Elena Valdameri

Training Female Bodies, Making Good Citizens: Women’s Physical Education between Global Trends and Local Politics in India (1900s – 1950s)

This project examines the role of physical education and outdoor activities for girls and women in late colonial and early independent India as a part of broader modernizing projects that focused on the body as a site of political intervention and used it to convey norms and values of ‘good’ citizenship. The research investigates the initiatives promoted by a variety of Indian and non-Indian historical actors: it shows that, while capitalizing on female ‘special needs’ and engaging more or less explicitly with globally circulating (pseudo-)scientific theories and medical knowledge, these actors advocated physical fitness schemes as instruments to ‘uplift’ women. What appears is that, by and large, the physically fit female body remained essentially linked to its ‘highest’ procreative functions throughout the period under analysis, but the relationship between women’s physical fitness, citizenship, national welfare, and racial vigour kept shifting according to the different ideological frameworks in which the advocacy of physical exercise for women operated. Crucial questions that this study seeks to answer are:

1) How and through whose agency did the concept – and attendant politics and practices – of modern physical education targeting women travel to colonial India? Were there pre-existing local ideals with which the new ones competed or connected? Did cross-cultural similarities exist?

2) What race, gender and class stereotypes were constructed or diluted through physical fitness schemes? More specifically, to what extent did the ideological milieu that connected physical fitness with modernity and civic values contribute to outflanking the model of the physically weak and fragile Indian woman and replacing it with a new model of politically and socially engaged woman?

3) To what extend did Indian women’s agency shape and even subvert the logics informing theories and practices surrounding the perceived fitness of their bodies?

4) Can we identify patterns of appropriation, rejection or subversion? Were there cultural obstacles to appropriate unchanged discourses and practices in Muslim- and Hindu-dominated contexts?

While correcting the predominantly masculine lens of existing research on the forging of the nation through modernizing bodily regimes, the project also points to the need of moving away from national or imperial lenses. These, in fact, have occluded the global interconnections and border-crossing trajectories at play when analyzing the history of the body in colonial settings and, more specifically, the epistemes, practices and discourses on, as well as the actors committed to, women’s physical education.

The study covers a period of around sixty years from 1900s to 1950s. It begins with a global moment that saw physicality become an increasingly significant element of modernity and of the performance of national identity, and it ends around a decade after India attained independence from Great Britian. Examining this span of time allows to track continuities and changes in the different ideological tendencies, political agendas and methods advocated by various individuals, groups, and organizations, some of which were already active prior to independence, over the early postcolonial period. In fact, the paucity of existing research after independence begs a thorough scrutiny of the new configurations of citizen-making schemes targeting women and how they were redirected from anticolonial objectives to the needs of the newly formed state.

Seriously taking into consideration the local contextualisation of globally circulating concepts, discourses, and practices designated to shape fit female bodies, the project intends to make a contribution to different strands of historical research. In this way, subfields like colonial and postcolonial history, women’s history, the history of the body, the history of medicine and science are put in conversation with each other so that they can cross-pollinate.