Fitness for Modernity? The YMCA and physical-education schemes in late-colonial South Asia (circa1900–40)

Abstract

AbstractFocusing particularly on the Madras College of Physical Education opened in 1919, this article reconstructs the role of the United States of America-dominated Indian Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in the spread of physical-education schemes in South Asia between the beginning of the century and the outbreak of the Second World War. American YMCA secretaries stressed the scientific, liberal, and egalitarian character of their ‘physical programme’ aiming at the training of responsible and self-controlled citizens and therefore supposedly offering an alternative to British imperial sports. The study demonstrates that the Y indeed exercised a considerable influence by acting as adviser to provincial and ‘princely’ governments as well as through the graduates of the Madras College of Physical Education (MCPE), many of whom became physical directors in educational institutions in India, Burma, Ceylon and other Asian countries. At the same time, it also makes clear that North American models could not be transplanted in a simple or straightforward manner to South Asian contexts. For one, in spite of its representation as a ‘school for democracy’, the Y's supposedly inclusive and emancipatory discourses and practices of physical fitness remained over-determined by the powerful influences of the colonial discourse of race, and the programme of the Indian Y continued to be rife with the imperial tropes ofsomatic Orientalismpredicated on the idea of fundamental difference between Westerners and South Asians. Likewise, the Y's sports mission turned out to be lessAmericanthan its advocates had hoped: ‘sportified’ versions of local games and physical exercises played an ever-increasing role in the numerous institutions of the Y in South Asia, leading eventually to a thorough ‘pidginization’ of its fitness regime.