P ISE FOR MUSCULAR INDIA

‘If you are looking for politically correct clichés about masculinity and
“changing India”, go elsewhere. Enter here for a tender and absorbing
story of muscular men, their searching hearts, their quest to matter in the
world. In this intricate and often entertaining landscape of gyms and
trainers and body building, you glimpse a truth about how vulnerable
aspiration makes us, how conditional are the promises of change, and how
lonely the enterprise of becoming a man.’ – Paromita Vohra, filmmaker,
writer and founder, Agents of Ishq

‘Muscular India is an essential addition to the study of upward mobility

in India. Through his immersion in the world of gym-made masculinity,
Baas bring us unforgettable stories of young men navigating the country’s
labyrinthine middle class armed with their bodies.’ – Snigdha Poonam,
author of Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World

‘Baas’s rich, textured and deeply insightful ethnography of body building

provides us with profoundly important insights on masculinity and
sexuality in South Asia. His analysis produces a critically incisive
understanding of embodiment, establishing a new and important
anthropological perspective on the anxieties and ambivalences of middle-
class identity in modern India.’ – Joseph S. Alter, author of The Wrestler’s
Body: Identity and Ideology in North India and Gandhi’s Body: Sex,
Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism

‘Muscular India is a fascinating story of national and bodily

transformation, shining a light on the country’s rising middle class by way
of its muscle men and fitness fanatics. Michiel Baas uses an impressive
mix of academic research and colourful real-life “in the gym” stories to
reveal a deep urge for self-improvement amongst India’s urban elite, from
the Bollywood idols whose sculpted bodies they emulate to the ambitious
working-class men who train and encourage them.’ – James Crabtree,
author of The Billionaire Raj

‘Michiel Baas uses bodybuilding and the gym culture to provide deep
insights into the Indian middle class, notions of mobility, cultures of
consumption, the obsession with Bollywood bodies and sexual desire.
Based on years of ethnographic research, the book is invaluable in
understanding the paradoxes of urban India.’ – Ronojoy Sen, author of
Nation at Play: A History of Sport in India

‘What do body building and the muscular body mean in contemporary

India? To this apparently straightforward question, Michiel Baas provides
a series of fascinating answers that capture the extraordinary social and
cultural churn in contemporary Indian society. An academic readership
will discover new ways of thinking of the body as an exploration of social
life whereas a non-academic one will discover what accessible scholarly
analysis has to offer towards a nuanced understanding of the Indian
present.’ – Sanjay Srivastava, author of Entangled Urbanism: Slum,
Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon

‘It’s rare to find a study that effectively combines theory and practice, but
Michiel Baas’s study of masculinity and the middle class in India does
just that. Muscular India is conceptually sophisticated and
ethnographically immersive; it moves fluently from idea to detail, and
back, all the while introducing us to a cast of well-rounded characters
who play out their lives in fascinating, little-explored settings. Along the
way, the book also makes detours into a host of important contemporary
issues, including consumerism, urbanisation, sexual mores, food
adulteration and the nation’s technology industry. What all of this adds up
to is a nuanced and layered portrait of modern India.’ – Akash Kapur,
author of India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India
‘Through his illustrative and eloquent writing, Michiel Baas takes us on a
vivid journey through the bumpy, aspirational worlds of lower-middle-
class male fitness trainers in India. In all its ethnographic vitality, the
author successfully captures how a poignant search for economic status
and social respectability, intersects with the desire for muscularity and
transformed bodies among these men. Baas’s lucid and nuanced
reflections, on how these robustly modelled bodies become emblematic of
a new India, is a must-read for those interested in the expanding market
for body-building in middle-class and urban India.’ – Atreyee Sen, author
of Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum
First published by Context, an imprint of Westland Publications Private
Limited, in 2020

1st Floor, A Block, East Wing, Plot No. 40, SP Infocity, Dr MGR Salai,
Perungudi, Kandanchavadi, Chennai 600096

Westland, the Westland logo, Context and the Context logo are trademarks
of Westland Publications Private Limited, or its affiliates.

Copyright © Michiel Baas, 2020

ISBN: 9789389648218

The views and opinions expressed in this work are the author’s own and
the facts are as reported by him, and the publisher is in no way liable for
the same.
All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written
permission of the publisher.
For Rithesh
 CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 THE NEW INDIAN MALE
CHAPTER 2 A SMALL NEIGHBOURHOOD GYM
CHAPTER 3 BODY | BUILDING | CAPITAL
CHAPTER 4 SOCIETY ON STEROIDS
CHAPTER 5 CITY OF VILLAGE(R)S
CHAPTER 6 SEX & DESIRE
EPILOGUE
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
 INTRODUCTION

I
t took three movies and a magazine to popularise a new bodily ideal
among middle-class men in India, characterised by bulging biceps,
rock-hard abs and visibly pronounced pecs. Radiating masculine
strength and athleticism, this ideal diverges markedly from the healthy
potbelly of yesteryear’s middle-class male—once the signifier of
prosperity and well-being. This new ideal does not align easily with that
of the pehlwan-wrestler whose body is the product of a diet rich in ghee,
almonds and cow milk. Even if there is some tangible (or historical)
connection in terms of workout routines, the end result is a radically
different body. While this new lean and muscular body, with its emphasis
on vascularity, comes closer to that of the working classes, within a
middle-class context it now references discipline, professionalism and
cosmopolitanism. While this trend has been taking shape for roughly two
decades, it’s only in the last ten years or so that it has caused a veritable
fitness boom across India.
For an older generation of fitness trainers and bodybuilders, Salman
Khan’s hit-movie Pyaar Kiya to Darna Kya (1998) was the first
intimation of what could be achieved with their bodies. However, this
only translated into the real and very rapid growth in gym memberships
and demand for personal training when Shah Rukh Khan revealed his
freshly baked six-pack abs in Om Shanti Om (2007). The actor’s dramatic
transformation was a hot topic of discussion in popular media that year.
Yet, this was nothing compared to what would befall Aamir Khan after he
starred in Ghajini (2008), the Hindi remake of a 2005 Tamil blockbuster,
itself based on the American Memento (2000). 1 Shot not long after he
played an art teacher and ‘ordinary’ boy-next-door in Taare Zameen Par
(2007), in Ghajini the actor sports a phenomenally muscular physique that
immediately begged the question: how had he pulled it off? In 2007, the
Indian edition of Men’s Health was launched, further propelling the creed
of the lean, muscular body. The magazine’s use of cover models who were
not celebrities confirmed the potential of the Indian male body beyond
Bollywood’s elite.
What is this body about, though? Why has it so seized the imagination
of middle-class men? And where have these legions of fitness and
personal trainers emerged from? After a decade spent researching this
phenomenon, I believe that the notion of transformation is key to
understanding these developments. Bollywood actors constantly discuss
the details of how they have sculpted their body to specifically suit a new
movie project, making it part of promotional activities. In fact, this bodily
transformation is often a separate storyline in itself, to be narrated
alongside that of the movie in question. It draws attention to the lead
actor’s body as something to go see and admire in addition to the movie’s
actual storyline. Gyms too aggressively promote the potential for
transformation, often imbuing it with notions that venture well beyond the
idea of fitness per se. Men’s Health magazine even suggested that
transforming one’s body wasn’t merely about health and fitness but also
about being professional, cosmopolitan and ‘in control’ to withstand the
caprices of rampant overconsumption.
Meanwhile, there is no denying that India itself is transforming.
Cities are rapidly expanding, new places of leisure and consumption open
their doors all the time, and quality of life—due to air pollution,
population growth and the pressure on existing infrastructure—is
diminishing. Central to these developments is the growth of the middle
class itself. While it tends to be the middle class that cities cater to as they
expand, remake and introduce new ways of consumption and leisure, it
also presents them with new opportunities in terms of career pathways
and generating an income.
This book builds upon an almost decade-long research engagement
with lower-middle-class men for whose families the very idea of
belonging to the Indian middle class is a relatively new situation.
Employed as fitness (or personal) trainers and competing in bodybuilding
and modelling competitions, these men’s muscular bodies appear to
reflect the very promise of a new India. Through extensive physical
transformation, their bodies have come to approximate the lean and
muscular ideal that Bollywood has popularised. The last decade or so has
seen the rapid emergence of a fitness industry across India, attracting an
ever-growing number of middle-class Indians struggling with issues of
weight-gain and aspiring to achieve this new muscular ideal. Trainers and
bodybuilders have become brokers in bodily knowledge and are held to
have the key to physical transformation. As much as they are admired for
their bodies, the socio-economic distance between the trainers—hailing
from lower-middle-class vernacular (‘vernac’) backgrounds—and their
clients remains significant. However, this ostensive class gap also
presents an opportunity for social mobility. Interacting with upper-middle-
class clients helps trainers improve their English and acquire knowledge
of the kind of lifestyles they aspire to. Their bodies function almost
literally as currency in this; it buys them a way into something that would
have otherwise kept its doors resolutely shut. At the same time, these
relationships between trainers and clients continue to be revealing for the
boundaries that separate different layers of the Indian middle class,
pointing at the resilience of entrenched hierarchies. As much as change
and limitless opportunities characterise the narrative of a new and rapidly
changing India, upward socioeconomic mobility can be a pretty sluggish
process as well.

A NEW AND CHANGING ‘MIDDLE -CLASS ’ INDIA

For decades now, the dominant narrative about India is of a country
undergoing rapid change, and emerging as an economic and geopolitical
force to be reckoned with. This idea of a changing or new India can be
traced back to the year 1997, when the country celebrated the fiftieth
anniversary of its Independence. Around this theme of a half-century-year-
old nation, international media focused on the concept of transformation
and the country’s growing dominance in the world of information
technology. Popular magazines with an international readership, such as
Business Week , The Economist , Newsweek and Time , often drew upon
the dyad of the elephant and the tiger or a variety thereof. The former
symbolised an India of the past, shackled by a planned economy and
Licence Raj, something that came to an end in 1991 when the country’s
economy was liberalised and foreign capital started flowing in. In
contrast, post-1991, India was increasingly equated with a tiger, roaring
loudly and ready to show the world its teeth. These analyses and stories
neatly juxtaposed old (black-and-white) images of the political leaders
who had ushered in Independence and the years of despair that followed
with new , colourful ones of IT campuses, shopping malls and the
flamboyancy of Bollywood. Central to these developments appeared to be
the emerging Indian middle class with its command of the English
language, transnationally marketable skills and new consumer power. In
the years that followed, the question of what precisely this change entailed
beyond these generalisations resulted in a number of studies and essays,
often with a specific focus on the Indian middle class. Muscular India
takes inspiration from these but is also critical of them.
Even those studies that do acknowledge that middle-class India is not
a homogenous whole, rarely is there an examination of how the various
layers that characterise the middle class relate to each other, or how more
recent members of the middle class may strategise to close the gap with
those considered higher or ‘upper’. Instead, the middle class’s internal
hierarchy—characterised by a (newer, vernacular) lower middle class
and (older, English-speaking upper middle class)—is often somewhat
unwittingly reproduced. The chapters to come challenge this in that they
focus on those whose ambition it is to climb the middle-class ladder.
Even before Indian Independence, new entrants were perceived as
‘inauthentic’ and inherently suspect, equated with materialism and other
types of behaviour frowned upon by the old elite. Born out of a lack of
capable (British) administrative staff who could keep the colonial engine
going, the formation of an older middle class can be traced to Lord T.B.
Macaulay’s 1835 ‘Minute on Indian Education’, which suggested that:
‘We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters
between us and the millions we govern; a class of persons, Indian in
blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in
intellect.’ 2 Even if this class later came to frown upon new entrants,
during colonial times, they themselves were perceived to be ‘deracinated
hybrids who could never hope to be fully Western, and who, at the same
time, were cut off from their own culture and civilization because of their
exposure to Western ideas’. 3 In this regard, the emerging middle class of
colonial India compared unfavourably with an allegedly more authentic
one that had its roots in Europe and the US. 4
In his perceptive study of the making of a colonial middle class in
north India, historian Sanjay Joshi (2001) notes how ‘being middle class’
was mainly a project of self-fashioning. His assertion that the middle
class needs to be understood as a project that was constantly in the making
and not simply as a mere sociological fact is something that continues to
hold relevance for new middle-class formation in contemporary India. To
be modern in colonial India meant centring the notion of aspiration, 5
which is also how India’s new middle class is conceptualised.
Well-known author Pavan K. Varma, who was one of the first to
address the question of the Indian middle class in his appropriately titled
The Great Indian Middle Class (1999), voiced his concern about the new
middle class’s proclivity to uncritically copy everything that comes from
the West. 6 In a somewhat similar vein, sociologist and public intellectual
Dipankar Gupta phrased his unease through the notion of westoxification.
7 In the slipstream of such studies, a more transnational perspective on the

formation of middle-class identities and lifestyles emerged as well. In

these we find that middle-class avariciousness and apathy is fuelled by
the growing gap between a globally connected, transnationally oriented
middle class and those left behind in this growth model. Geographer
Emma Mawdsley (2004) writes that members of this globally connected
middle class appear to have more in common with other middle classes in
countries such as Australia, South Africa and the US than with what she
describes as the ‘parochialised “have-nots” of their own nation’. 8

THREE HUNDRED MILLION MIDDLE -CLASS INDIANS

On 3 February 2014, the cover of Open magazine featured a drawing of a
fictive scene bringing together the two competing electoral prime-
ministerial candidates at the time, Narendra Modi (Bharatiya Janata Party,
BJP) and Rahul Gandhi (Congress). Sitting on a wooden bench facing a
calm river, both have their fishing rods out, about to haul in the middle-
class vote. ‘The baiting of the middle class’ is how Open captures the
issue at hand. ‘This 300 million strong constituency is now clamouring for
political attention—and getting it too.’ 9 Accompanying the article is an
illustration of both political leaders in a boat, this time decidedly less
composed, standing up, fishing lines ramrod straight, and bewitched
masses emerging from the murky-blue waters below, having caught the
bait. 10 The focus of the piece is resolutely on the new middle class,
which according to well-known academic Ashis Nandy had ‘emerged as a
formidable force in the country’ [and who now] ‘constitute more than one-
fourth of the population’. 11 The middle class would indeed play a key
role in the 2014 elections in which Narendra Modi secured a landslide
victory. Five years later, the mandate from the middle class appears to
only have increased. While, in 2004, the BJP’s use of the slogan ‘India
Shining’ backfired and is held to have contributed to the defeat of then
prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s BJP-led government, ten years later
the promise of a new and shining India was very much integral to the
construction of ‘Brand Modi’, with its emphasis on the successes made in
his home state (Gujarat), the fight he pledged against corruption, and his
appeal to urban voters and India’s youth. 12 Even though Modi rarely
directly referred to the promise of a new and shining India during the
2014 campaign, the victory speeches he made right afterwards explicitly
did. 13 Having successfully hauled in the 300-million-strong middle-class
vote, a new India was (again) ready to take off.
How do new middle-class Indians relate to the idea of change and
the opportunities it brings? While studies of the Indian middle class tend
to take economic growth as a point of departure to discuss the rapid
emergence of a new class of consumers with significant political
influence, their estimations of size are revealing. For one, the number of
300 million has existed for at least two decades now. In India:
Globalization and Change (2000), anthropologist Pamela Shurmer-Smith
already speaks of 300 million, drawing on data from the late 1990s. Even
though she herself appeared unconvinced that this was correct at the time,
it is clear that it concerned an estimate that had had some traction for a
while already. 14 In contrast, the Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER)
estimated the middle class as just over a 100 million or 12 per cent of the
total population in 1993. 15 Even if India’s economic liberalisations were
only two years old at the time, surely the middle class didn’t grow by 200
million individuals over the next seven years? Confusingly, six years after
Shurmer-Smith’s book was published, anthropologist Minna Säävälä
(2006) speaks of 200 million, or 20 per cent of India’s population, in her
study of new middle-class aspirations in Hyderabad. Säävälä borrows
this figure from sociologist D.L. Sheth’s study which appeared in 1999,
only one year before Shurmer-Smith’s. 16 In contrast, political scientist
Leela Fernandes’s influential publication India’s New Middle Classes
(2006), which appeared in the same year as Säävälä’s, speaks of a 250
million-strong middle-class consumer market. 17
More recent studies continue to befuddle. In their introduction to the
edited volume Elite and Everyman , Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray
(2011) write that ‘[w]ith the broadest definition of the middle class in
India, it is estimated that the top 26 per cent of Indian households belong
to this income group.’ 18 For this they refer to E. Sridharan’s work (2004)
19 , which focuses on dissecting the sectorial composition of the country’s

middle classes but whose data set does not go beyond the year 2000. In a
widely quoted publication of 2004 (reprinted in the earlier mentioned
2011 volume), E. Sridharan himself acknowledges the maddening
diversity in terms of size estimates, saying it varies between 50, 150
million and 250 million. In her detailed and insightful study of middle-
class anxieties and gender in Madurai (Tamil Nadu), Sara Dickey (2012)
notes that estimations of the size of India’s middle classes vary between
50 and 350 million, corresponding with at least 5 per cent and at most 35
per cent of India’s population. 20 However, Dickey also adds that there is
growing agreement that the higher figures are greatly exaggerated. 21
Surinder S. Jodhka and Aseem Prakash note something similar in their
book in the Oxford India Short Introductions, The Indian Middle Class
(2016), arguing that estimates vary between ‘a lower end of 5 or 6 per
cent of the total population’ and ‘an upper end of 25 or 30 per cent, and
sometimes, even more’. 22

