ABSTRACT
In India—a “developing” nation where a majority of the population has historically been poor and hungry—fat is culturally valorized as a marker of prosperity. Traditionally, fat children embody class and caste privilege; and mothers bear the cultural responsibility of nurturing appropriately “plump”/“healthy” children. Yet, in the current century, in globalized, urbanized India, “childhood obesity” has become—as part of a global trend—a fraught site of moral panic, body-image anxiety, medical-industrial regulation, neoliberal consumerism, and mother-blaming. This paper examines the simultaneous existence of these two contrary fat discourses and considers how, in India, both these competing narratives (of fat-as-bad and fat-as-good) responsibilize mothers for childhood fat or its absence. The first section focuses on three intensely scrutinized maternal categories—the traditional (over)indulgent mother, the working mother and the fat mother—in mainstream fat discourse, as exemplified in a controversial clinical study on Indian urban childhood obesity and related media articles. The next section analyses the responses of ten Indian mothers implicated in this binarized fat politics, exploring their diverse lived experiences of anxiety, discrimination, oppression and guilt, and their active coping strategies in mothering fat/not-fat child/ren.
