Healthy aging, self-care, and choice in India: Class-based engagements with globally circulating ideologies

Abstract

Euro-American notions of successful and healthy aging are taking root globally, shaped and inflected by local cultural and political contexts. India is one place where globally inflected discourses of healthy, active, and successful aging are on the rise. However, notions about just what constitutes healthy aging and how to achieve such a goal do not play out the same way across the globe. This article explores how older Indians of diverse social classes are thinking about their own lives in relation to broader discourses of healthy aging circulating within India and abroad. Analyses of in-depth interviews with 25 individuals (11 women and 14 men, ages 57 to 81, across a range of social classes) reveal that while many among the urban elite are enjoying participating in a globally informed healthy-aging culture, such trends are not at all widespread among the non-elite. Moreover, Indians across social classes tend to interpret their own “healthy aging” goals in ways at odds with their perceptions of Western paradigms of healthy and successful aging, sometimes incorporating critiques of the West into their own reflections about health and well-being in later life. By examining how healthy-successful aging ideologies play out across divergent national-cultural and social-class contexts, our aim is to challenge universalizing models and heighten understanding of social inequalities while opening up a wider set of possibilities for imagining what it is to live meaningfully in later life.