A (NEGATIVE ) PRODUCT OF ECONOMIC GROWTH

Discussions about size also point to highly specific ways of thinking about
what the middle class stands for. There is a tendency to focus primarily on
consumption and political influence. 23 The article in Open suggests that
the two are directly related—by making ‘their’ size count, India’s middle
class is all about consumerism and demanding politics to cater to their
needs. This resonates with a popular framing of the new middle class as
chiefly unethical, narcissistic and uninterested in the larger issues India
grapples with, be it poverty, environmental pollution or violence against
minorities. The adjective ‘new’, therefore, does not so much refer to an
expanding middle class in positive terms—denoting upward
socioeconomic mobility—but rather a ballooning one, not unlike a
protruding waistline. The new middle class is not celebrated as an
outcome of economic growth but seen as a negative by-product instead,
signifying a society out of control.
However, as sensitive and ethnographically rich studies such as Ritty
A. Lukkose’s Liberalization’s Children (2009), Christiane Brosius’s
India’s Middle Class (2010) and Sara Dickey’s Living Class in Urban
India (2012) confirm, the idea of a singular ‘united’ middle class with a
clear consumerist and political agenda is deeply problematic. Instead,
what stands out is how complex the middle class’s internal hierarchical
layering and regional differences can be. Muscular India uses the term
‘middle class’ to mean a purely social and cultural construct. The use of
lower, middle and upper middle class in everyday-speak does not only
indicate economic difference but also points at an interplay of other
factors. Fitness trainers and bodybuilders tend to hail from working class
or lower-middle-class backgrounds. Using the appeal of their muscular
physiques and their knowledge of how bodies can transform to achieve
that effect, these men (it is an overwhelmingly male field) generate an
income out of the bodily aspiration of their upper-middle-class clients. In
doing so, they also capitalise on what clients perceive these muscular
bodies to stand for. Yet, the muscular body alone cannot compensate for
the socioeconomic gap that characterises the relationship that clients have
with their trainers. Climbing the middle-class ladder, making alternative
career decisions, or simply doing things differently, requires long-term
investments in generating social and cultural capital. The new middle-
class profession of providing fitness training offers a unique opportunity
for this since it requires a long-term, and often deeply personal,
commitment between trainer and client. At the same time, trainer–client
relations continue to be illuminating for the boundaries and obstacles that
lower-middle-class men face when strategising toward upward
socioeconomic and cultural mobility.

NEW MIDDLE -CLASS PROFESSIONALS

The profession of fitness or personal trainer, much like that of coffee
barista and shop attendant in high-end malls, has emerged out of economic
growth itself. These professions are characterised by new ways of
working, often requiring direct contact with clients and customers. At
Starbucks, for instance, this revolves around the idea of creating a ‘third
space’ for customers—an alternative to the home or office space. Baristas
are specifically encouraged to make customers feel at home by engaging
in chitchat, inquiring about their day and learning their names and
preferences, something unheard of in the fast-food outlets and eateries
they may have otherwise found employment at. 24 In the case of providing
fitness training, this contact tends to go much deeper. Besides, trainers are
the physical manifestation of something their clients desire, something that
money cannot necessarily buy: a muscular body characterised by bulging
biceps, clearly pronounced pecs and rock-hard abs. However, those
successful in the field of fitness training are rarely able to rely on their
bodies alone. They must be able to successfully interact with clients as
well as translate the customer’s vision into training routines and dietary
regimes. A certain middle-class comportment is deemed crucial to this,
something that could even be understood as being sufficiently able to
perform middle-class belonging.
These professions are relatively new, and the trainers are self-made
men, not just in terms of having fashioned and precision-engineered their
bodies, but also having developed a career or business trajectory out of
this involvement. Parents and other family members are generally far from
supportive of these trajectories, and their personal histories are revealing
for how so many have taken considerable financial risks. Largely
educated in a ‘vernacular’ language, instead of the ‘English-medium’ that
characterises their clients’ upper-middle-class upbringing, these men are
up against another hurdle to overcome. Bodily capital, as such, is rarely
enough to compensate for a lack of social and cultural capital, and can
even complicate matters. The trainers whose ambition it is to rise in
bodybuilding ranks through locally, regionally and (inter)nationally held
competitions have to work towards a muscular body that might deviate
from the ideal-type that their upper-middle-class clients are after. It might
even render them ‘too large’ for mainstream gyms who are keen to avoid
the (older) association of such bodies with underworld or goonda
characters. So, trainers must find a balance where their body might still
appeal even if it is not something the client ambitions for himself. And this
is crucial: the muscular ideal is never quite stable and not every muscular
body appeals to the middle-class imagination. Trainers interviewed who
worked with Bollywood (Hindi), Kollywood (Tamil) and Sandalwood
(Kannadiga) stars all confirmed that, increasingly, actors start with the
question of what type of muscular body they want to display in their next
movie. An actor will be able to capitalise on the body he presents through
the narrative of transformation, even if the end result is not necessarily
one that fitness enthusiasts might want to emulate.

SIZING UP THE MIDDLE CLASS

It is striking how central questions of size are to discussions about the
Indian middle class as well as the ideal and appeal of the muscular body.
When I brought this up over drinks with a friend in Delhi, he humorously
suggested that ‘of course size matters!’ While he was not necessarily
referring to the middle class itself, his rambunctious involvement in
regularly held gay parties across the city spoke of a certain middle-class
belonging where opportunities for same-sex encounters were in
abundance. As an English-educated and highly paid professional working
for a multinational company, my friend clearly belonged to a different
bracket of society than some of the trainers he had allegedly seduced in
his gym’s steam room. Even if such men did not identify as gay
themselves, my friend assumed that their ‘vernacular’ backgrounds meant
that these encounters signified something entirely different for them than
they did for himself. It aligned with a sort of general perception among
clients that trainers would be at their every beck and call, providing them
with dietary advice, lifestyle tips and providing exceptional flexibility in
terms of their personal training schedules. The understanding was that
‘these men’ might be open to same-sex encounters due to the more
conservative (traditional) gender relations in their communities, which
greatly reduced the chance of casual sexual relations with members of the
opposite sex. There was also, of course, the assumption that the trainers’
socioeconomic backgrounds leave them with no choice but to be
available, flexible and ‘servile’. It sketches a divide between ‘opposing’
middle-class camps that would often percolate through casual banter;
something I have come to be intensely critical of. As much as upper-
middle-class opinions of lower-middle-class newcomers were built on an
intrinsic dyad (vernacular vs English; provincial vs cosmopolitan;
boorish vs cultured), interactions and relations between the two were
revealing for how little is truly set in stone.
A pertinent question about the Indian middle class is precisely what
its potential represents. In other words, what can be found between
India’s increasingly muscular legs? This is a question that arises from the
fact that much of the discussion about the Indian middle class, as well as
the country’s economic growth and its swelling geopolitical influence,
abounds in masculine overtones. Mother India and her association with
Gandhi’s struggle for Independence and Nehru’s post-1947 planned-
economy period, has gradually been replaced with the notion of a
boisterous awakening, a sleeping giant getting on its feet, and a country
showing its might to the world. As noted earlier, this narrative is replete
with the flexing of muscles. Inescapable here is the liberalisation of
India’s economy in 1991, in which the gradual abolition of the licence-raj
was a crucial element. During this phase, domestic capital was freed from
licensing constraints, import restrictions were reduced, the currency
devalued, and opportunities for Foreign Direct Investment increased. As a
result, it became much easier and more appealing to invest in India, which
in turn encouraged a rapidly growing number of multinationals to establish
offices in India. 25
More recently, the country’s twenty-fifth anniversary of economic
liberalisations has led to revisiting the 1991 period and, in particular, to a
renewed assessment of its much-maligned prime minister of the time, P.V.
Narasimha Rao. 26 While the reforms that were implemented followed a
succession of severe financial crises, this history now also functions as a
pivotal moment: that’s when new India took off. Yet the exuberance that
clings to this narrative is also somewhat duplicitous because it ignores
genuine questions about the number of Indians who have actually
benefited from economic developments since.

UPG DING MIDDLE -CLASSNESS

Besides an important new way of generating an income, the fitness

training industry also represents an opportunity to ‘do things differently’.
Not following in their father’s footsteps, nor joining the family business,
or opting for a ‘respectable’ salaried job, such as engineering, medicine
or accounting, the trainers that this book focuses on are part of a growing
group of young Indians who attempt to carve out a non-traditional career
trajectory. Part of the industry’s attraction is that it is seen as an
opportunity to learn , which ranges from improving one’s English
language to learning new business and networking skills. Working in high-
end gyms allows trainers to develop a deeper understanding of the lives
and lifestyles of their upper-middle-class clients, something they hope
will be handy in ‘upgrading’ their own lives. The term ‘upgrading’—
frequently employed to describe the work on their own bodies—was also
used to define their ambitions beyond the gym. I hung out regularly in a
small neighbourhood gym in South Delhi (see chapter two), which was
deeply informative for how trainers give shape and direction to such
ambitions. It was equally revealing for how their upper-middle-class
clients perceived and engaged with these attempts at upward mobility.
Supriya, 27 one of the female clients at this gym, well aware of my
research, would often probe me for updates about my progress. Most
mornings she was trained by Amit, a floor trainer who took a selection of
regulars under his wing and provided them with on-the-spot instructions
on what exercises to do next. Amit was originally from Chirag Dilli,
another South Delhi neighbourhood, though of a decidedly different
standing from CR Park or GK-1, 28 where most of the gym’s clients hailed
from. In fact, Chirag Dilli is officially designated as an ‘urban village’. 29
Each day early morning, Amit made his way from this ‘village’ to GK in
order to provide the gym’s clients with personal guidance. Although he
had received almost all of his education in Hindi, he was always keen to
speak English inside the gym as a way of practising the language, which
he considered crucial to his future success as a personal trainer. For this
reason, Supriya had also taken him under her wing and often rather
adamantly insisted on speaking English, something she herself was fluent
in due to her upper-middle-class upbringing. 30 This native Hindi and
Punjabi speaker spoke in an English laced with words and sentences in
Hindi for purposes of clarification as well as the freedom it provided to
mock Amit in a jovial manner.
One morning, Supriya asked, waving her hand casually in Amit’s
direction, ‘What is it precisely that you want to know about them?’ I
explained that I was mainly approaching the topic from the angle of it
representing a new middle-class profession that does not only offer
alternative career prospects but also opportunities for upward social
mobility. ‘For instance, because of their almost daily interaction with
people like you here in the gym.’ Supriya remained silent for a while and
then offered me her opinion: ‘I see what you are saying, it is indeed
remarkable how good these guys are at mimicking middle-class
behaviour.’ Her use of the word ‘mimicking’ indicated that she certainly
did not consider Amit her equal. In fact, she seemed to doubt that such a
thing was even possible. She smiled and added: ‘They try really hard you
know.’ She had observed herself how trainers like Amit were ‘practising
middle-classness’ through their interactions with her and other clients.
Even as she tried to help Amit out with his English, she continued to play
the part of gatekeeper, someone who decides what is sufficiently middle
class. In a nutshell, this is what most trainers of new middle-class
backgrounds struggle with. Understanding the language, codes and norms
of middle-class belonging took time and effort. This slow-paced process
contrasted with how fast everything else seemed to be developing.

AWARENESS OF THE OSTENSIVE GAP

As new middle-class professionals, the fitness trainers in this book have
embarked on a career trajectory that none of their family members have
experience in. Parents tend to have very limited understanding of what this
work entails, and trainers often struggle to convince the family that their
work is of a genuine nature and not connected to underworld or goonda
practices. More generally, this also means a new way of thinking about
themselves in relation to their immediate environment and India’s
changing urban landscape. As new entrants to the middle class, these men
are part of a growing group of Indians who are actively testing the
flexibility of, and manoeuvrability within, Indian society. However, while
celebrating the opportunities this brings in terms of breaking through class
boundaries and facilitating socioeconomic mobility, it is not hard to see
how fitness companies themselves understand this and seek to profit from
these young men’s ambitions. A manager of Gold’s Gym (a franchise
operation of American origin) in the north of Delhi was very clear that he
expected his team to ‘build a rapport with their customers so that they can
cash [in] on that’. His objectives were simple: ‘I want sales!’ He would
tell his trainers exactly how to communicate with their clients. He
described it as wanting them to do this ‘in a slightly higher way’. What he
meant by this, he clarified, was the unlearning of some of their ways of
speaking—‘in a rough, lower-class way’—and ‘to add some maturity’ to
the way they conducted themselves. His battalion of trainers, who were
neatly lined up in his office during the interview, were not to only think of
the members as clients to be made money of but also ensure they were
genuinely comfortable coming to the gym. Most of his trainers were of
Gujjar 31 and Jat backgrounds, and their brusque nature might upset the
well-heeled clients of the gym, the manager suggested (see also chapter
five). What stands out is how aware he was of the gap that existed
between his clientele and staff. He saw himself as an interlocutor here,
somebody who firmly understood the gym’s predicament: catering to
upper-middle-class clients while relying on lower-middle-class trainers.
This gap in middle-classness is not just characterised by
socioeconomic distance but also what could be seen as a space of
mobility. Both tangible and intangible forms of mobility play a role. On
the one hand, there is the highly concrete notion of upward economic
mobility, which is usually treated as one that can be proven with statistics.
It is not hard to see how upward economic mobility resonates and runs
parallel to advances in physical mobility: acquiring a motorcycle, the
transition to a first car, and the upward trajectory in terms of brands—
from Nano to Indigo to Jaguar. 32 This contrasts with the evanescent and
slippery nature of social and cultural mobility. Economic mobility almost
always runs parallel to processes of upward social mobility (expanding
one’s network, gradually inhabiting a different social layer of society
altogether) and sideward cultural mobility (doing things differently,
exploring alternative pathways). Treating these different forms of mobility
—economic, physical, social and cultural—as essentially conflated, part
and parcel of the same trajectory helps develop a much deeper
perspective of the way newness and change comes about in India.

