Indian women are done adjusting. Now, they’re designing homes the way they like

Growing up, my bedroom never truly felt like mine because it was filled with choices made for me—the colour of the walls, the shape of the drawers, the design of the Formica sheets, even the size of the fan. In college, despite being on a shoestring budget, I was adamant about making the tiny room in the girls’ hostel feel like a reflection of the person I had grown into. It felt tentative, like testing boundaries I wasn’t sure I was allowed to cross.

Indian women have been raised with the idea that ‘home’ isn’t something they shape but something they adjust to. We’re born into an already-designed home, and we move into an already-designed home when we marry. But today, thanks to women who work long hours and want to come back to a space where they can unwind, or women simply becoming more assertive in general, we’re setting up apartments alone, negotiating shared spaces with flatmates and carving out corners in in-laws’ homes.

When Bhavya, 33, moved into her in-laws’ home during lockdown, she found herself suppressing design preferences. Her string lights with intimate polaroids, fridge magnets and bold artwork went into a box in the attic, tucked away out of sight. “Technically, I did have control over what I wanted my room to look like since no one explicitly objected. But deep down, it felt like I shouldn’t change anything. I thought I’d be judged or, at the very least, be invading someone else’s home, even though it was supposed to be mine, too.” Describing that familiar feeling of women’s spatial freedoms coming with invisible caveats, she says, “It’s similar to having a great leave policy at work, but the environment doesn’t support actually taking days off.”