Interacting With Domestic Objects: How Men in India Create a Sense of Home Away from Home

This thesis examines how occupationally mobile men in India construct a sense of home through domestic objects and spatial practices within temporary living spaces. Drawing on insights from material culture, anthropology, sociology, architecture, gender study and migration theory, this study explores home-making as an ongoing practice produced through everyday material interaction under conditions of repeated relocation. Focusing on North India, this study includes men in occupationally mobile roles such as the armed forces and government services as well as corporate professionals, traditional craftsmen, service workers and long-distance truck drivers. Despite differing occupational structures and constraints, participants share experiences of sustained mobility that require the continual reconstitution of domestic life across changing urban and semi-urban contexts. The homes examined include temporary and transitory accommodations: government provided institutional housings with standardised layouts, rented apartments ranging from compact studios to larger units, shared rooms in economically constrained settings and mobile dwellings such as truck cabins. Although these environments vary in scale and spatial configuration, limited privacy, institutional regulation and impermanence consistently shape domestic practice. The study critically attends to how domestic objects and spatial arrangements within these heterogeneous settings contribute to the practice of home-making and sense of belonging and identity among mobile men. Methodologically, this thesis adopts a qualitative, multi-method design integrating material culture, anthropological, sociological and architectural perspectives. Data collection involved seventy-two semi-structured interviews capturing narratives of home and identity; ethnographic observation in seventeen homes, supplemented by drawings and field notes; and two-hundred and thirteen participant-submitted photographs of emotionally significant objects, enabling semiotic analysis. Guided by the inductive methodology, analysis triangulates narrated experience, spatial observation and participant-led visual representation to examine how domestic meaning is materially produced. The findings reveal that men’s engagement with domestic objects in temporary homes operate as mnemonic and affective anchors linking mobility to continuity. Objects act as emotional carriers, storing memories and routines that travel across postings, enabling participants to recreate familiarity within unfamiliar environments and mediate relationships with absent family and past homes. Participants organise domestic space through practices that navigate expectations of ‘being a man’ in the society and emotional restraint associated with masculinised occupational cultures. Spatial arrangements reveal shifting zones of visibility and privacy, while everyday routines demonstrate forms of stability despite repeated relocation. Home-making therefore emerges as an active process through which masculinity, mobility and materiality are co-produced. These processes collectively constitute a ‘making of home’ that transcends fixed geography, instead, unfolding as a situated practice of belonging under precarity. This thesis contributes to debates on home, masculinity and mobility by advancing two theoretical models: the ‘Emplaced Home-making Matrix,’ which theorises the intersection of material, spatial and emotional practice and the ‘Mnemonic Mapping Model,’ which integrates interviews, observations and photographs as analytical registers. Together, these models demonstrate how belonging is materially sustained within mobile domestic conditions, extending existing theories of home by repositioning occupationally mobile men as active agents of domestic life.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

PhD

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

De Montfort University

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Bahadur, Devika

Licence

• https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/bitstreams/2c9eb340-bc41-4ea9-b3c9-0c6c14772ef3/download