INTERSECTING MOBILITIES AND INTANGIBLE FORMS OF

CAPITAL
Research in the field of social mobility tends to be of an objectivist
nature, often taking a quantitative and decidedly aggregated approach. 33
John Goldthorpe’s social mobility studies that were conducted from the
mid-1970s onward set the initial tone for the field. His team’s methods
left little space for the role of ambivalence, missteps and side-
trajectories. 34 Pierre Bourdieu (1987) spoke of the biographical illusion
here, pointing at the fallacy of coherence and meaning projected onto an
individual’s life narrative. An additional problem is that previous studies
were rarely situated in a context of rapid change, such as is the case in
India. Instead, they tend to employ a long-term, even cross-generational,
focus that differs considerably from the one utilised throughout this book.
As such, the Indian context necessitates a deviation or rethinking from the
classical understanding of what social and cultural mobility entails. In the
Bourdieuan sense, social capital dwells in and is produced through social
relations, memberships of the right clubs, and ‘simply’ via interaction
with others. These relations or connections are more than just that; the key
is knowing how to capitalise on them. 35 Social mobility’s innately
slippery nature comes to the fore when we realise that it is often a by-
product of activities engaged in for other purposes. 36 There is something
self-evident or self-fulfilling about social mobility that goes to the heart of
the very nature of social capital. It reproduces in a progressively
cumulative manner; social capital produces social capital and then some.
Ronald Stuart Burt (2000) pointed out that those who do better in life are
generally also better connected. Those born in the right families tend to
have better connections, (hereditary) memberships in the right clubs and
organisations—think of the Bangalore Club, Delhi’s India International
Centre, or the Madras Club in Chennai—and in all likelihood will enrol
in better schools, colleges and universities. The advantage here is not only
the network one is born into but also the lifelong opportunity one has to
understand how this network works and make use of its membership.
Cultural capital—unlike social capital, which functions beneath the
surface—more obviously allocates a particular intangible value to a
person. Studies show education as particularly instrumental in
contributing to this, even if it has also been considered for its potential as
the great equaliser—lifting people out of poverty and closing the gap
between rich and poor. As Craig Jeffrey’s (2010) pathbreaking work
focusing on the context of provincial (tier two) India has shown, education
alone rarely has all the answers. While young men in India’s smaller
towns have increasingly become more educated because of reservation
policies and state-led investments in higher education, this has not
necessarily translated into better opportunities. Pierre Bourdieu (1986)
distinguished various forms of cultural capital (embodied, objectified and
institutionalised) that helps sort out the complexity we see. There is the
embodied state of cultural capital: cultural capital is most of all something
one strategically reveals or makes visible, to which a certain degree of
effortlessness would be key. In other words, what could be understood as
middle-class comportment. I once introduced long-term informant and
trainer Kishore to a friend who hailed from an upper-middle-class
background, and who was interested in including him in a documentary-
film project. My friend observed how Kishore had made such an effort ‘to
look the part’. It reminded me of what Supriya had said about mimicking
middle-class behaviour. For it to be convincing, it has to appear natural,
which is a strain for most trainers since their family’s membership to the
middle class is a relatively recent development. Unable to draw upon
‘intimate’ internalised knowledge of how to blend in effortlessly, the
danger is that it might look too studied. This touches upon the physical
(objectified) or visible dimension of cultural capital. In a Western context,
this is symbolised by (the ownership of) books, dictionaries and
instruments. However, in the case of India, it is not unreasonable to
expand this to clothes and other objects, such as cars and mobile phones,
that may not strictly embody knowledge but that are held to ‘represent’ a
particular ‘knowing’ of what they stand for in a middle-class context.
Kishore, for one, no longer buys his ‘branded’ clothes from the local
bazaar, instead investing in the ‘real thing’ because his clients would
immediately pick up on them being counterfeit. These much more
expensive clothes are not only meant to underline that he knows what
appeals to his clients, but also that he understands the socioeconomic
stratum they inhabit (and which he ambitions to become part of himself).
The institutionalised state of cultural capital, represented by educational
qualifications, complements and further strengthens this. 37 In India,
education remains one of the main qualifiers of middle-class belonging.
However, it is not only the reputation of the institution that matters, but
equally if not more so, the language of education. The very idea of
‘vernacular’—as in education, upbringing, mode of communication (at
home, with friends)—has even taken on the character of a swear word, as
evidenced by its use in the Amazon hit-show Made in Heaven , which
revolves around two wedding planners in Delhi. Jazz, one of the
assistants who is originally from Dwarka (a sub-city and diplomatic
enclave in Southwest Delhi), tries to make it in the far more posh and
opulent setting of South Delhi. When she is unable to meet the wishes of
one of the agency’s wealthy clients, she is called a ‘bloody vernac’. 38
Social and cultural capital come together in Bourdieu’s (1990) use of
the concept of ‘habitus’, which speaks of a system of dispositions through
which we perceive, judge and act in the world. It ensures the active
presence (and influence) of past experiences, embodied and
internationalised so it is second nature. 39 Even the way we bear our
bodies could almost immediately give away our place in society. We
appear to ooze this habitus through our pores; like pheromones, it is
something others pick up on without necessarily realising it. Famously,
Edward Palmer Thompson once described the habitus as a ‘feel for the
game’. 40 While this book doesn’t speak of a middle-class habitus—as its
set-in-stone character doesn’t necessarily easily translate to the rapidly
changing Indian urban context—it is in essence what Muscular India
seeks to investigate. What does it take to become middle class? Or
perhaps more succinctly: what does it take to convincingly pull off the
idea of ‘confidently’ belonging to the middle class? As a new entrant,
how does one lose the skin of newness, one’s entry being suspect and up
for inspection and judgement? Even if this requires navigating the
treacherous pathway from lower to upper middle class, the eventual end
goal is not to become ‘like them’, but to take up a space of one’s own. In
that sense, what we witness here is a much longer-term continuation of
new middle-class formation where notions of new/lower and older/upper
have always been in motion and flux. As a social and cultural construct,
middle-class belonging, no matter one’s socioeconomic standing, is
always criticised, suspicious and in question.
 CHAPTER 1

THE NEW INDIAN MALE

‘We are kings of this world, man!’

– Vijay, personal trainer

K
ishore’s muscles glisten in the hot afternoon sun as he speeds
towards me on his customised shiny-black Royal Enfield
motorcycle, bare-chested and waving enthusiastically. If this were a
Bollywood movie, the soundtrack’s incessant and asynchronous drumming
would have coalesced into one coherent rhythm by now, followed by
Kishore stepping off his motorcycle, tossing his Ray-Ban aviators into a
crowd of swooning onlookers and commencing his dance routine. His
neatly torn Levi’s and sturdy boots would complement the scene.
Yet, the street is oddly empty, and even the Hanuman temple where
he asked me to wait seems quiet for the time of day. He beckons me to
jump onto the back of his bike and we drive off towards Chembur, a
working-class neighbourhood of Mumbai, where he grew up. The
celebrations for the final day of Ganesh Chaturthi are in full swing. 41 In
his usual animated fashion, Kishore summarises the past few days of the
festival while deftly navigating traffic. He ploughs through groups of
energetically dancing men moving to the sound of dhols. All of them are
readying for the long journey to the seashore, where murtis 42 of the
elephant god will be immersed in the water. I had encountered countless
such street parties over the past few days. Mumbai had come to a relative
standstill, with businesses shuttered, streets closed to traffic and throngs
of crowds queuing until late into the night to receive a coveted blessing at
one of the makeshift pandals 43 where local communities instal their
towering Ganesha idols. For ten to eleven days each year, Mumbai—
India’s financial heart—dances not to the tune of money, but to the
percussive rhythm of the worship of its beloved patron deity.
The fourteen-foot-tall Ganesha seems to loom over Khardev Nagar
in Chembur where people from Kishore’s neighbourhood have gathered to
celebrate. A chaotic party has started in front of the cart on which the
murti is mounted. The air is thick with the smell of incense and sweat, and
Bollywood music blasts from speakers even as drummers compete
deliriously for attention. When we get closer, we notice Vijay, who is
taking off his T-shirt and tucking it into his belt while a crowd of
onlookers observes his every move. As lean and muscular as Kishore, his
body is the product of martial arts, boxing and functional training. Both in
their late twenties, their similarities in physique and style continue to their
sunglasses and nearly identical motorcycles, which Kishore now indicates
we will take for a spin around Chembur to inspect some of the other
pandals. We might even be able to buy some liquor on the way, Vijay
suggests, despite it being a dry day. 44
As we cruise around Chembur, we’re regularly pulled over by
Kishore and Vijay’s friends and acquaintances who want to know where
we’re heading, and to admire their physiques. There is no denying the
spectacle on offer: sculpted muscles, perfectly V-shaped backs, protruding
calves and upper-legs, and biceps that flex with every animated gesture.
They happily pose with bystanders for pictures hurriedly taken with
mobile phones and then analysed. Fingers zoom in on particular muscle
groups, followed by keen inquiries about workout tips and diet
suggestions. Jokes are made referencing Bollywood stars Hrithik Roshan
and Salman Khan, to whom this duo is considered to have a vague
resemblance. One person even conjures up a clip on his phone from
Salman Khan’s hit movie Jai Ho (2014) to illustrate his point. Kishore
and Vijay are stars in their own right. They epitomise a new bodily ideal
for Indian men that is characterised by leanness and muscularity.

NEW MIDDLE -CLASS PROFESSIONALS

The festival in honour of Ganapati, ‘remover of obstacles’, brings
Mumbai to its knees. Main arteries, flyovers and by-lanes are taken over
to transport the idols which, according to local and community-specific
customs, 45 need to be submerged in the sea at specific points in time. The
seventh and eleventh day of the festival are of special importance,
although the city’s beaches are busy throughout.
There is an emblematic image of Mumbai: of slowly submerging
elephant heads made of plaster, colourfully decorated and garlanded with
fragrant flowers. Yet, the actual physical pilgrimage across
neighbourhoods and suburbs is something that gets far less attention. It
may seem like the city’s residents are united in a common pilgrimage to
the shore. Yet, in reality, the various groups that make their way across the
city have significantly different socioeconomic backgrounds. The same is
arguably true for the rest of the year as well, when the city returns to its
usual frenetic pace: commuter trains packed to the rafters, sidewalks
teeming with business and roads a slow-moving sludge of honking cars.
How do different groups, especially those belonging to the middle
class, relate to each other? How do they navigate a changing urban
landscape and deal with class difference along the way? And what sort of
room for manoeuvrability exists among various middle-class categories?
When new middle-class professionals such as Kishore and Vijay make
their way across the city, they make another journey too—negotiating the
city’s social and cultural boundaries. These boundaries shape and add
layers to the city; billboards reflect them, buildings resonate with them;
and even as everything in rapidly changing India appears to be in flux,
some of these borders turn out to be quite robust.
The question that this book enquires into is how young Indians make
use of the opportunities that recent economic developments have brought
them. It is particularly interested in new middle-class professionals: those
who are now employed in professional categories that have emerged out
of these developments. Although they may not always feature prominently
in more archetypical depictions of the Indian middle class, these men do
think of themselves as ‘middle class’. However, people I interviewed
would frequently employ the term ‘new’ or ‘lower’ middle class not only
to underline their economic position in relation to other members of the
middle class, but also to describe a trajectory of sorts. For one, thinking
of themselves as middle class was a decidedly new thing for the parents
of these young professionals. Typically, their parents had held working-
class jobs themselves before experiencing a trajectory of upward mobility
into middle-class ranks at some point. Yet, the relatively new middle
class these parents continue to inhabit differs markedly from the one their
children aspire to.
Kishore grew up as the son of a labour migrant from Odisha who
came to the city to join the textile mills as a weaver. Vijay’s father was a
low-ranking administrative clerk with the local bureaucracy. They spoke a
vernacular language at home (Odia and Hindi respectively), and Marathi
with their friends outside. After primary school, their education consisted
of private training colleges—notably those offering English-language
instruction—or ‘simply’ on-the-job. While their fathers never made much
more than Rs 10,000 per month, they themselves now average ten-fold
that. Catering to upper-middle-class clients, they offer personal training
sessions across town in upmarket gyms, at clients’ homes or in the parks
of upscale neighbourhoods.
While their own bodies are crucial to attracting these clients,
Kishore and Vijay have also invested in other aspects of their lives. In the
roughly ten years that I have known Kishore, I have observed his English
improve, his sense of style and fashion change and his general confidence
in interacting with those belonging to different socioeconomic strata grow.
At the same time, his Chembur upbringing continues to nibble at the
carefully delineated peripheries of his new middle-class life. As such, his
transition into middle-class ranks is an ongoing project.

A BOLLYWOOD CONNECTION
Two crucial developments spurred and continue to inform the emergence
of the new lean, muscular ideal among Indian men. The first is the
phenomenon whereby Bollywood, Kollywood 46 and other regionally
produced movies increasingly come with specific scenes that allow the
male hero to flaunt his lean, muscular body. The other is represented by
the launch of the Indian edition of Men’s Health in 2007, 47 and the
emergence of other such health and lifestyle magazines that specifically
target middle-class men.
 It’s not easy to say which came first, but both developments draw
upon the globalisation of male bodily ideals. Yet, as much as Indian
movies or the Indian edition of a foreign-owned magazine appear to build
on a globalised momentum, the way these have been appropriated is as
locally specific as it is global. 48
Unlike in Hollywood movies, where actors playing superheroes
sport precision-engineered bodies with rock-hard abs, 49 the role male
bodies play in Bollywood or other regional Indian cinema is much less
likely to build on a functional connection between body-type and the
character depicted. This doesn’t mean that there is no connection between
an actor’s body and the movie script. In fact—as interviews with personal
trainers of Indian actors revealed—it’s often the specific type of muscular
body that an actor wishes to portray in a particular movie that sets the
agenda and subsequent scripting. The process of transformation the actor
undergoes to build such a body is strategically made part of marketing
campaigns and can lead to specific training programmes as well as gym
and sports brand endorsements. This has a direct impact on the gym floor,
where trainers act as brokers of bodily knowledge, translating a
particular, fashionable muscular ideal into workout routines, diet plans
and related lifestyle choices.
It is important to understand, however, that while such bodies are
invariably characterised by their leanness and muscularity, they are not
always identically lean or muscular. For instance, actor Farhan Akhtar’s
depiction of sprinter Milkha Singh in Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013) was
characterised by a leanness and vascularity that was somewhat in keeping
with the role he was playing—though decidedly more muscular than Singh
himself was during his heyday. For the crime-thriller Wazir (2016), in
which Akhtar plays an anti-terrorism squad (ATS) officer, he sports a
bulkier physique. Even if Akhtar shows relatively little skin in this movie,
his strapping frame is clearly visible through his clothes. As various
media reports discussed in detail, for Wazir he had to adopt a different
workout routine and diet plan than for his 2013 hit. 50
It is striking that reportage on the movie mentions by name his
personal trainer—Samir Jaura—whose approaches to bodily
transformation have been discussed in various articles in the last few
years. 51 There are more and more instances of this kind of direct
connection being drawn between actor and celebrity trainer. Bodybuilder
and trainer Kris Gethin, for instance, collaborated with Hrithik Roshan for
his book on training methods, The Bodybuilding.com Guide to Your Best
Body (2013). John Abraham provided the foreword for its follow-up,
titled Bollywood Body by Design (2015). 52
Especially in Mumbai, newly established, higher-end gyms often
boast pictures of Bollywood actors who were present during the opening
ceremony or launch of their venue. The walls of a functional training gym
in Andheri East (Mumbai) prominently feature pictures of Akshay Kumar,
who graced the inauguration and is allegedly passionate about functional
training. The gym is operated by Kavita—one of the few female trainers
whose career I was able to follow over a long period of time—who is
from an English-educated middle-class family from Juhu. This particular
Bollywood connection wouldn’t normally be available to a person of her
socioeconomic background, but was facilitated by the co-owner of the
gym, who works as a marketing manager and used to be one of Kavita’s
clients. The gym’s location in the suburb of Andheri East contributes to
the likelihood of movie-industry insiders patronising it. The association
between Bollywood stars and gyms, however, isn’t location-bound.
Across India, gyms collaborate with movie stars, sometimes as brand
ambassadors, other times even as investors.
What led Bollywood and regional movie industries to develop such
a specific interest and orientation towards the lean, muscular body,
spurring the spectacular growth of the Indian fitness industry? While
movie heroes have always tended to epitomise a particular masculine
ideal, which saw itself partly reflected in powerful ‘buff’ bodies, this
was hardly a specifically sculpted body, at least not in the sense that is
common today. Actors such as M.G. Ramachandran (1917–87, Tamil),
Dilip Kumar (1922, Hindi) or Mammootty (1951, Malayalam) were
undeniably known as ideal-type men, embodying hero-like qualities—yet,
their prowess was communicated through body language rather than their
actual physiques. The same goes for former Bollywood stars such as Dev
Anand (1923–2011), Shammi Kapoor (1931–2011) or Vinod Khanna
(1946–2017). Shirtless pictures of these men are rare, if they even exist.
 Actor Dharmendra’s famous scene in Pyar Hi Pyar (1969) is a
notable exception. The camera is in thrall to the actor’s body, clad in only
a towel while he speaks on the phone. Absent from the narrative in this
movie and others from this period, however, is a direct connection
between the attractive, manly, muscular body and its portrayal as a
specific accomplishment of the actor for this particular movie. 53 A
noteworthy deviation is the acting career of former wrestler Deedara or
Dara Singh (1928–2012). As Seema Sonik Alimchand’s biography
Deedara aka Dara Singh (2016) underscores, this was an actor who did
not develop his body as part of his film career, but whose body facilitated
this career in the first place. Ronojoy Sen argues in Nation at Play: A
History of Sport in India (2015) 54 that ‘Dara was … the first
sportsperson to bring the sporting and the film industry together.’ 55
In an article in The Indian Quarterly , filmmaker and columnist
Paromita Vohra argues that ‘On-screen masculinity could even
accommodate decidedly not-good looking men like Pradeep Kumar and
Rajendra Kumar, whose appeal is mysterious, or perhaps lies in their
being absolutely unthreatening as far as sex appeal goes…’ Their bodies
are present, but the actors don’t have any real bodily presence, so speak.
This is something that has clearly changed. The specific scenes within
Indian movies that allow for the muscular male body to be showcased in
‘all its glory’ have become a staple ingredient, and also contribute to an
external storyline of transformation. Kollywood blockbuster-actor
Vikram, for instance, has made the idea of bodily transformation central to
his acting persona. As he explains in Tulsi Badrinath’s Madras, Chennai
and the Self: Conversations with the City (2015):

‘Every film of mine I have done something. For Raajapaatai , I

put on size and weight. In Bhima I was a fighter, so I worked
out and looked like a thug. For Dhil , I ate twenty-five egg
whites and a whole chicken every day to bulk up.’ In Saamy ,
where he played a cop, ‘I put on muscle and a paunch.’ 56

Parallels can be drawn here with how ‘transformed’ bodies fit in with
India’s rapidly changing urban landscape. On the one hand, these bodies
appear intimately connected to the transformation urban India is
undergoing; on the other, they seem to exist apart from it. As much as lean,
muscular bodies are ubiquitously and indelibly part of popular culture and
public spaces—looming from soaring billboards and delivering health
and fitness advice in newspapers and magazines—they are also marked
by absence. Most men in India, as elsewhere, do not look like this, and
most likely never will.
In many ways, Kishore and Vijay ‘rule’ by absence; their shirtless
presence on the final day of Ganesh Chaturthi is a reminder of this. They
may elicit desire in other men to look like them, to share their admiration
and seek advice. But the promise to become like them is ultimately just
that, a promise. Kishore has no illusions about this, though that’s not what
he communicates to his clients. His business relies on selling a
possibility, perhaps even a ‘dream’. Thinking of the notion of
transformation as merely physical obfuscates the way bodies themselves
are layered and imbued with all sorts of meanings. Bollywood provides
an insightful window into understanding how bodies are much more than
the sum of their bones, muscles, tissue, veins and organs.

