All the king’s horses and all the king’s men might not have been able to help Humpty Dumpty — that fabled, fat figure — but the New York City council certainly has. The council passed a bill that would make it illegal to discriminate among citizens on the basis of weight and height in housing, employment, and public accommodations. Size has mattered historically. In ancient Greece, through to the Renaissance and Victorian Britain, larger bodies and fuller figures were idealised as they were meant to represent wealth and affluence. The rich had access to better food and were spared the rigours of labour. Consequently, they were larger and paler, possessing the two physical traits that were coveted. In India, too, a look at famous sculptures and frescoes of apsaras, yakshis and temple carvings would reveal a preference for rotund, curvy forms. When and why, then, did weight fall from grace? Colonisation and the slave trade brought in their wake stigmatisation of weight with the subjugated races — the Bengali with an expanding mid-riff? — ridiculed as distinctly unmanly and sloth-like.

Colonialism has departed. But it has left behind prejudices that remain intact. It has been estimated that one in five heavily-set adults experience body shaming; the figure is higher among teenagers. The explosion of social media has made matters worse. In 2021, it was found that Instagram’s algorithms were drowning teenage girls under a flood of weight-loss content, leading to the rise of ailments like bulimia and anorexia. An equally toxic moral architecture has succeeded — perversely — in associating weight with laziness and gluttony, leading to embedded discriminations. Several surveys across the world show that overweight people are less likely to be hired; are paid less; have fewer opportunities; and are bullied in the workplace. As usual, women are made to bear a disproportionate slice of the discrimination — obese women earn $5.25 less per hour than women who fall under the ‘normal’ weight category who, by the way, make much less than their male peers, according to a Vanderbilt University study.

This is not to argue in favour of obesity. The latter has serious health consequences. But the equation between excess weight and illness is not entirely uncomplicated. Metabolic health — the link between weight and disease — is seldom reflected in physical appearance. Not all large men and women can thus be deemed unhealthy. What ought to be resisted is the institutionalisation of discrimination — social, cultural, economic, even medical — on the grounds of weight. New York City has shown a way to shift this burden,but the legislation will not carry weight across the world. What must perhaps be contemplated is a broader mobilisation against prejudicial attitudes towards largeness as well as greater empathy for victims of such shaming. A large heart is the need of the hour.