This chapter will examine the gendered politics of leisure and work in the films of Zoya Akhtar, analysing the representation of working women, their leisure practices, the role of glamour as labour, care work as leisure and ‘workplaces’ of leisure. Kathi Weeks likens the ‘workplace’ to the household, ‘typically figured as a private space, the product of a series of individual contracts rather than a social structure, the province of human need and sphere of individual choice rather than a site for the exercise of political power’ (2011: 4). Considering in detail Akhtar's first three films, Luck by Chance (2009), Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011) and Dil Dhadakne Do (2015), where there are direct encounters with women at work, this chapter will build on Weeks's formulation of the workplace to interrogate three crucial aspects of Akhtar's representation of gendered work in her films. Firstly, this chapter will examine how the performance of glamour by women subsumes waged work and unwaged work because it is framed as leisure. Secondly, it will analyse the gendered divisions of work and leisure in consuming and occupying luxurious and opulent (cinematic) spaces and how they are thus disguised as sites of aspiration and liberation for women. Lastly, the chapter seeks to highlight how women’s work is made invisible as pleasure/leisure, or what I call p/leisure, in how they undertake care, or care work, of familial social structures in Akhtar's films.

In his Critique of Everyday Life, Henri Lefebvre interrogates the concept of ‘everyday life’, asking where it is to be found: work, leisure, family life or life unfolding ‘outside of culture’ (1991: 31). He goes on to address the dialectic of work and leisure, inferring that while all of the aforementioned elements do make up ‘a global system’ of everyday life, leisure consists of discrete activities that produce and reflect both passive, ‘alienated’ attitudes, such as cinemawatching, and active, cultivated leisure activities such as photography, sports and filmmaking (32). In his text Everyday Life in the Modern World (originally published in French in three volumes in 1947, 1961 and 1981), Lefebvre's preoccupation with theorising leisure accounts for the fact that leisure can only be acquired as a break from the rhythms of everyday life: while ‘pledged time (professional work)’ and ‘compulsive time (the various demands other than work such as transport, official formalities, etc.)’