OM SHANTI OM
The first movie to explicitly carve out a scene for its lead star to
showcase the kind of transformation that would soon become common
was Om Shanti Om (2007). In it, Shah Rukh Khan, one of Bollywood’s
most revered actors, suddenly and rather miraculously sported six-pack
abs, a revelation that was widely discussed in the Indian press at the time.
For Kishore, though, the inspiration to build a muscular body came
much earlier, from Pyaar Kiya to Darna Kya (1998), which featured the
already immensely popular actor Salman Khan. Although the movie and
its attendant marketing did not stress a bodily transformation per se—
Khan had always been known for being robust and well built—many
trainers of Kishore’s generation remember it as the first film that sparked
their desire for a muscular body.
Pyaar Kiya … to Darna Kya is the first mainstream Bollywood
production to emphasise its lead actor’s body on its movie poster as well
as in the song ‘O O Jaane Jaana’. During the song, a bare-chested Khan
drives down the beach to a makeshift stage, where an elated audience
cheers him on. Grabbing a guitar, the actor turns to the crowd to entertain
them as the focus remains unavoidably on his powerful chest and abs.
Kishore still knows the song by heart, though he probably sports a more
defined body than his hero did at the time.
While the muscularity of male bodies has become more pronounced
since Pyaar Kiya to Darna Kya , there’s also a class difference to dissect
between this film and Om Shanti Om . Salman Khan has always been
perceived as a common man’s hero, and his physique carries with it
decidedly working-class connotations. The appeal of Shah Rukh Khan is
decidedly more ‘middle class’. This somewhat cursory contrast is
reflected in the spatial divide between Chembur (where Kishore grew up
and still lives) and Bandra West, which is not just the area Shah Rukh
Khan and Salman Khan call home, but also the location of one of the city’s
best-known Gold’s Gyms. At some point, Kishore worked out at this gym
to attract well-heeled personal training clients. Engaging in complex
routines that involved handstands, pull-ups and various types of push-ups,
he envisioned himself performing in front of an audience whose
admiration could someday translate to a name within Bollywood. He
thought of the expensive membership as an investment, and of himself as
working out his way into an imagined future as a high-end trainer to the
stars.

The Indian edition of Men’s Health launched in 2007, the same year Om
Shanti Om was released. The magazine was widely available at
pavement shops across India, right up until its final issue in 2015. Its
glossy cover invariably featured a non-famous Indian—usually a fitness
enthusiast or personal trainer—whose stunning physique could be
achieved by following his training routines as outlined in the magazine.
During an interview, the managing editor Jamal Shaikh told me that when
the first edition came out, people had a hard time believing that the
unknown cover model was actually Indian. The chief editor of the India
Today group, of which the magazine used to be a part, even demanded to
know why he had made use of a foreign model for the launch of the Indian
edition.
‘He just couldn’t believe that these were local models!’ Shaikh said.
In fact, the first coverline was: ‘Indians can have abs too!’ Shaikh
explained that, at the time, Indian men believed they didn’t have the right
body-type for developing abs. ‘They are vegetarian, they think that will
hamper them with building muscles.’ 57 Apparently men would show up in
such droves for cover shoot call-outs that special security was required to
keep them in check. Considering that the magazine never paid its cover
models for services rendered, these hopefuls were there for something
other than financial gain.
‘Abs mean business these days. It’s become a sign of achievement,’
said Shaikh. ‘People equate it with having low body fat. But it is not
necessarily healthy. And it is also not always about fitness or endurance.’
The magazine conceptualised its covers as communicating different
shades of aspiration. ‘Sometimes we won’t put a six-pack on the cover.
Sometimes he will just have four,’ Shaikh said. The idea behind this is
that ‘the guy who will buy the magazine will think “I am better”.’ But what
worked best was success stories. ‘Especially those about being
overweight and then getting lean, or about those guys who are too thin but
want to get bigger.’ Admittedly, the magazine featured very few of the
latter cases.
It was generally agreed that a lean and muscular look was not enough
to make it to the cover. The look had to come with a new fitness routine,
something innovative that could be linked to the specific body of the
featured model. The cover needed to communicate that between the pages
of the issue lay the secret knowledge to achieving such a body. Being
aesthetically pleasing wasn’t enough, the model also had to be a guide to
deeper understanding. These featured bodies were a site of innovation,
knowledge and skill. While trainers who were featured thought of the gig
as a way to potentially increase their client base, they unknowingly lent
their bodies to an evolving discourse on what the lean, muscular body
might stand for.
 The way Men’s Health and its successors present their cover models
echoes the way movies craft special scenes for such bodies. The notion of
unveiling or even unpacking the body is crucial. The model or actor’s
body is announced, undressed and subsequently unpacked in the
surrounding discussion about what it takes to sculpt and mould oneself
into a desirable shape. That readers or moviegoers could potentially
achieve the look is the charge underlying each cover or scene with a sense
of possibility that feeds into and draws from the narrative of
socioeconomic change in India.

T NSFORMATION IN A NEW INDIA

The notion of a ‘new’ India needs particular examination here. 58 The

lean, muscular body is not only held possible within the context of a new
India, but also epitomises it. I engage with the colonial legacy in detail
later on—especially in terms of British imperial perspectives on the
emasculated or effeminate Hindu body (see chapter three). But what I
want to dwell on first is the very notion of a trajectory.
There is a new bodily ideal, true, but the very focus on the male body
is novel as well. Whereas previously men were the ones observing
women, judging their bodies and setting standards for attractiveness, their
own ‘male’ bodies have now become the object of the gaze as well.
However, the male body is principally one that is scrutinised by other
men. While Men’s Health and similar lifestyle magazines use bare-
chested models to portray a more ‘attractive’ body, and Bollywood
heroes make heroines swoon with their dance routines, ultimately they are
all selling a highly specific bodily ideal—and they are selling it to other
men.
Globally, Men’s Health and comparable magazines primarily cater
to a male readership. Muscular actors who portray superheroes in
Hollywood blockbusters also frequently discuss their workout and dietary
regimes in popular media, setting the tone for new such routines for men.
What makes the Indian case so specific, however, is the wider
socioeconomic context in which these developments take shape. Leaving
aside popular narratives of economic growth and concomitant social
change, there is no denying that the Indian context is also coloured by
underdevelopment, rampant inequality, poverty and malnourishment.
There is plenty of evidence for the limitations and exclusivity of India’s
newness discourse.
The construction of a new India is essentially an incomplete process,
something that is still ongoing, and that conceivably will never reach an
‘end stage’. This is personified by the country’s ever-looming building
sites, road constructions and multiplying critical issues (many the product
of its bulging population numbers). On the other hand, perhaps this
incompleteness comes with the way the idea of this modern nation builds
(metaphorically as well as literally) on the notion of transformation. The
body is a particularly rich site to tease out the broader implications of this
transformation, with regard to the position its middle classes take up
within this trajectory and the way India relates to the outside world. How
can we understand this hazy macro-reality in relation to the micro-
realities of the everyday? How do the bodies of trainers, bodybuilders
and clients relate to the socioeconomics of a rapidly changing urban
landscape? When it comes to economic, social or cultural change, the
body enacts these changes and is changed by them too. Obesity, diabetes
and related issues, for example, are the outcome of changing diets, the
availability of readymade products, the overconsumption of carbohydrates
and sugar, and the product of once active but now predominantly
sedentary lifestyles. At the same time, the body is never just a receptor but
always also an actor: one that makes decisions and actively engages with
its changing environment. It is guided by ideas and notions of health,
aesthetics and, perhaps most of all, influenced by the gaze of others. The
body is in dialogue with its environment and reflects what goes on in
society.
The implied dichotomy between an old and a new India, or a
developing versus underdeveloped one, is therefore less interesting than
the way newness itself is experienced. Everyday ‘middle-class’ lives also
function irrespective of the framing narratives of old India–new India. As
fast as developments in India appear to be—the proliferation of shopping
malls, the spectacular growth of the fitness industry, and the availability of
goods and services previously unheard of—change can also seem sluggish
as bureaucratic hurdles remain seemingly the same, regular power cuts
are inevitable and issues with water pressure insistent.
 As with bodies in the gym, on a bench press pushing weights, in front
of the mirror with dumb-bells, or positioned for another round on the leg
press, actual progress is often more measured than the narrative of change
would imply. Bodies transform slowly, indolently, often without much
result at all. This is what Kishore also remarked after a group training
session that he had invited me to observe. ‘It took me a lot of time to build
this body,’ he said as he rubbed his abs through his T-shirt. Dedication
and discipline had been key, but genetics and a certain body type had
benefited him as well.
To a certain degree, his bodily transformation, specifically his body
language, also mirrors the socioeconomic change he has effectuated as an
increasingly higher-end trainer. Genetics notwithstanding, his own
working-class background was not particularly conducive to this. Unlike
his career trajectory, or the smoothness of his bodily transformation,
Kishore’s journey of upward social and cultural mobility has been a
bumpy one.

The many reflections on the idea of the middle class in popular media and
in academic publications rarely consider what it means to those who
belong to this group. While the adjectives of lower, middle and upper slot
people in more narrowly defined categories, there are no conclusive
descriptors for defining the ‘old’ or ‘new’ middle classes. Those who
self-identify as upper middle class generally use the adjective ‘new’ to
refer to those they perceive as ‘lower’. Lower does not necessarily
correspond to ‘less money’ but instead a briefer history of belonging to
the middle classes.
Family histories tend to reveal a generational understanding of what
this middle-class belonging entails. Young professionals I spoke to in the
information technology (IT) industry, working for Wipro or Infosys, would
frequently narrate their families’ trajectories in terms of their own
education—for instance, attending convent school, and thus receiving
almost all their education in English—but also the educational and
professional histories of their parents, and even grandparents. 59 Although
they spoke a language other than English at home, these software
engineers and their parents were very comfortable with English. They
described their parents as ‘educated’; their mothers were teachers or
government servants, their fathers took care of a family business or were
accountants, doctors, engineers or lawyers. Most grandmothers were
homemakers, but sometimes a grandmother would also be described as an
‘educated woman’, ‘traditional … but intelligent nonetheless’. A certain
conflation of class and caste and notions of religiosity percolated such
recollections. Upper-middle-classness could be understood as a
privileged, though not necessarily elite, 60 position in society.
What actually separates lower from middle and middle from upper?
As much as it makes sense to seek all-encompassing definitions,
especially considering the numbers involved, it makes more sense to
focus on the mobile trajectories of those who navigate and negotiate these
categories. It is important to treat these categories as inherently flexible
and negotiable, despite what those who belong to each might say. People
often defend their own middle-class position, presumably against those
who seek upward mobility and might one day consider themselves part of
the establishment.
The context of India’s changing urban landscape provides
opportunities to new middle-class professionals like Kishore and Vijay:
the transformation of urban space has the potential to destabilise old and
entrenched hierarchies. It makes everything a lot less certain.

A CHEMBUR GYM RAT

At heart Kishore remains a typical Chembur boy, as he would describe
himself, having lived in the same locality of Mumbai all his life. His
father arrived from Odisha to join the cotton mills of Parel in the 1970s,
working there until the 1980s, when the mills ceased operations. He held
various odd jobs and, as long as Kishore can remember, life was
characterised by financial precarity. His father’s last earned salary of Rs
7,000 contrasts significantly with the Rs 1 lakh 61 Kishore himself makes
as a personal trainer. He describes the home he grew up in as ‘nothing
more than a hut’, though the family now lives in a ground-floor apartment
on a tree-lined street, which his earnings have paid for.
Kishore completed all of his schooling as well as his B.Com. in
Chembur but admits that studying was never his forte. Instead, he was the
‘sporty guy’ in school, the one who excelled at all games. An old
classmate of his said he was always ‘running around the neighbourhood’,
and that she couldn’t remember a time when he was ‘not working on his
muscles’. She and other childhood friends are impressed by how he never
let his ‘humble origins’ stand in the way of making something of his life,
not just his muscles.
When I met Kishore for the first time, now almost a decade ago, he
picked me up on his bike in front of Bandra’s Gold’s Gym and we drove
off to Band Stand on the sea-facing promenade. A throng of mainly
adolescent men would gather there, eagerly awaiting the rare appearance
of Salman Khan on his apartment’s balcony, a ‘tradition’ which would
repeat itself every Sunday. Their anticipation was not so much for the
actor’s appearance, but about whether or not he would take his shirt off
and flex his muscles. Shah Rukh Khan was not known to entertain such
fancies in a similar way and usually kept himself secluded in his mansion,
just a few hundred metres down the road.
Sitting on the rocks facing the sea, Kishore and I listened to the
voices of the crowd bubbling with excitement. He knew from experience
that the actor rarely showed himself, and rumour had it he was actually
abroad on a movie shoot. Yet the place was important to him, not least
because of the influence his hero had had on his own trajectory. Growing
up in a working-class environment, schooling was deemed important but
earning money and becoming self-reliant even more so. When Kishore
was sixteen, an uncle invited him to join his packaging business, a job
which helped his family make ends meet but held little promise for the
future.
Influenced by Salman Khan’s Pyaar Kiya … Kishore had started
working out at a local gym, where he rapidly made a name for himself
because of the gains he was making. He soon had a loyal following of
enthusiastic local ‘gym rats’ who consulted him on their own gym
routines, which led the gym owner to offer Kishore a job. Though it was a
poorly equipped gym that catered to a local working-class crowd, it
allowed him to make his first forays into the world of fitness. He quickly
understood he needed to invest more if he wanted to move up the ladder
and turn his passion into a stable source of income.
Kishore realised that working out was becoming more popular
among those with ‘more money to spend’ and could lead to employment in
gyms in well-heeled neighbourhoods. As he started exploring better
career options, the industry itself was becoming more professional as
well. Gyms were no longer the working-class places they had once been;
they were becoming better equipped and had begun offering a whole array
of health-related services. Like Café Coffee Days (‘CCDs’), fashion
outlets of American brands such as Levi’s and Nike, and fast-food
restaurants, gyms were ‘suddenly’ everywhere, Kishore remembers.

