Loneliness, mobility and self-care: Active tourism and the remaking of later life in India

Aging in India is moving away from the discourses of withdrawal and otherworldliness to new forms of social engagement. Older adults, a growing demographic figure in the country, now seek care well beyond conventional institutions where active tourism has become one such site. Travel offers them cross-cultural belongingness, exposure to the pace of life elsewhere and the pleasures of leisured mobility, all of which reshape what active aging and self-care mean within India’s fragmented structures of care. Exploring this, the paper draws on the lived experiences of upper-middle class older tourists in Kolkata, the capital city of West Bengal, whose time, resources and class position allow them to enter the global tourism industry as consumers and for whom travel doubles as a performance of class identity and a means of remaking domestic roles. Yet their consumerist agency does not arise in a vacuum. It emerges from changing kinship relations and the out-migration of adult children, which together produce an embodied experience of loneliness. The paper therefore proposes tourism in later life as an adaptive strategy, one in which the older adults travel not simply for leisure but to repair the social worlds that migration and shifting kinship relationships have hollowed out.