Explained : Urban India’s Burnout and the Fantasy of the Sanitised Past and Its Impact

The smog in Delhi NCR has become an annual affair. The thick black blanket of air now spares no one—not even the ultra-rich of Gurgaon, who breathe the same poisonous air from their 21st-storey balconies as the slum dweller who escapes their imagination, or exists only as a communal other.

The capital city is not an exception but the norm for a rapidly decaying urban India. Clean air, beautiful lakes, walkable roads, and public parks accessible to all remain distant aspirations. Indians are exhausted, not only from breathing a high density of PM2.5, but also by the fatigue produced by relentless work demands in tall, glass office buildings.

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The absence of meaning and pleasure in the city, combined with banal screen time spent consuming content rather than art, has led many to seek escape. Those who can afford it are increasingly chasing the pastoral ideal—an escape into the mountains, the countryside, into an imagined authentic place. In these spaces, working with hands, as artisans do, is celebrated without any reckoning with politics. Manual labour is romanticised by stripping artisans from their political, social, and economic conditions. The greenery becomes an opportunity to build an organic farm without understanding what building a settlement entails for someone who has never built anything with their hands but has always relied on cheap caste labour. The mountain inspires poetry but will be stripped of the roads on which visitors travel in their fossil-fuel SUVs to get there.

This exhausted Indian, for whom consumption is joy, seeks to escape not only to another place but also another time. Much like the politics of our era, which seeks glory in an imagined, mythologised ancient past, many Indians now seek pleasure and aesthetics in places preserved and marketed as remnants of a carefully curated, slower, and more comforting past.

The past as refuge

Consider the expanding heritage tourism market in India. The past here functions not as history but as a temporal refuge from the precarity of modern life. It is not the past as it was lived but as it is imagined in the present.

In Kannauj, widely recognised as the perfume capital of India, heritage tourism is gradually taking shape alongside its industry and market. The city draws on its connection with attar-making, a tradition dating back over 400 years. Tourism narratives on social media frame the spaces and processes as “experiences” to be consumed, appealing to a longing for an imagined simpler past marked by slower rhythms. The labour-intensive conditions of production in extremely high temperatures and the artisans who sustain the industry remain largely invisible or are idealised.

The artisan or artisanal product is positioned here as a marker of “authenticity”, something most consumers seek in their search for uniqueness rarely available in the metropolis. Across affluent households, handcrafted items occupy a prominent place, usually acquired from high-end boutiques and exclusive craft galleries. These objects circulate as markers of distinction and taste—what Walter Benjamin would describe as a modern longing for an “aura” in the age of mechanical reproduction. In a society dominated by mass-produced, standardised goods that are endlessly replicable, such objects project exclusivity.

Yet craft in India remains tied to caste-based communities situated at the lower rungs of the social hierarchy. The irony stands stark: while artisanal labour is increasingly displayed and converted into luxury commodities, the material conditions of artisans remain largely unquestioned and, accordingly, unchanged.

Sanitised estates, concealed histories

In West Bengal, several former zamindari estates in the countryside are being repurposed as heritage hotels. These spaces are not merely preserved but actively curated, designed to attract travellers from distant locations as well as nearby Kolkata. Upon entering, guests encounter what is presented as a rural Bengal that is supposedly timeless, unchanging, and fundamentally different from the present. Such spaces operate on the correctly identified assumption that those who travel to these “forgotten” regions seek an experience presumed to exist outside history, politics, and social conflict.

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In catering to this desire, heritage hotels selectively extract elements of the zamindari past while concealing the relations of agrarian power, dispossession, and inequality that sustained these estates before the abolition of the system. The Permanent Settlement of 1793, introduced by Governor-General Lord Cornwallis, granted considerable authority to a class of native landlords, empowering them to act as landowners and rent extractors, often with little interest in improving agriculture or the lives of peasants. Through rent extraction, among other instruments, zamindars and their subinfeudaries exploited peasants and built their aestheticised residences and estates.

When we visit these places today, we do not necessarily learn this history. What is offered instead is a sanitised past, rendered consumable through aesthetics of decay, nostalgia, and comfort, carefully choreographed through architecture, cuisine, décor, and storytelling, and enclosed within the idiom of “rustic luxury”. The result is less an encounter with rural Bengal than a commodified memory of it.

The question that inevitably follows is whether these pasts—these estates and artisanal practices—should be preserved at all. The answer is, emphatically, yes. Preservation matters. What demands reflection is how such pasts are being converted into exclusive islands of experience for a privileged few, even as the surrounding countryside continues to bear the weight of dispossession and neglect. What is safeguarded then is not history but access to it.

Beyond consumption

Tourism has increasingly been reoriented around display and replication, extending the same logic through which heritage spaces are rendered consumable, and shaped by what circulates on social media platforms. It has hardly ever been about exploring, encountering, and engaging with the unknown and the unfamiliar.

Travel need not be reduced to tourism alone. It has the potential to be rethought as a practice of engagement rather than mindless consumption—one that allows for reflection and contemplation. Yet this potential is rarely realised. It is not because people lack the intent or curiosity, but because they are caught up in routine jobs that leave little time and energy for either. For many, work itself is uncertain—unemployment is rampant, and older labour laws are being repealed to create weaker ones that will institutionalise precarity.

A woman displays toys outside her house at Raghurajpur heritage village, known for Pattachitra and palm leaf engravings, in Puri on April 1, 2025. Today, handcrafted objects circulate as markers of taste and distinction, even as the caste-based labour that produces them remains undervalued and precarious.
| Photo Credit:
K.R. Deepak

As long as work continues to be defined and organised around time, speed, exhaustion, and insecurity, leisure will remain a momentary relief rather than a meaningful one. What is required is a rethinking of the social conditions of how labour and rest are structured. Without addressing these concerns, everything, including leisure, will continue to be absorbed into the cycle of consumption without the possibility of transformation.

Perhaps our current predicament is the inability to slow down and redefine a life beyond the market, where rest and not work is the norm. The change can begin from within the cities that we seek to escape—by rebuilding them for a pleasurable life of dignity and beauty, not profit.

Soumyadeep Guha is a PhD scholar in History at the State University of New York, Binghamton. Rumela Chatterjee is a PhD scholar in Sociology at Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi NCR.