Designing Embodied Citizenship: Paradoxes of Decolonization in the Making of an “Indian” Regime of Clothing Size Standards

ABSTRACT

This article critically examines INDIAsize—an Indian government–funded anthropometric initiative to “decolonize” body size standards used in clothing production. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in New Delhi between 2020 and 2024, I demonstrate how body size research and design standards–making processes become sites for negotiating ideologies of citizenship and belonging in postcolonial contexts. The analysis extends anthropological scholarship on consumer movements by theorizing how contemporary designers deploy body standards, scientific authority, enumeration, and classification to police ethnic boundaries within consumer capitalism. I develop the concept of “embodied citizenship” to characterize these political struggles over the tangible, material, and epistemic conditions of corporeal access through which worldly participation is lived, contested, and claimed. I argue that seemingly inclusive design projects become vehicles for ethnonationalist politics not only through deliberate right‐wing orchestration but through the gradual accretion of exclusionary practices resulting from individuals’ implicit, habitual, or career‐optimizing decision‐making—cumulatively amplified and rendered opaque via technoscientific research methodologies. The conclusion considers how designers' decolonization practices are increasingly unmoored from the goal of liberation, proposing how ethnographers can study these processes by paying attention to intentions and enactments .