This chapter is an attempt to decolonize fat discourses—specifically, childhood fatness—by inserting India into a debate that has been, thus far, overwhelmingly situated in Europe and North America. “Childhood obesity” has become—as part of a global trend—a fraught site of moral panic, body-image anxiety, med- ical-industrial regulation, neoliberal consumerism, and mother-blaming (Boero, 2009; Friedman, 2015). While this is undoubtedly manifest in globalized, urban- ized India, there simultaneously exists an older, traditional, contrary narrative that celebrates fat as good. This is the point of difference (vis-à-vis western fat discourses) wherein I frame my inquiry and consider how, in India, childhood fatness is also a site of an ongoing epistemological conflict between cultures and generations, and how both these competing narratives (of fat-as-bad and fat-as- good) responsibilize mothers for childhood fat or its absence.

Sarkar, S. (2019). “May my children always have milk and rice”: Problematizing the role of mothers in childhood fatness in India. In M. Friedman, C. Rice, & J. Rinaldi (Eds.), Thickening fat: Fat studies, intersectionality and social justice (pp. 51–63). Routledge.