For generations in India, a full-figured person was automatically perceived as someone with privilege, someone who could afford to eat well. Curves were ‘in’, while being thin signaled that you didn’t have enough.
Cut to contemporary India, where that perception is shifting.
Recent National Family Health Survey numbers tell us that one in sixteen Indian women, and one in twenty-five men is obese. A quarter of young Indian women and just over a fifth of young men, now weigh more than what is considered a normal range. The trend line, across five rounds of the survey since 1992, points steadily upward.
From an Indian perspective, this makes eminent sense; as certain sections of society grow wealthier, their weight correspondingly rises. The oddness comes when you compare India to Western countries. In many other countries, the data reveals that the more money a household has, the fitter its members tend to be. This is consistently true in the United States, Britain, Germany, and wealthier parts of Asia such as South Korea. But when economists have split that data by gender, an odd asymmetry shows up. Wealthy women are reliably thinner than poor women. Wealthy men, though, are not much different from poor men — plenty of both are overweight. The conventional explanation is that in rich countries, heaviness has become, in effect, a marker of scarcity: too little money for good food, too little time for the gym, too little flexibility in a low-wage schedule to plan meals or exercise.
Swelling incomes in urban India increasingly equal greater convenience: the ability to buy a car, using a delivery app instead of stepping to the neighborhood corner store, a fridge stocked with rich, heavy food, and access to multiple household staff. In the country, therefore, having purchasing power equals the power of not having to move.
This greater convenience is paired with the transformation of the urban Indian diet, where traditional home-cooked meals are giving way to colas and burgers thanks to burgeoning fast food chains.
Meanwhile, the culture that surrounds the body has been rewriting itself just as quickly. That old grammar, in which plumpness read as good fortune, is being overwritten by a newer one, imported largely through globalization, in which fitness has become the visible proof of means — visible proof that a person has the time and money to stay in shape. Ultra wealthy people such as Yash Birla and Ramona Narang now show off their muscles and their fitness regimes, on Instagram. Indian films, once happy to cast healthier-figured actresses, now cast very slim actresses and hyper muscular men.
That inversion of meaning reveals something. In a wealthier country, where a larger majority of citizens are affluent, thinness has become embedded as a cultural marker of privilege, since it is achieved through gyms, trainers, and carefully curated diets that only money and leisure can buy.
In India, affluence is newer, and for the moment it is expressing itself as the opposite: not the discipline to eat less, but the freedom, finally, to eat more, and to eat in the effortless, sedentary Western style that convenience has made possible before the cultural backlash to it has fully arrived. The rich world’s thinness gap and India’s weight gap may turn out to be two chapters of the same story, simply read at different points in time — one where a population has already absorbed the anxieties of plenty, and one that is still, for the first time, getting used to having enough.
None of this is necessarily a matter of individual willpower. It is the result of infrastructure, food, work and culture changing faster than our bodies can adapt—a transformation that is playing out across entire nations.
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