CITY PERMEATES BODY

India’s urban landscape has undergone an incontrovertible transformation
since the new millennium, with burgeoning spaces of consumption and
leisure that specifically target the ever-expanding middle classes. The city
permeates the body not just physically through its orifices 62 —the large
quantities of air pollution, the skin soaking up dust, arteries clogged with
abundantly available cheap snacks, the ever-present danger of dengue and
other types of viral diseases—but also mentally and as such socially and
culturally. Considering the inherently diffuse nature of Indian urban space,
with its constant surge of newcomers, the body has come to be a marker of
difference, and almost literally a vessel of social and cultural mobility. As
the ever-present body traverses the city, moving in and out of different
situations and locations, it carries with it meanings well beyond its
immediate physical appeal.
Kishore’s involvement in English language courses in small institutes
of variable quality across the city, doing various accreditation courses
with fitness training institutes, and the gyms he has been involved with at
over time, all add up to a trajectory in which he has not only worked on
his body but also the ‘packaging’, so to speak.
His English has improved remarkably since our first conversation at
Band Stand. These days, his relative fluency is put to good use on his
regular Facebook and Instagram updates, through which he advertises his
services and connects with potential clients. In such updates, he portrays a
bodily confidence that appeals to potential upper-middle-class clients
who seek his guidance in developing their own bodies. In these posts, I
have known him to play with a dash of working-class bravura, which also
holds a certain appeal (albeit in moderation) to potential clients. This is
more difficult to comprehend than the ostensive appeal of his body. His
natural exuberance is laced with a harder edge, which some might
describe as rowdy or even aggressive. The hint of his working-class
upbringing adds to Kishore’s persona as a self-made man, exuding a
masculinity defined by survival and overcoming the odds.
It is clear, however, that Kishore’s Chembur appeal is limited to the
actual workout sessions. He is aware that his clients will never quite
consider him their equal or make him fully part of their private lives.
Even though he is doing well as a personal trainer, his salary wouldn’t
necessarily permit him to hire himself for the services he renders either.
In that sense, his clients belong to a different socioeconomic stratum
altogether. But there is more yet to this difference. Kishore’s trajectory
from working class into lower-middle-class terrain, from being educated
in a vernacular language to having entered the workforce at a young age,
is not a pathway his clients would ever consider for themselves or their
children. Their education will invariably have been in English, probably
at a convent school with a network of similarly positioned people. The
kind of sociocultural capital this provides from early on feeds into the
less tangible difference between positions within the middle class.
Kishore’s upward trajectory is marked by seeking to close an economic
gap as well as a social and cultural one.

MAYBE WE ARE GOONDAS !

After inspecting a number of pandals across Chembur, and stopping to
pick up some cheap whisky at a small shack, we gradually make our way
back to Khardev Nagar in Chembur. We park the motorcycles at a safe
distance from the party, which has grown considerably in size since we
left. A neatly dressed gentleman approaches and identifies himself as a
police officer in civilian clothes. Although I am unable to follow the
discussion, it is abundantly clear that he wants both Kishore and Vijay to
put their shirts back on. They begrudgingly agree. However, the moment
the officer is out of sight, they immediately take off their shirts again.
Vijay explains that ‘the guy thinks we’re trouble-makers’, to which
Kishore adds ‘goondas’, 63 shrugging his powerful shoulders. ‘He thinks
we’re crooks, man,’ Vijay says and laughs. ‘Maybe we are,’ he adds.
‘We’re kings of this world man!’ He high-fives Kishore. Vijay pats his
chest and turns to me. ‘That guy is nothing, man, forget him.’ Taking a
swig of his whisky-and-Coke, he says: ‘He’s a nobody, that’s what he is.
A nobody!’ He wants to know my opinion but it has all happened so fast
that I can’t quite make up my mind. Why not simply wear your shirts if it
might get you into trouble this way? ‘This is our day to shine,’ Kishore
says. ‘We live all year for this.’ He points at the party going on further
down the street. ‘It’s our moment of glory.’
Walking back, I wonder what they mean. Aren’t both shining all the
time, assisting clients in their workout routines, participating in
bodybuilding competitions such as MuscleMania, and posting pictures of
themselves in various poses online? What precisely makes this moment
stand out? Perhaps because they are able to ‘show off’ in their own
neighbourhood for a change?
Vijay’s personal history sheds light on something crucial: upward
trajectories always carry the indelible impression of one’s background
into one’s future. He grew up in the same locality as Kishore and, like
him, has integrated his Chembur ‘heritage’ into how he ‘markets’ himself
and his physical accomplishments. But this narrative is not easy to
control, nor is it a simple thing to pick and choose what aspects from the
past to retain and what he should keep at a remove.
Vijay’s father, who is deceased, held a job with the municipal
corporation for most of his life. With a brother employed with a logistics
company and an elder sister who is a software engineer, the family has a
longer history of thinking of itself as middle class than Kishore’s does.
Vijay’s father’s clerical position helped in this. Even though Vijay’s
English is more fluent than Kishore’s, it would be a mistake to think that
he benefited from superior education. He too has mainly ‘improved’ on
his English along the way. At nineteen, he completed a diploma in hotel
management and was hired as a bartender by the Ritz-Carlton in the UK
where he worked for a year and a half. He returned to Mumbai for a brief
spell and was subsequently hired to work for a five-star hotel in Dubai,
which eventually facilitated a transfer to the US.
But Vijay’s heart was never in the hospitality business. ‘To join a
hotel was just an excuse. I didn’t want to work there.’ His main goal was
to travel, to see the world. While working out in the hotel gym, he met
‘some army recruiters’ and was convinced to enlist. ‘They told me about
this new plan; if you are a foreign national and can speak good English
and can speak a foreign language, then you can join the army and get
citizenship.’ A degree of some sort was also required, and to be good in
sports—something that had gotten him noticed in the first place. Vijay
explained that he joined ‘the rangers battalion, infantry’, but was always a
little vague about what precisely was expected of him in the army,
perhaps because of enlistment regulations which limited how much he
could say about it.
Once, talking about his time in the US Army, he said: ‘Was real, real
shit, man. Wasn’t intelligent stuff; jump from plane, get out of the
helicopter, use rope, mountain trekking.’ But the pay was good, he
insisted. His first trip took him to Afghanistan for nine months, but none of
what he was made to do there was particularly brave, he feels—‘that’s
just in the movies’. He was also stationed in Europe for a joint exercise of
three months, during which he visited Germany, Poland, Lithuania and
Latvia. It gave him the kind of international exposure that somebody from
Chembur could only have dreamt about, he felt.
Now a US Army Reserve, which requires him to return to the country
on a regular basis, Vijay spends most of his time with Kishore, attending
to personal training clients and taking care of his family. As a personal
trainer, he charges around Rs 20,000 per month, which includes four one-
on-one sessions per week. The price is high-end, and if he is completely
booked, his income could average as much as Rs 2 lakh per month. This
rarely happens, since clients come and go and sessions often get
cancelled. He describes his clients as ‘very rich, high-class
people … richest class of people’. He wouldn’t even refer to them as
middle class, as he puts it.
Besides knowledge of training techniques, such clients ‘need well-
spoken people to come to their house to train’, Vijay says. His army
qualifications certainly help here, but also his fluency in English and the
fact that he’s well-travelled. During the Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations, he
flexed his muscles to underline that ultimately that’s what his clients see,
of course. ‘But they like it that I have been in the army, they think I am the
commando-shit or something.’ He makes considerably more than most of
his peers in Chembur, and believes that the next step is to become a
celebrity trainer, catering to Bollywood clients. ‘Otherwise I can always
go back to the States, join the army again.’

SHINING ALL THE TIME IN INDIA

The moment of interruption by the police officer points to the complexity
of Kishore and Vijay’s trajectories. Sometime after the Ganesh Chaturthi
celebrations, I asked Vijay what precisely the police officer had been
after, and it emerged that there was more to the story than I had been told
then. A few years earlier, Kishore and Vijay had been involved in
collecting loans for a local politician and businessman. As a result, both
had made their share of enemies in Chembur. It had even led to a kerfuffle
between members of two opposing gangs, something that had resulted in
the two spending time in jail the previous year.
‘We knocked out all of them, two broken arms, two in ICU,’ Vijay
told me over the phone one evening. Allegedly, the case for self-defence
had not worked out, and they had been found guilty of various charges
related to aggression and violence. It wasn’t the first fight the two had
been involved in. During a ‘bigger one’, Vijay had been stabbed in his
side. The scar, he felt, added to his carefully cultivated fighter persona
and helped secure ‘elite’ clients for his personalised outdoor training
routines. He had also stabbed some people himself, he emphasised. ‘Big
fight, man!’ This fight had also led to some jail time. Vijay claims the
cops involved were corrupt, but adds, ‘I am not saying it wasn’t my
mistake at all.’ He was ‘too young’ those days. Coming back to the
incident during Ganesh Chaturthi he noted: ‘These cops want to fight me
all over.’ Because of their muscular bodies, he feels, they are
automatically suspicious.
While these stories involve serious violence and aggression, casting
the duo as goonda muscle men, they also need to be understood in a larger
context. Neighbourhoods such as Chembur, which are still known as
working class, even if gentrification has permeated there (see chapter
four), are part of a city in motion. Its inhabitants can’t always boast
pristine, unsullied trajectories from A to B to C. Like some of the men
described later in this book, who have resorted to the use of anabolic
steroids and growth hormones, the health and fitness narratives they share
about themselves and ‘sell’ to their clients are not necessarily tainted by
the details of their journeys. Part of the appeal of contracting Kishore or
Vijay for their services may very well be their working-class Chembur
backgrounds, laced with references to violence and aggression.

As we join the party, several men are in the process of getting a pick-up
truck ready to transport the idol to Dadar. It is around seven o’clock; the
sun has set and the temperature is gradually becoming more bearable,
though the intense dancing has left many exhausted and drenched in sweat.
The steel contraption against which the idol rests has some space on top,
and Kishore indicates that I should climb there and position myself behind
Ganesha’s left ear so that I can sit and watch the crowds from above as
we commence on our snail-paced journey across town. He himself will be
on the cart too, not just to keep the God company but also to claim his own
stage.
As much as Ganesha is known to be the remover of obstacles, we
will have to negotiate quite a few on the way, not least because the height
of our transport is such that we will have to take the idol off the cart and
carry it underneath a number of flyovers. For most of the route, Vijay
either walks alongside or sits on the outer edge, chatting with Kishore’s
family members or friends, or glancing at the screen of his mobile phone.
He has a personal training session scheduled for seven o’clock in the
morning the next day, but his client has requested an earlier time because
of a meeting and the maddening traffic from Andheri West (where his
client resides) to his office in Worli. It is one of the reasons Vijay does
not want to drink too much tonight. However, I also know that he is less
than keen to accompany us all the way to Dadar, which in his experience
might take longer than is optimistically expected.
As we slope through traffic, it is slowly sinking in that our initial
speedy progress has gradually been reduced to a casual walking speed.
The Khardev Nagar party is now part of a never-ending parade of similar
carts, all bedecked with colossal Ganesha statues in various shapes and
poses, seemingly pushed forward by the relentless exclamations of
Ganapati Bappa Morya , 64 occasionally followed by a Pudchya Varshi
Laukar Ya. Seen from on top, the suburbs all blend into one as thousands
of people throng the streets to watch the carts snake by. Our path cuts
across socioeconomic differences, while the flyovers are physical
reminders of the city’s ongoing negotiation with economic developments,
population growth and the limitations of its narrow land mass.
When we come to a near standstill, I climb down the contraption I
have spent the better part of three hours on top of, and make my way to a
public restroom I spotted from above. Vijay follows suit, the whisky now
as good as finished, but the road ahead still long. Afterwards, while
buying a bottle of water at one of the roadside stalls, I notice the truck
suddenly moving and speeding up. Vijay has already started running to
catch up, but the incline of the flyover is too steep and the truck too fast,
and we quickly lose sight of our party altogether. On a nearly deserted
flyover, we continue jogging along, me barely keeping up with Vijay, who
hardly seems to notice that he is jogging at all, and who is also hurriedly
talking to Kishore on his phone. Half an hour later, we manage to catch up
with our party when it gets stuck in another jam near Shivaji Park,
theoretically within spitting distance of Dadar Beach.
I clamber on top of the truck and try to count the number of carts
ahead of us, all heading for the same seashore to immerse their idols in
Mahim Bay. Vijay says his goodbyes, realising that this may be his last
chance of catching an auto home. He has taken part in this procession
numerous times and knows that, although we are close, it will be a number
of hours before we actually reach. Removing his shirt from his belt and
putting it back on, he asks if I am sure I want to stay. Since I have come all
this way, I feel I may as well see it through till the end. He smiles, gets
into an auto and heads off, checking his phone for messages from
tomorrow’s clients.

SUBMERGING GANESHA , IMMERGING IN THE CITY

Multiple bands are now joining up, keeping up a rhythm that contrasts
with the flagging energy of the people on the carts. It has been a long road,
yet there is no choice but to continue dancing and singing along a little
longer. Kishore is still in his usual spot, encouraging his fellow
community members to keep the spirit alive, not unlike the way he
conducts his training sessions. However, the road ahead is a clogged
artery that no amount of diet advice can unblock.
I climb on top of the truck and am joined by two of Kishore’s
neighbourhood friends, who have been part of the festivities throughout
and seem to be in need of a break. They have known Kishore since
childhood, and although they admire his stamina and perseverance, they
also find his efforts to continuously motivate others to keep the spirit alive
somewhat amusing. We stand up to admire and photograph a beautifully
decorated truck with an incredibly large following of worshippers—all
dressed in white, though festively blemished by coloured powder.
Kishore’s friends are keen to share their stories with me: one studies
accounting, the other has just joined his father’s real estate business after
a brief spell in IT. Their paths relate to growing up within the limitations
of Chembur but also speak of upward socioeconomic mobility; personal
histories that, however brief, are themselves coloured or patterned by the
changing socioeconomic conditions of India.
They are middle class, but with the qualifiers of ‘new’ or ‘lower’.
Neither would make the mistake of thinking of himself as upper middle
class. Their awareness of their relative position in society is as crystal
clear as the water we are approaching is muddy, having witnessed
countless immersions over the past few days.
As we approach the beach, instructions and regulations, enforced by
a heavy police presence, become more pronounced to facilitate a speedy
transition from cart to water. Kishore, with some others, lifts the immense
statue off the cart and carries it to the sea. The auspicious moment is
marked by a wave of fatigue and relief washing over the crowd.
 Ultimately, Kishore and company were not able to carry the idol very
far into the water. The size and balance of the statue was such that it
quickly tumbled over, giving in to its inevitable descent. By the time
Kishore emerged from the water, the next party’s Ganesha was halfway
under. With nothing left to do and exhaustion rampant, the party quickly
gathered on top of the cart—decidedly more spacious with the departure
of the main guest—and headed back to Chembur. I was staying in Bandra
West then, so I walked down Old Cadell Road, or Swatantrya Veer
Savarkar Road, as it is now known, against better judgement hoping to
find a taxi.
Late at night, India’s beating heart—which never sleeps, and
certainly not on the final day of Ganesh Chaturthi—was surprisingly quiet.
In the distance, the crescendo of drum bands could be heard, its strength
lessening and the lights still on in buildings nearby diminishing. As I
finally found a taxi driver to take me along, I realised that the city would
soon return to its normal chaotic self. In this city, Kishore and Vijay
would recommence their roles as trainers, offering their clients a way to
deal with ‘all’ that new India had in store for them. The adulation
received from the audience would have to wait for another year, though.
As much as their bodies are crucial to their upward trajectories, the
public unveiling by taking off their shirts earlier could also be thought of
as a symbolic reminder of the constraints society will continue to put in
these men’s way.
 CHAPTER 2

A SMALL NEIGHBOURHOOD GYM

Once through this ruined city did I pass

I espied a lonely bird on a bough and asked
‘What knowest thou of this wilderness?’
It replied: ‘I can sum it up in two words:
‘Alas, Alas!’
– Khushwant Singh, Delhi

A
grey haze greets me as I step out of the house. The hesitant morning
sun does its best to percolate through, and the result is a pinkish sky
that is something between vaguely charming and disturbingly
apocalyptic. The air is redolent of something metallic, the smell of which
competes with garbage scattered around and the burning of heaps of
leaves. The neighbourhood is basking in an idyllic quietude interrupted
only by the distant honking of cars and autos. The houses in CR Park in
South Delhi are generally tall—three to four storeys high—with
significant fences topped by pointy spikes, as well as the occasional guard
indolently parked on a plastic chair. Cars line the streets: Maruti Suzuki
DZires, Tata Indigos and the occasional four-wheel drive or Jaguar,
washed dutifully by the guards or by boys who patrol the neighbourhood
offering their services. The battle against dust, however, seems lost from
the onset.
Two men of indeterminable age are out for a brisk walk, one sporting
a turban and fierce moustache, the other balding, a ring of dyed black hair
all that is left of what must have been a head-full once. He occasionally
uses an old blue towel draped around his neck to wipe the sweat off his
face, adroitly removing his heavy-set black-rimmed glasses without
missing a beat in the story he is enthusiastically sharing. I take a left into a
nearby lane and squeeze through the narrow opening in the gate. It is left
ajar during the day but kept resolutely shut at night, this narrow side-gate
the only way in or out. Security is taken very seriously in CR Park, as is
the case in all of South Delhi.
The city has a history of unrest turning gruesomely violent, and even
though this does not necessarily set it apart from other Indian cities, the
inner suburbs of Delhi continue to be characterised by imposing yellow
gates. Especially at night, when the gates are shut, it can be quite a
challenge to find one’s way to a particular address. These residential
areas continue to be referred to rather euphemistically as ‘colonies’,
something which has its origin in the post-Independence resettlements. As
Rana Dasgupta writes in Capital: The Eruption of Delhi (2014), Delhi’s
bizarre vocabulary of residential residences, with its associated social
and security paranoia, ‘says much about what people in this city expect
from home: they live in housing societies and estates which are contained
in blocks , themselves sub-divisions of sectors , enclaves and colonies ’.
65 These colonies have long gelled into one distinctly upmarket enclave

that people now often simply refer to as South Delhi.

