Beyond the Body Ideal: Everyday Fitness Practices in the Public Parks of Delhi

Abstract

The manoeuvring of everyday spaces to nudge the population towards a physically active lifestyle or active living has been the hallmark of the policy modes of instrumental thinking for combating physical inactivity, particularly in urban spaces across the world. Thus, the active promotion of fitness activities by the postcolonial state signifies the centrality of the body in disciplining docile and inactive individuals to produce fit and active citizens. Such a population-based approach has often raised concerns about social and spatial justice and expressions of identity, liberty, and surveillance, even as everyday spaces in cities continue to exhibit elements of colonial governmentality. In the midst of this, the body continues to be central to the ways in which such a population makes sense of being physically active and ‘being healthy’ in their everyday lives. By employing a multi-sited ethnography conducted over a period of 10 months in different public parks in Delhi, the present chapter aims to understand the ways in which fitness activities are performed, produced, and practised in the city. While public parks themselves are a product of colonial urban governmentalities in Delhi, this chapter argues that active bodies engaged in everyday sports in the parks also emerge as the critical site for the bodily inscription of global standards of physical activity. Driven by Western fitness regimes, individuals tend to understand themselves as entrepreneurial selves that can bring to life this imagination of the body ideal even while being engaged in various fitness and leisure activities aimed at being ‘healthy’.

Citation

Lakshyayog, (2024), "Beyond the Body Ideal: Everyday Fitness Practices in the Public Parks of Delhi", Mani, V. and Krishnamurthy, M. (Ed.) The Postcolonial Sporting Body: Contemporary Indian Investigations (Research in the Sociology of Sport, Vol. 20), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 73-91. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1476-285420240000020005