse him—a familiar example of the ways the care labor of unmarried sisters is routinely called upon by extended kin, with no secure sense that reciprocal care will be extended in return (Lamb 2022). 

When Nilanjana Goswami and I asked other urban working class and rural landless-laborer interlocutors the same interview questions posed to the more elite, such as, “Do you expect to continue living with your children as you age?”, the elders—along with their kin who were usually present during the interviews in their co-residential home spaces—conveyed feeling taken aback, even a bit confused or insulted, by the question. “What do you mean? Where else would she live?”, one granddaughter replied. Mustafir Gazi, a working-class Muslim man in his sixties who lives with his three sons as they manage their family’s neighborhood grocery stall, declared: “Muslim families do not send their elders to old age homes. In Muslim religion, the feet of the parents is heaven, so they don’t put them in old age homes. They keep their parents with them.” These conversations revealed a common sentiment among both Hindus and Muslims: the idea that needing and receiving care in later life is perfectly normal and expected, even valued, similar to how North Americans tend to regard needing and enjoying care as a child as normal and valuable.

Indian American physician and author Atul Gawande, in his best-selling book Being Mortal, suggests that people in both the United States and India would choose to live independently from younger kin if they could. In his chapter “The Independent Self,” Gawande argues that with today’s pension systems and rising incomes, “both parents and children see separation as a form of freedom. Whenever the elderly have had the financial means, they have chosen what social scientists have called ‘intimacy at a distance’” (2014, 20-21). In their landmark text Successful Aging, American geriatrician John Rowe and psychologist Robert Kahn present the value of maintaining independence as a fact, stating: “When older men and women are asked about their hopes and aspirations, they name their primary goal—to remain independent and continue to take care of themselves. Similarly, when they are asked about their greatest worries, they stress the fear of becoming dependent on others” (1998, 125). 

But are visions of how best to live, age, and care for one another really so simple or universal?

Navigating the endscapes of life is unsettling, regardless of the era or location. The embodied vulnerabilities, looming limits of lifespan and healthspan, and need for social and economic resources for care, all bring existential issues to the fore. Globally circulating ideologies of healthy, successful, and active aging, often originating from the West, celebrate a presumed universally desired and achievable independence. These ideologies, which present the healthy self as a lifelong project, are inspiring to many worldwide, including in India.

However, ethnography reveals that we must question the universalizing certainties of any one approach. There is no single or simple answer to the challenges and opportunities of older age. Through listening to the stories of diverse, situated individuals, ethnographic research unsettles familiar ways of thinking and highlights that these are just one set of possibilities among many.

Retired travel agent Rajini reflects on such questions, puzzled by whether Americans committed to “successful” and “healthy” aging believe they can prevent old age or avoid it altogether. Employing familiar Hindu perspectives on human life that emphasize transience and change over stability and permanence, Rajini asserts: “No matter how hard you work, it is impossible for your old body to compete with the young. This is the fact we have to face. Aging is a timely thing that you cannot reverse. Humans always lose in the fight with time.” 

This finiteness of time accentuated in old age can be not only an unsettling challenge but an opportunity and inspiration. After recounting how a friend came over one evening for tea and coffee, and how they talked and sat together until midnight, Jayanti proclaimed: “I try to make use of every minute given to me! Because it won’t be there again.” 

Notes

[1] Giving her permission to publish her photos, Jayanti remarked: “If I can inspire even one person, my life will be worth it!”

References

Gawande, Atul. 2014. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. New York: Metropolitan Books. 

Klinenberg, Eric. 2012. Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. New York: Penguin.

Kislev, Elyakim. 2019. Happy Singlehood: The Rising Acceptance and Celebration of Solo Living. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lamb, Sarah. 2022. Being Single in India: Stories of Gender, Exclusion, and Possibility. Oakland: University of California Press.

Lamb, Sarah and Nilanjana Goswami. 2024. “Healthy Aging, Self-care, and Choice in India: Class-based Engagements with Globally Circulating Ideologies.” Journal of Aging Studies 68, 101194. 

Laslett, Peter. 1989. A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Leinaweaver, Jessaca. 2023. “Trying to Know Others in Andean Peru.” In “A Sign of Our Times: Caring in an Unsettling World,” edited by Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori and Salwa Tareen, American Ethnologist website, 3 August 2023. 

Purkayastha, Naina, Preeti Dhillon, Balhasan Ali, and Jiten Hazarika. 2024. “Changing Patterns of One-Person and One-Couple-Only Households in India.” Journal of Population Ageing 17: 51-69. 

Samanta, Tannishta. 2018. “The ‘Good Life’: Third Age, Brand Modi, and the Cultural Demise of Old Age in Urban India.” Anthropology & Aging 39(1): 94-104.

Sargam, Rajesh. 2019. “Old Age Homes.” Times of India Readers’ Blog March 27, 2019. 

 

Sarah Lamb is Barbara Mandel Professor of Humanistic Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Her research focuses on aging, gender, families, ethical strivings, and understandings of personhood in India and the United States. Her books include White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender and Body in India (2000); Aging and the Indian Diaspora: Cosmopolitan Families in India and Abroad (2009); Being Single in India: Stories of Gender, Exclusion, and Possibility (2022); and (as editor) Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession: Global Perspectives (2017). She is also the editor of the Rutgers University Press book series Global Perspectives on Aging. ORCID 0000-0002-9817-3692

Cite as: Lamb, Sarah. 2024. “Introduction.” In “Independence as Aspiration and Impossibility: Images from India towards the Ends of Life,” edited by Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori, American Ethnologist website, 7 August 2024. [https://americanethnologist.org/online-content/collections/aging-globally/independence-as-aspiration-and-impossibility-images-from-india-towards-the-ends-of-lifeby-sarah-lamb/]