Internal differences in terms of the sociocultural backgrounds of the
inhabitants of these colonies have gradually diminished as well. While
CR Park is still known as a predominantly Bengali area—its well-known
fish market continues to thrive because of this—there is no denying that it
has stopped being solely Bengali. Its upper-middle-class identity remains
resolutely intact, however, as is the case with its adjacent neighbourhoods
such as Greater Kailash (GK), parts I and II. The relative quietude, the
men out for a brisk stroll, white socks determinedly pulled up to their
knees, the brand-new cars awaiting their regular bath, all reek of this
upper-middle-classness.
However, if one were to ask the inhabitants of CR Park to define
what precisely this designation of upper middle class means, the answers
would likely vary considerably. The possession of landed property
figures into such accounts, financial wealth, of course, but equally I found
people stressing their ability to speak English, their level of education
and, related to this, their history and experience with education itself;
parents and even grandparents having attended higher education, children
enrolled in English-medium private education, and the occasional family
member with a schoolbook or biography to their name. Those in CR Park
would never think of themselves as new middle class; those are decidedly
‘other’ people. However, tales of middle class belonging tend to be of a
slippery, fluidic quality, and CR Park is no exception. What exactly
middle-class belonging entails is often a matter of individual
interpretation.

SLOWING INDIA DOWN

The Mumbai suburb of Chembur, where I met Kishore and Vijay for the
Ganapati celebrations in the previous chapter, continues to be known as a
working-class neighbourhood. Yet, the trajectories of the two trainers
have been decidedly upwardly mobile in socioeconomic terms—
something that is reflected in their physical mobility across Mumbai,
providing personal training to clients in elite neighbourhoods such as
Andheri East, Bandra West or Malabar Hill.
This chapter focuses on the trainers and clients of a small
neighbourhood gym called BodyHolics in South Delhi. But first, let’s
continue a little longer on the walk this chapter opened with. For a period
of nine months between 2013 and 2014, I made this walk almost every
day. This was a relatively short walk, about fifteen minutes, compared to
the much longer ones I would embark on in various Indian cities over the
years to map and ‘experience’ urban change. These walks, both short and
long, raised serious reservations about the idea that India was indeed
changing ‘incredibly fast’. Walking from South Delhi to Gurgaon, or
exploring the outer limits of Noida on foot, I often found myself reflecting
on the speed of this change.
Such walks would take me from Chennai’s outer-lying new middle-
class suburb of Pallikaranai to the far more bohemian, upper-middle-class
Besant Nagar; from the shady lanes of Koramangala, a popular suburb for
well-heeled software engineers in Bangalore, to the iconic MG Road in
the heart of the city; and from Mumbai’s breezy sea-facing suburbs to its
swelteringly hot interior ones. Walking, the slowest mode of
transportation, challenged the speed at which I had assumed India was
changing. In fact, often on such walks, reflecting on the personal histories
that informants had shared with me, I could not help conclude that change
was also incredibly slow.

NEGOTIATING T FFIC , CROSSING BOUNDARIES

I squeeze through the narrow gate on my usual morning walk to the gym,
reaching a road almost permanently clogged with impatient traffic. It is a
few weeks before Diwali and it has become noticeably colder in the past
few days. Some of the stray dogs, who usually congregate near the stall of
a chaiwallah, are now wearing jackets against the chill as they rummage
through a pile of refuse carved out of the plastic bags dumped on this
street corner. The tea seller himself is smoking a beedi and checking his
battered old Nokia for messages. Casually, an auto driver leans against
the back of his rickshaw, sipping a cup of steaming chai. A vegetable
seller navigates his cart around it, loudly calling attention to his
merchandise, but drawing only the interest of the pack of strays.
Momentarily stepping into the midst of the slow-moving traffic in order to
avoid the holes that pockmark the sidewalk, as well as the various stalls
selling snacks, paan and calling cards that take up what is left of the space
between, I make my way to the extraordinarily busy Outer Ring Road that
runs in front of BodyHolics.
The T-junction that merges with this road is flanked by colourful
billboards advertising private education at various institutions across the
city, and even more visually striking advertisements suggesting solutions
for hair loss, obesity and other health-related issues. One faded billboard
shows the before and after of a man who has lost considerable weight due
to an Ayurveda-inspired intervention, while a more recent one offers hope
to women, who look like they have gotten an early start on the season’s
sweets, that they too could be shaadi-ready. 66 This is a regular topic of
discussion among the female clients of BodyHolics. The ready
availability of fast food, the demands of social life with its never-ending
string of parties and weddings, and, most of all, sedentary lifestyles all
contribute to the risk of putting on weight. This is a concern that is shared
by the gym’s male clients as well, though they are more likely to discuss it
in terms of wanting to look fit. While the latest muscular looks of
Bollywood heroes may be a source of inspiration for the younger
members that turn up in the evening, a majority of the men who attend the
gym in the morning are in their late twenties or older, and in general
married. They are concerned first and foremost with budding potbellies
that remind them of their fathers and of the health advice they have
received about the risk of diabetes.
As I bide my chance to cross the ring road, I notice some regular
clients entering BodyHolics. The gym offers valet car parking, though this
does not amount to much more than that there is a person who manages the
double-parking issue that cannot be avoided on the relatively small strip
in front of the entrance. I spot one of the morning’s regulars leaning
against his car, the door open, some paperwork spread open on the
passenger seat, busily discussing something on his phone. Phones
regularly interrupt morning workouts at the gym. In general, clients carry
one or two with them, either keeping them with them during their workout,
or leaving them charging on the small desk near the entrance where they
will regularly congregate to check for messages. Most are business
owners or managers, and there never seems to be a break from their
urgently required involvement in pressing matters.

A GYM’S RHYTHM AND SOUNDS

The moment I open the BodyHolics door, I’m hit by a blast of Bollywood
music that overpowers the honking of cars outside. On the gym floor itself,
this music competes with the sound of weights being casually tossed on
top of each other as well as the loud grunting emanating from Sunil’s
throat as he bench-presses a weight equal to that of Ravi, the head trainer
who is assisting him. It is a spartanly decorated gym that could have used
a major overhaul some time ago. However, due to a conflict between the
building’s owner and the gym’s two managers, general maintenance and
repairs have fallen behind. The first time I visited it, I was rather
surprised to see how busy it was, considering that competition abounds in
South Delhi. In walking vicinity of my home in CR Park there were at
least six other gyms, while nearby Saket (Select Citywalk mall) and East
of Kailash (right next to the subway station) were home to branches of
globally operating chains Fitness First and Gold’s Gym. Most BodyHolics
members had been regulars for a few years already, and as a result,
seemed to know each other well, living in the neighbourhood and
spending free time together outside the gym. The rather desperate state of
some of the equipment did not seem to bother them as long as the
personalised service continued.
Gyms come with their own rhythm, and BodyHolics was no
exception to this. While its morning shift was characterised by the coming
and going of local businessmen, their wives and the occasional manager
working for some multinational, evenings drew a younger, student-aged
crowd. The gym was open from six o’clock in the morning until noon,
closing for a few hours to give its trainers some respite. More or less the
same battalion of trainers returned in the late afternoon to assist the
evening crowd until ten o’clock. Since the gym offered personalised
training to all its members, there was considerable interaction between
clients and staff, not just about workout routines but also all sorts of
related and unrelated topics.
I notice Amit and Supriya, one of his clients, watching one of the TV
screens mounted on the wall above. The somewhat disapproving look on
Supriya’s face contrasts markedly with that of Amit, who seems
enthralled. The TV is, as usual, tuned to MTV India, and the hit song
‘Tattad Tattad’ from the movie Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela , a
runaway success in the cinemas. The movie opens with actor Ranveer
Singh arriving on a motorcycle, lying down on it, dressed in embroidered
jeans, a tight-fitting purple shirt, cell phone in hand, nonchalantly cruising
through a Gujarati make-believe, fairy-tale bazaar, where he is joined by
rowdy-looking men, all dressed in yellow kurtas and matching turbans. It
is hardly the most original way to introduce a lead character in a
Bollywood movie—virtually all male leads have a few iconic arrival-on-
motorcycle scenes to their name 67 —but the casualness with which
Ranveer reclines on his motorcycle, at some point even flipping his cell
phone from one hand to the other in order to take a selfie, is over-the-top
even by industry standards.
Once the motorcycle comes to a halt, the men zoom up to the lead
actor, then scatter to their designated positions to start the opening dance
routine. Ranveer 68 emerges from the crowd, his purple shirt fully
unbuttoned, sporting well-defined six-pack abs. Soon the actor is being
carried through the crowd on what looks like a wooden board, possibly a
door. Frenetically dancing, thrusting his crotch upward to a pulsating
rhythm, Ranveer’s moves are an inebriant to the crowd. When his posse of
dancers pass a balcony on which four traditionally dressed women are
slowly losing their minds, the actor takes off his shirt, flaunts his muscular
physique, and even strikes a few bodybuilding poses. Overcome by the
visual spectacle, one of the women on the balcony faints, while Ranveer
continues to dance, this time surrounded by a group of women keen to take
his picture and cosy up to him. The video is deeply erotic, yet full of
religious signifiers: images of Shiva decorate the walls, and various
extras are dressed as Krishna, Ram and Hanuman, suggestive of a divine
sanctioning of all that is so scrumptiously on display. While this is hardly
bhakti poetry, 69 the scene is suffused with adulation and devotion.
As a floor trainer, Amit does not come close to meeting the lean,
muscular ideal that Ranveer Singh exemplifies. A solidly built, muscular
‘Jat-boy’, 70 he has been employed with BodyHolics for a little over a
year. He enjoys working out himself, but the muscularity Ranveer Singh
displays in his movie would require Amit to make an investment in his
body that he currently does not have the money nor time for. This
particular morning, he is not only responsible for Supriya’s workout, but
simultaneously for a number of other clients who all rely on him to tell
them what exercises to do next, as well as to listen to their physical
complaints, provide dietary advice and also basically be a listening ear to
anything they want to share. The Bollywood videos that provide these
workouts with a soundtrack are a reminder of the gym culture’s source of
inspiration, as much as they underline ‘failure’, since hardly any of the
members—or, indeed, the trainers—sport a Ranveer-like body.

MEETING BODILY IDEALS

In 2013, the Hindustan Times ran a ‘Get Healthy, Delhi’ campaign, which
featured ‘ordinary’ Delhiites who had taken a pledge to get fit. One
Saturday, the paper ran a large article titled ‘Kisme Kitna Hai Dum’ (Who
Is the Strongest), about two businessmen who ‘say their biggest weakness
is food’ and were pitted against each other in a face-off to see who could
lose more fat. 71 Accompanied by a set of vivid pictures, the battle was a
cheerful one, but its ultimate goal was to warn against a serious and fast-
growing problem in India: obesity and associated problems such as
diabetes and hypertension.
The two businessmen are in many ways interchangeable with the
male clients who frequent BodyHolics. It’s up to the floor trainers to come
up with a workout for the day, often specifically tuned to one or two areas
of the body. For these clients, life is hectic and time short; most run
construction businesses and spend the bulk of their day stuck in snail-
paced traffic from one building site to another. It is this dilemma that
magazines such as Men’s Health tap into when they discuss the benefits of
a lean and muscular body. Ultimately, however, this body is an ideal type.
For the majority of middle-class men, the challenge will be exactly the
one so jovially illustrated by the Hindustan Times : reducing fat levels
and potentially avoiding associated ailments.
Twenty-three-year-old Ratish, one of the gym’s regulars, was one of
the few whose strapping figure came close to the Ranveer ideal. When he
stood in front of the mirror flexing his muscles, the floor trainers whose
focus should be on the gym’s clients, immediately shifted to what was on
display: heavily pronounced pectoral muscles, sharply defined triceps,
bulging biceps and a V-shaped back. Recently having finished a degree in
hotel management from an elite institute in Switzerland, Ratish moved
back to Delhi in search of a job and clearly came from a well-off family.
In the morning, we would usually briefly catch up and the floor trainers,
whose English was limited, often tried to participate in our conversations.
Ratish interlaced his stories with rapid Hindi, but he lacked the slang that
lubricated the bolder tales of the trainers.
When Ratish walked in, the general manager, Manish, usually quickly
emerged from his office to inquire about his workout plans for the day.
Manish used to train bodybuilders across Delhi and was a competitive
weightlifter himself until recently. While his own body continued to
remind others of these past achievements, it also made no secret of the
fact that he himself was no longer ‘in the game’—he had clearly been in
better shape. He combined management of the gym with a number of other
enterprises he was in the process of developing, such as a gym in Dwarka
near the airport, and one at a company at an industrial site nearby. Manish
was a fitness entrepreneur, and the effort he put in to maintain his body
was mainly about showing his clients that he knew what he was talking
about.

DIVERGENT BUT INTERSECTING T JECTORIES

Supriya, Amit, Sunil, Manish, Ratish and Ravi could be found at

BodyHolics most mornings. For an hour or more they would occupy the
same space, breathe the same air, watch the same Bollywood videos and
interact with each other. Outside the gym, however, their lives were highly
divergent. Amit and Manish were from Chirag Dilli, and still referred to
themselves as middle class with some hesitation. Supriya, Sunil and
Ratish, who lived in colonies adjacent to the gym, could be considered
upper middle class.
Ravi stood out in this group. He grew up in GK-II as the scion of a
family heavily invested in construction projects across the National
Capital Region. Never his ambition to join the family business, Ravi
opted for a career in fitness training instead. In roughly half a year with
BodyHolics, he had emerged as one of the leading figures on the gym
floor, providing coaching to the other floor trainers, assisting Manish with
his plans to expand his fitness business, and providing training to a select
number of clients, including me.
Even if it is hard to determine the actual size of the Indian middle
class and its various subsections, on the gym floor, middle-class
hierarchies were always perfectly understood. With the exception of Ravi,
the two groups—trainers and clients—could be divided neatly along
lower and upper-middle-class lines. At the same time, boundaries and
demarcations were constantly explored, tested and, depending on whom I
asked, trespassed as well. Within the context of the gym, a certain social
and cultural flexibility appeared possible that one also found in outlets of
Starbucks and in high-end malls. For those pursuing upward social
mobility, these spaces seemingly encouraged disobedience towards
adhering to how middle-class belonging was interpreted elsewhere.
 In terms of economics, fitness training was hardly ever the most
lucrative route to follow, though. Starting salaries for floor trainers were
as low as Rs 8,000, making it barely more profitable than being employed
as a security guard or driving a taxi. Yet, unlike such professions, salaries
tend to increase quickly once a trainer manages to bring in personal-
training clients. While Amit was not making much more than a starting
salary, Kishore from Chembur made ten-fold that amount as a personal
trainer to clients in the upmarket areas of Mumbai.
Over coffee one afternoon in a bakery near the gym, Ravi tells me his
impressions of the backgrounds and ambitions of various floor trainers at
the gym. As a fitness trainer of an upper-middle-class background, he was
well-aware of his in-between, somewhat liminal, position. He often
functioned as a go-to person and translator of sorts for the trainers, not so
much in terms of language—almost all trainers and members of the gym
were native Hindi speakers—but with respect to expectations and
comportment.
Ravi thought of his fitness career as catering to various ambitions.
On the one hand was his desire to make it big in fitness because of his
‘sound knowledge of different techniques’, most of which he had picked
up by studying various websites and watching YouTube videos. On the
other was the even bigger ambition of making it as an actor. Although a
north Indian by birth and upbringing, he had his eyes set on Kollywood,
shorthand for the Tamil movie industry located in Kodambakkam,
Chennai. He was particularly invested in exploring a connection with
Kavya, a female client who was one of the morning’s regulars and who
could often be found in his company. A freshly graduated doctor, Kavya
had recently joined a practice in nearby Saket, but her father apparently
had links with the movie industry in their native Tamil Nadu. Ravi was
never short of dreams to share in this regard. When he was not practising
his rudimentary Tamil with Kavya between workout sessions, Ravi could
be found in the company of Manish, who had eagerly involved him in
various plans to expand his fitness business, relying on Ravi’s superior
grasp of the English language as well as contacts and background.
Quickly gobbling down a few sandwiches the afternoon we met for
coffee, Ravi started by pointing out that the main difference between him
and the other trainers was his capacity to speak English. For Amit and
Kareem, the latter a trainer with whom I did not interact much, ‘speaking
English is like climbing Mount Everest barefoot without an oxygen mask’.
Manish, on the other hand, simply needed to boost his confidence, Ravi
assured me. His English was much better than he himself thought it was.
Some of the spot boys who came in irregularly did not speak any English
at all. It was hardly necessary, since their main task was to put the weights
back after clients were finished with them. Yet, Ravi thought it crucial to
invest in their English-language capabilities as well since much of the
information about fitness training online was in fact in English, and it
would be ‘the only way to grow in this business’. Besides that, clients
appeared to appreciate it when knowledge of various fitness techniques
was conveyed in English.
The strength of BodyHolics as opposed to other gyms, in his opinion,
was the sense of family which the gym strongly encouraged. ‘We are all
friends, we work like that accordingly.’ Although most gyms appeared to
revolve around and stimulate similar notions of family and camaraderie,
Ravi was adamant that there was always unwanted competition in other
gyms, with trainers trying to steal each other’s clients, because of the
commission received for personal training and the status associated with
having a large client pool.
BodyHolics had a better model, Ravi argued, providing on-the-spot
personal training without charging clients extra for this service. It was all
part of the package, as was the vision. Within this context, each trainer
had his own strength, which the gym utilised to full advantage. ‘I see the
client’s personality and then I give them the best trainer.’
Kareem was known for his ‘chocolatey eyes’ and his ‘easy
relationship with the ladies’, while Amit was appreciated for being a
‘hard worker who brings out the best in clients’. The two were childhood
friends from Chirag Dilli and had joined around the same time. Girish, a
lanky, agile senior trainer, originally from the state of Odisha, was
particularly appreciated for his patience and his knowledge of different
workout techniques, yoga among them. His backstory was something of a
mystery, with rumours about a wife and possibly kids back home in a
small fishing village. Then there was the one female trainer, Mishty, who
doubled as a receptionist and occasionally provided aerobics classes.
 Any trainer, however, should be able to take over if a colleague is
absent, Ravi emphasised. Trainers’ frequent absences were due not only
to illness or family obligations, but also because of the high rate of
attrition. Ravi could not say why so many trainers quit, but it was likely
the low pay that BodyHolics offered and the absence of personal-training
opportunities, as well as the frequent gossip about the gym’s financial
state and its general state of neglect.

