Sport, glocalization and the new Indian middle class

Abstract

Focusing on the structure and influence of transnational sport – namely the Commonwealth Games and fitness culture within the context of contemporary India – we draw on observations derived from empirical research to explore the complex interrelationships between economic liberalization, globalization, and consumer capitalism. Our argument centres on the processes through which contemporary Indian sport culture is being re-made within the image of India’s new middle class; a set of processes that simultaneously contributes toward the hegemony of India’s protuberant new middle class and thereby patently re-inscribes the social inequities and polarities evident within Indian life more generally. Through a contextual consideration of the economic liberalization policies and allied neoliberal ideologies that propelled the emergence of the new middle class (Antonio, 2007), and the consumer culture through which its identities are substantiated and boundaries demarcated (Bauman, 2001), we point to those bodies valorized (productive, consumptive and functional) and those pathologized (impoverished, underserved and disposable) within a transnational sporting culture that espouses the dictates of neoliberal polity, policy and body politics.