RAVI’S DOWNWARD MOBILITY

Ravi completed his schooling at an all-boys English-medium school, after
which he graduated from Delhi University’s College of Arts and
Commerce. Although he had subsequently enrolled in a master’s course in
counselling psychology, Ravi felt he was not in the right place, not least
because after a couple of months, he already found himself ‘teaching the
other students’. He had little interest in joining the family business, but
there was considerable pressure on him to give up what the family thought
of as an idle pursuit that would never generate the kind of income that the
business would. The idea of working on building sites and ‘having to talk
with the labourers all the time’ was simply not something that appealed to
Ravi though. Mainly employing semi-skilled and illiterate Bihari
labourers, it would require him to ‘to use very rude language, otherwise
they won’t listen’. To this, he added: ‘You can’t talk to them in any other
way. You have to use shit language.’
There was something else: ‘I want to be self-made.’ Ravi stated with
confidence: ‘I can sweep a floor, I can build a wall, I can do all that.’ Of
one thing he was certain, though: ‘I want to do something on my own
without anyone’s help.’ He added almost defiantly: ‘I never wanted to go
down the line that I got my father’s help.’ It was one of the reasons he did
not get along with his father too well at the time. ‘My father and I, we are
not that close right now. We don’t talk much at all.’ His father thought that,
unlike his brother, Ravi was not ‘strong enough’ and that that was why he
did not want to join the family business. ‘I did have that dream to be an
architect when I was a kid. Unfortunately, I did not have that science much
under control, I was not very good at it.’ He had even ‘prepared’ for his
civil service exam, but it had also not proven to be his calling. ‘I wanted
to … I wanted to do well but I never really wanted a desk job per se.’
Finishing a chocolate roll and flushing it down with a can of Sprite,
Ravi asked me if I had seen the 2004 movie Swades , starring Shah Rukh
Khan. The storyline resonated with his own, he felt. In Swades , the
protagonist, on leave from his job with NASA, returns to India where he
becomes involved in a project to solve the electricity issues of a small
town. The idea appealed to Ravi at a social as well as personal level.
Having told his father that he would not join the family business, he
needed to find an alternative to prove that he could be successful in
something else. ‘That’s when I started working out. I wanted to put all that
energy into something and that’s where I could put it in.’ It was really
something he could put his heart and soul in, he found.
As a way of developing and educating himself, Ravi started looking
into the biomechanics of fitness, and realised ‘how it worked and how I
could improve it’. Determined to find the best workout possible, he was
able to transform his body within four months, Ravi said with great pride.
‘I went from being a matchstick to being a real man. To a man’s body!’ He
suggested he was ‘almost anorexic before that’ and overtly self-conscious
of this. From this moment, he became ‘truly devoted to fitness’. It was
now his ‘number one ambition’ to feature on the cover of the Indian
edition of Men’s Health one day. But Manish, his boss and friend, had
warned him that he first needed to ‘complete a certain fitness level’. In
terms of natural good looks, he was already there, Manish said, but for the
magazine to take him seriously, he would have to work on his body and
come up with an innovative workout routine that he could pitch.
Parallel to these plans was Ravi’s desire to make it as an actor.
Movies had played a significant role all his life, he said. ‘I come from a
family where Bollywood is praised to a level that there is a television in
our home which only shows movies.’ (He meant that there was one movie
DVD or the other playing almost all day.) However, he was not very fond
of cinema as a kid. ‘Unconsciously it was projected on me.’ Searching for
the right way to phrase it, he clarifies that ‘unconsciously I was getting the
movie stuff’. He used to see himself as a beta character, ‘never this alpha
guy that I am now’. Bollywood functioned as a prime source of inspiration
—‘I always wanted to be this superhero guy’—but his shy character stood
in the way.
As a young child, Ravi would spend considerable time watching
movies with his grandfather. Reflecting on his younger self, he suggests
that ‘unconsciously you watch this a lot, and that’s how I imagined myself
to be an actor’. In his spare time, he had developed an interest in books
that combined philosophy and psychology. He declared proudly that he
had a knack for emotions and that he was quite good at reading them.
Fantasising about himself as an actor, he emphasised that he wanted to
give it his best shot. ‘I want to have that emotion.’ By this he meant being
able to evoke an emotional reaction from the audience.
Ravi was working hard on his Tamil because Kavya might be able to
get him a role in a production. He dedicated forty-five minutes a day to it,
quite a challenge given the hours he had to put in at BodyHolics. ‘I give
myself self-affirmation. I tell myself that I am good in Tamil, am fluent in
Tamil.’

MANISH’S UPWARD MOBILITY

Manish was a veteran in the field of fitness compared to Ravi. When I
first met him, he was twenty-nine years old and a personal trainer with
various certifications—from aerobics and weightlifting to those with a
focus on the needs of professional athletes—and even experience in
physiotherapy. He was also a registered pharmacist and dietician. Before
he made his move into fitness, his main passion was wrestling. ‘I used to
do that at a state and national level.’ This was not kushti, which is
practised in local akharas 72 but ‘the wrestling they do at the Olympics’.
That said, Manish had also been involved in traditional wrestling for
about five years. It was the most exhausting thing he had ever done, he
once said. He still had some friends who competed in various akharas, but
he had lost interest in it a long time ago. Manish saw no future in the sport,
and even noted that some of the akharas he had once trained at had now
been converted into gyms, some even with air-conditioning.
In the morning, we often found ourselves in his small office, which
was located in the middle of the gym. Through the tinted windows, he
could keep an eye on what was happening on the floor. There was even a
little bell to summon people to his office or for the music to be changed,
though the latter was often so loud that the bell could not be heard and
Manish had to dash out of his office to deliver instructions in person. In
contrast to some of his floor trainers, Manish preferred that Western music
be played, since BodyHolics was ‘a high-class gym’ and he would ‘get
complaints’ if it played Bollywood music non-stop.
He described BodyHolics as ‘high class’ as if oblivious to the
desperate state of some of the equipment, which was a source of
amusement among the regulars. The gym’s financial predicaments were
well known, and some clients wondered openly if Manish would be able
to pay the electricity bill in time so the air-conditioning could be switched
on in the hotter months. However, its strategic location in GK-II and its
mainly upper-middle-class clientele added a certain élan to the place—to
Manish at least. His friendship with Ravi mirrored this, in that he
considered him crucial to the future of the gym. Ravi’s upper-middle-class
upbringing would certainly help in his expansion plans and add high-end
clientele to the gym, he reasoned.
Usually comfortably seated behind his desk, Manish had at least two
phones in front of him, one for business, the other for personal calls. On
the wall behind him was a large image of the goddess Kali, as
worshipped in the nearby Kalkaji mandir. On the other hung a somewhat
kitschy affair of a couple of horses in flight, galloping to some unknown
destination. It was the kind of image one could buy by the dozen not far
from the gym, outside Nehru Place metro station at footpath stalls.
Although Manish described his family as lower or new middle class
and mainly educated in Hindi, he would also say they were ‘a family of
business owners, engineers, doctors’, and never failed to add that nobody
was doing what he was doing. His parents really only thought of ‘two
fields that way’. One either became an engineer or a doctor, other ways of
making money were never quite considered. ‘They think more about
earnings, not what the child wants, the child’s happiness.’ Although he
could never get himself very interested in the field of medicine, he did
complete his pharmacy certification and was employed with a large
pharmaceutical company for a while. ‘But I was not enjoying it over there.
I even got the offer to work in Dubai, Saudi, Singapore.’ The thought of
working abroad was attractive, but the work itself did not hold enough
appeal.
‘I like instructing people … I like it when students listen to me and
take my advice.’ This is also why he got along so well with Ravi. ‘He
really treats me like a teacher.’ Although BodyHolics was closed on
Sundays, in the afternoon he would invite all the trainers to the gym to
provide additional coaching. ‘I also have this anatomy book from which I
teach them.’ It was the kind of foundational knowledge that they could
also get from a certification course with Gold’s Gym Academy or
elsewhere, but he had little faith in the quality of such training institutes.
‘On Sunday, I teach them about fitness, client scheduling, slow
knowledge, things like that.’ He feels he has a similar student–teacher
relationship with the bodybuilders he had taken under his wing in order to
prepare them for regional and even international competitions. One of the
bodybuilders he was involved in coaching at the time was sponsored
through the Central Reserve Police Force. As Manish explained: ‘He will
not do any job there, he just takes a designation, that’s all.’ They also did
not really have the capacity to work in the police force, he found, at least
not at the level they were getting paid for. ‘They are just focused on their
sports, those guys.’ Also, ‘They come from humble families, they require
this money to survive in their sports.’
Although Manish described his own origins also as humble, he took
a superior position when compared to the bodybuilders he trained—not
just as their coach or guru but also in terms of his middle-classness. Even
if he frequently voiced doubts about his ability to speak ‘proper’ English,
compared to them, he was a man of the world, well connected in the
world of business and sports. At the same time, he noted that there was a
wide gap between his own position and that of his gym’s clients. Such
discussions always oscillated between how impressed Manish was with
the clients he got to interact with, and the respect he would receive from
them.
One morning, when he and I were hanging out in his office and
discussing future plans for the gym, he suddenly pointed at a woman doing
leg-extensions and asked me if I knew what she did for a living. I had
spoken to her a few times, but this had never come up. ‘She is a CMO
with Vodafone, she heads the marketing department there.’ He leaned
backwards, his hands behind his neck, and stared at the ceiling for a
while, then suddenly exclaimed: ‘She calls me sir!’ To emphasise the
significance of this, he added: ‘That makes me feel high, it makes my level
feel high. In here, they call me sir …’ Illustrating how exceptional her
calling him sir was, he added proudly: ‘Outside, I would have to make an
appointment.’ While he was signifying that he was only a nobody, unlikely
to have such acquaintances or connections, it became clear that his
familiarity with her was clearly very much bound to the gym itself.
Only with very few clients did he have a relationship outside the gym
as well, though it always appeared as if this was still very much in a
preliminary stage. A client with whom he hoped to develop a further
relationship was a local business owner who had recently opened a
shopping mall nearby. Such people held a specific interest because they
might facilitate the opening of another gym in the future. Whenever this
client came in, Manish would greet him warmly and make sure that he
personally provided the training. Often, I could hear them chat about their
respective businesses, exchanging ideas and suggestions in a mixture of
English and Hindi. From the body language, it was also clear that the
relationship was not that of equals. Manish, however, never failed to
emphasise how much he ‘learned from that guy, especially about doing
business’. This idea of learning from his clients was constantly on his
mind, and although he avowed a fierce passion for fitness and helping his
clients lose weight, gain muscles and become healthier in general, being
in the gym was also an opportunity to extend his contacts, work on his
English, share business ideas and, more generally, learn from those he
held in high esteem.
Throughout our conversations, questions about how Manish came
across in terms of speaking English, his comportment and sense of style,
his presentation skills, even the car he drove frequently came up. It would
be a mistake to think of him as insecure though. He was perfectly at ease
with who he was, where he came from and what he had accomplished. It
was only that, when it came to his clients and the lifestyle he sought to
emulate, he realised that there was a gap he had not yet successfully been
able to bridge. Particularly revealing were his excursions outside the gym
in order to meet personal clients at their homes, for which he would bring
Ravi along. Not so much to help him with the training, but to guide him in
terms of how to deal with such clients. Manish framed it as an opportunity
for Ravi to learn, but it was also clearly an opportunity to educate
himself. Among these clients he counted a dealer of luxury cars, a number
of property developers and various other businessmen. ‘These are
sophisticated people, so we have to behave ourselves.’ Some of them
even had a gym-space at home. Pondering on this some more, he offered:
‘We have to know how to behave around them. These are high-class
people; it is good to get exposed to them.’

A DEPARTURE FROM THE GYM AND LIFE

I returned to BodyHolics after a brief absence in early 2014 to find that
things had changed dramatically. Ravi had inexplicably left BodyHolics
and joined his father’s company, seemingly having given in to family
pressure. He was not speaking to anyone, Manish and others assured me,
and there was no point contacting him. According to Kavya, he was not
interested in meeting anyone from the gym, and he was ‘mainly keeping to
himself’ after he had left. She had visited him at his home and had also
spoken with his mother, but had returned home without a clear picture of
what was going on. Apparently, she had even been able to secure a small
role for him in a Tamil production through her father. ‘But he said he
wasn’t ready.’ It had surprised her, considering how enthusiastic he had
been before. However, looking back on the weeks before he had stopped
coming to the gym, there had already been something off about him.
‘Something was clearly on his mind but he was no longer sharing it with
us,’ Kavya said.
One evening, a few weeks later, Supriya contacted me by message to
ask if I had heard ‘about Ravi’. My immediate reaction was one of
excitement, thinking he may have re-joined the gym, but there was
something ominous about her messaging me this way. Watching her ‘typing
a message’, I suddenly dreaded the worst. Ravi had indeed taken his own
life.
In the week after, the gym remained quiet. Clients seemed to think
most trainers would not show up for work, or that the atmosphere would
not be conducive to working out. Those who did visit the gym put little
effort into their exercises, instead congregating in the centre of the gym to
exchange ideas, theories and rumours, keen to understand why Ravi had
committed suicide. Such conversations invariably turned to the question of
choice itself. As one regular customer, a rather striking senior woman
usually dressed in all-black, a number of large diamond-encrusted rings
adorning her fingers, put it: ‘He was such a gentle soul, he really wanted
to do something else in life.’ She had known the family for years, lived in
the same neighbourhood and had occasionally tried talking to him, she
said. He had always treated her with a generous amount of respect, she
remembered sadly. Her sentiments resonated with that of the other women
who had been regulars most mornings.
Ravi’s suicide had brought people together, but their sadness could
also be framed as a performance. All agreed how unfortunate it was the
way things had turned out, yet their accounts and reasonings were also
laced with a certain sense of understanding. The general consensus was
that family pressure, the desire to do something different and the relatively
little space he had to manoeuvre had left Ravi with no other choice. This
was also not the first suicide they had dealt with in their circle, nor would
it be the last, it seemed.
For Ravi’s family, working in the gym signified a form of downward
socioeconomic mobility that they had not been able to stomach. Not only
would he not be able to make the kind of money the family business
promised to generate, he would end up serving customers that the family
considered their equals. This contrasted with the way Ravi perceived the
situation, considering his career in fitness as an alternative that had great
potential. It was a firm belief he shared with Manish, who despite his
different socioeconomic background, had also faced backlash from his
family for the choices he had made.

STARTING A NEW GYM , A NEW LIFE

During the third week of February 2014, Manish invited me along to an
industrial estate owned by a global provider of telecommunication
solutions. He had learnt that they wanted to open an in-house gym and he
was hoping to become the manager. The day before, we had discussed his
plans at a Starbucks in Nehru Place, going through his PowerPoint
presentation and thinking of possible questions they might have. He was
keen to bring me along, partly because he thought a ‘foreign face’ would
help smoothen the deal—providing the plan with cosmopolitan élan, so to
speak—but also because he felt that his English was not strong enough,
even though the conversation was likely to be in Hindi.
He would have brought Ravi along for a meeting of this sort, but now
Manish had to rethink some of his business plans. The mere mention of
Ravi usually brought tears to his eyes, and in the last one-and-a-half
months since his suicide, Manish had repeatedly recounted how the family
had called him to take care of Ravi’s body when they found it lifeless in
his bedroom.
Over time, Manish had begun to involve me in his plans to expand
his fitness business, seeking my advice over how to formulate a ‘proper
email’ in English or to read through a folder he had prepared. In the past,
Ravi had been part of these plans. Together they had visited nearby
housing societies in order to pitch fitness-related ideas to the inhabitants.
In these upper-middle-class compounds, Ravi had been crucial in
introducing him to the people in charge, because they required an
introduction from a trusted face. Manish explained: ‘We try to meet their
residents and give them some coaching and counselling.’ He hoped they
would join BodyHolics, but his staff could also offer training at the
housing society, if desired.
‘A lot of them have sitting jobs, they sit behind the computer, they are
not fit, so we tell them the benefits of working out. What the importance of
the workout is.’ As always, he would bring along a slide-show to
convince his audience of this. ‘We give them a piece of paper on which
they can write three questions.’ He would take these questions into
account to make them a group offer, or if it was a company, a corporate
deal. In some cases, he had been lucky and managed to sign on new
clients, but often they were met with disinterest and prejudice. ‘They have
a lot of doubts, these people, lot of questions.’ Bringing Ravi along was
by no means a guarantee of success. ‘They will want to know why he is
there, what is he doing in fitness.’ Yet, with Ravi at his side, Manish had
felt much more confident. In the car, on our way to the company site, he
repeated how much he missed Ravi when he made such visits. Admittedly,
he wasn’t making that many. ‘I lack the motivation for it.’
 The number of clients at BodyHolics had reduced drastically now
that Ravi was no longer around. As such, Manish really needed this new
gym to ‘work out’. ‘It’s like Ravi took the soul out of the gym with him,’
he remarked, pensively staring at the traffic that was snaking past at a
snail’s pace across a flyover. As always, the trainers were changing on a
regular basis. Girish had absconded to Odisha to take care of family
matters, and it was unclear when, if ever, he would be back. Animosity
was also brewing between Amit and Kareem, who were no longer on
speaking terms because of a conflict that appeared to revolve around a
female client who was possibly married. Kareem had been providing her
with ‘personal training’ at home, something Amit did not approve of, or
was jealous about.
Manish wanted to lay-off Kareem ‘because his enthusiasm for the
work is gone’. Abounding rumours over the alleged affair also had to be
considered. These were the topics Manish and I had discussed at the
Nehru Place coffee shop: departing trainers, concerns over declining gym
memberships, clients demanding the return of prepaid fees and the cost of
starting a new gym. Besides, there were always the nagging doubts about
how those Manish considered higher-up would perceive him. Would his
English be sufficient? ‘We never spoke that language at home, Michael.’ 73
Would they even hear him out? ‘I am not from that world, man,’ he once
said, pensively.
On his first visit to Starbucks, I could see he was uneasy, even though
he was familiar with the brand. The chain’s ambitious plan of expansion
across the city fascinated and bewildered him. Dressed neatly in branded
jeans, a T-shirt which fit perfectly and accentuated his powerful build,
with multiple smartphones resting casually on the table in front, Manish
was evidently ill at ease, commenting that this was hardly his usual place
to meet people. He explained that this was typically a place where he
expected ‘hi-fi people’ (‘like you’) to hang out. At the same time, he
seemed eager to thank me for suggesting this location, seeing it as an
opportunity to learn more about what was going on in this world that he
aspired to belong to one day.
While going through his presentation, Manish appeared edgy about
pitching this idea of an in-company gym. He remarked that this was
something he had imagined Ravi would have done for him, or at least to
have helped him with. He had consulted some BodyHolics’ members,
including a former client who was working ‘somewhere high up in a
telecom company’ and who had looked at a few of his PowerPoint
presentations before. ‘She makes 1.5 lakhs [per month] but is doing this to
help me,’ he explained. That way, he put considerable faith in the socio-
cultural capital of other people (including me, a firang pursuing a
mystifying research topic), even though he himself was clearly the expert
in fitness and bodybuilding. Although Manish’s English had improved
over time, certainly since I had first met him, he continued to lack
confidence, mainly because of the way he interpreted his own vernacular
upbringing in relation to those he hoped to convince of his expertise and
knowhow. Ironically, ‘life coaching’ was becoming integral to the way he
had started pitching his fitness ideas to companies and housing societies
lately. One of the exercises he liked to introduce at company outings had a
team-building element to it: he divided a team into three groups and gave
them each a rope and wood to cross an imaginary river (‘this was really
good fun’). He was all about problem-solving, he assured me, and since
he had overcome considerable obstacles himself, he was the perfect man
for the job.

During the thirteenth-day memorial service, the local Arya Samaj temple
was packed. Around ten regular clients were there, as well as fellow
trainers such as Girish. Absent, however, was Amit, who had shown
considerable anger about Ravi’s suicide. ‘He would always show his
positive side here but he was negative inside,’ Amit had blurted out. Ravi
had been like a brother to him, he felt. ‘He always gave me proper
respect!’ The fact that Ravi had taken him seriously and had invested time
helping him improve his skills, even becoming a friend of sorts, were
memories he now cherished. Knowing how much resistance Ravi had
received from his family, he felt justified in not attending the memorial
service, as a form of protest. Manish understood Amit’s point of view but
felt compelled to attend anyway. The family could have known that Ravi
was depressed and ‘should never have allowed this to happen’, Manish
said, though.
In our interactions, either in the gym or in the car going somewhere,
Manish would frequently complain of how little support he received from
his family. ‘They don’t believe in this at all, they don’t know what it is.’
His brother, who was employed as an engineer, was especially negative.
‘But he’s just jealous, that guy,’ he had said once, dismissively. The
second-hand car he had recently bought was deemed ‘too high’ for his
family, as he put it himself. ‘They think I am wasting my time, that I am
taking too many risks.’ While he admitted that they have a reason to be
worried, since his fitness business was not doing so well, he also felt he
needed the car to ‘show people that I am doing well, you know’. Having
made our way across the flyover, nearing the site where he envisioned his
next fitness business would take shape, Manish repeated that he felt he
was on the way to something big. But like the traffic we had just been in,
he knew that the road ahead was congested, and that he was not nearly
close to where he wanted to be.

THE POSSIBILITY OF ALTERNATIVES

Earlier in this chapter, I described Amit and Supriya watching a song from
Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela , a film which revolves around a
Romeo and Juliet-type fable, represented by the impossible love between
the son and a daughter of two warring clans involved in the local arms
trade. Both Amit and Supriya agreed that Ranveer was looking incredibly
fit; however, Supriya added that she fiercely disliked the ‘loudness’ of the
character the actor depicted. She had seen the movie in its first weekend
and had even attended some promotional event related to it at nearby
Nehru Place, but wished she hadn’t. What she found particularly
disturbing was the amount of sex and violence portrayed. She wasn’t the
only one who found the movie problematic. The intended title of the
movie had caused controversy prior to its release. Its initial title, Ram
Leela , had been attacked by various groups that were angry the film’s
‘vulgarity’ was being connected to the story of Lord Ram. As a result, the
movie had been renamed Goliyon Ki Rasleela Ram-Leela 74 only forty-
eight hours ahead of its release.
In the movie, the hero and heroine commit suicide in the end,
something that ultimately brings the two warring clans together to cremate
the bodies of the young lovers. At BodyHolics, Ravi’s departure not only
brought two ‘opposite’ middle-class groups together, but also made them
(temporarily) reflect on their position vis-à-vis each other. Here, perhaps,
was it laid out in the clearest manner how social and cultural mobility in
urban India produces a complex interplay of overlapping, intersecting and
occasionally contradictory trajectories. I knew Ravi only briefly, and
even though we became quite close during that period, I am sure there are
aspects of his life that he did not share, experiences that I was not aware
of, and that what he provided me with was an edited version of a story he
‘liked’ to share. It was by no means an easy decision to write about this
incredibly bright and caring trainer whose untimely departure from the
gym and life affected and impacted a whole range of people. Yet his story
is too important not to share, not least because it shows how difficult it
can be to choose an alternative career trajectory and ‘to do things’
differently in a new India.
 CHAPTER 3

BODY | BUILDING | CAPITAL

‘Each workout is like a brick in a building, and every time you go in

there and do a half-ass workout, you’re not laying a brick down.
Somebody else is.’
– Dorian Yates, Mr Olympia Winner, 1992–97

T
his Monday morning, Express Avenue, one of Chennai’s premier
malls, is reasonably quiet. Victor sits in front of me, his heavy arms
resting comfortably on the table, a tray with a large portion of
French fries, a double Whopper chicken and a sizeable Coke waiting for
him. Although the plan was to meet for coffee, Victor was hungry and in
the mood for ‘some decent food’.
Just two days earlier, Victor had made his return to the bodybuilding
stage at the third Mr Steel Tamil Nadu competition after a long absence
due to a back injury. As we get ready to dig into our hamburgers, he seems
to be in a much better mood than at the competition, where he had taken
third place in his particular weight category. Smirking, he says, referring
to the bodybuilder who had placed second: ‘That guy had no legs!’ He
quickly takes a bite of his burger and continues: ‘See, he was very broad
in his chest and shoulders but he had no legs, so I should have beat him on
this.’ Apparently, the jury does not like Victor, a problem I have heard him
complain about before. ‘I could see it from their eyes, when I started
posing they all stopped smiling and looked down.’
He believes one of the jury members—a bodybuilder who was once
Victor’s training partner, but with whom he had since fallen out—is the
culprit. Victor thinks he had instructed the other jury members to place
him lower than he actually deserved. ‘I used to respect him quite a bit in
the old days. I really thought that he is a genius, that guy.’ This memory
triggers a diatribe about several other bodybuilders who all work as
personal trainers and who apparently ‘show many different faces’
depending on the situation they are in. ‘Online they will be like, don’t take
drugs, they’re bad for you, but in the gym, they are the big guys who will
supply you with anything they can get their hands on.’ There is a lot of
back-stabbing and jealousy, he explains. ‘They don’t like me because I am
an IT guy. They think I am only doing it as a hobby and that I don’t need to
win.’ The competition came with a generous cash prize which the jury
may have thought to be of little consequence to him. He has now decided
to change bodybuilding federations for good. ‘This federation is not
showing me any respect and will never let me win.’
When I had reached the competition at Kamarajar Hall in Teynampet,
Chennai, two days earlier, the first categories, from 55 to 70 kg, had
already taken the stage. An energetic host had asked for the audience’s
special attention for the upcoming category of men with various
disabilities, such as a missing leg or an underdeveloped body-part due to
childhood polio. A raucous applause greeted the competitors, who all
received a certificate of appreciation for their participation. Next was the
70-plus category. Around ten gold-painted men started nervously flexing
their leg muscles, encouraged by the droning voice of one of the jury
members who instructed them on what pose to take and what muscle group
to flex next. Some were dressed in professional posing trunks, others
were simply wearing underwear smudged with the tanning lotion they had
lathered on. It was as if a giant had picked up each of these men by their
heads, holding them between index finger and thumb, and dipped them in
gold paint. The untanned faces took on a ghoulish hue under the harsh
stage light, with chins jutting through paper-thin skin and eyes lying
hollow in their sockets, the result of extreme dieting and dehydration.
In India, bodybuilding competitions usually commence with the
lowest weight-category of 55+ kg, after which they work their way up by
increments of 5 kg. Since the 100-plus category is the highest one, this
means that there are roughly ten different weight categories in all. The
winners of each category compete for the overall title in the final round.
Considering the muscular size and maturity required to win an overall
title, it is usually awarded to one of the winners of the 80-plus to 90-plus
categories. In comparison with the lower-weight categories, these
bodybuilders are able to display larger and more detailed body-frames
and vascularity. Besides that, their muscles tend to have reached a
particular maturity that comes with years of working-out. The higher
weight categories often have an issue with fat levels and dryness, which
stands in the way of giving the muscles a particular definition and veiny-
ness.
Other categories, such as the disabilities one, or those that revolve
around fitness or swimwear modelling, are sometimes added to give the
competition an extra dimension. Depending on the location, sponsors and
federation involved, there are also specific moments scheduled to honour
the local organisation, the owner of the building or the land at which the
competition takes place, and the senior bodybuilders present in the
audience. These men are asked to flex their muscles for the benefit and
appreciation of the audience. Bodybuilding competitions in India,
therefore, rarely run shorter than four hours, though double that is no
exception. As one informant jokingly put it: ‘It’s like a day match,’
referencing cricket, India’s national obsession.

BODIES BUILDING CAPITAL

In the third Mr Steel Tamil Nadu competition, Victor competed in the 80-
plus category and hoped to have a chance at the overall title. The winner’s
prize was well-deserved, and Victor had stood no chance against him.
However, it was up for debate whether Victor should have come in
second. Having made considerable investments in his physique in terms of
time, energy and money, it was thus not surprising that he had left the
competition feeling disillusioned. What drives bodybuilders to invest
inordinate amounts of time, energy, not to mention actual financial capital
into their bodies? What are their bodies ultimately about? Is it mainly a
quest to become huge, something that is imbued with notions of
masculinity, in order to impress and dominate through sheer physical
presence? This last question is mostly rhetorical, as indeed, these bodies
stand for much more than hastily drawn conclusions about gender and
sexuality. The personal histories of the bodybuilders I met and
interviewed across India showed that the process of ‘building bodies’ is
intimately connected with strategies of upward mobility, middle-class
belonging and, ultimately, a changing Indian economic, social and cultural
landscape.
The focus in this chapter is on men whose bodies are considerably
larger and more muscular than those featured on the cover of the Indian
edition of Men’s Health and other male-oriented lifestyle magazines, or
those that film stars build their storylines around. Finding a balance
between the body required to be competitive on the bodybuilding stage
and the lean, muscular ideal foregrounded in popular media doesn’t
necessarily entail a physical process per se. Instead, capitalising on the
bodybuilder’s body requires a translation in terms of what clients may
potentially read in it. In order to better appreciate what is at stake here, I
focus first on the long-term trajectory of Victor, a Tamil bodybuilder from
a Brahmin family and a former IT professional with a multinational
company in Chennai. His case makes for an intriguing comparison with
that of Akash, a bodybuilder with international ambitions who lives and
works in Bangalore, India’s IT heart. Like Victor, Akash is competitive on
stage as well as a successful personal trainer. However, unlike Victor,
who pursued running his own gym after quitting his IT job, Akash is
employed as a highly sought-after personal trainer with Gold’s Gym.
Their bodies are not the product of a mere strict adherence to highly
specific diets and routines, but of an intimate understanding of what they
are doing. While their bodies might provide the impetus for clients to seek
out their services, it is ultimately their knowledge of how their bodies can
be transformed that makes Victor and Akash successful and sought-after as
trainers. Another instance of capitalising on this knowledge is that of
Kaizzad Capadia (actual name), a former bodybuilder who now runs a
training institute offering certification courses to aspiring fitness trainers
—something leading fitness brands such as Gold’s Gym and Reebok are
also involved with. The success of Capadia’s training programme shows
that ‘training’ trainers has become a source of income in itself. Ultimately,
the question I shall investigate here is not only what it takes to build a
muscular body but also what is required to capitalise on this body.
INVESTING CAPITAL IN THE BODY
As the overall category was taking the stage at the end of the competition,
I sat next to the parents of the eventual Mr Steel Man 2017. Dressed in a
colourful sari, the winner’s mother was lost in prayers. The smell of the
jasmine flowers in her hair mingled with that of the protein powder added
copiously to water bottles around me, as well as the lingering odour of the
‘coconut-flavoured’ tanning lotion of the bodybuilders who had already
competed.
During an earlier posing session, I had been drawn into a
conversation with some male students sitting next to me. They said they
were avid gym-goers but had no particular desire to compete themselves.
In fact, none of them looked particularly muscular, and they assured me
that their interest was mainly in the spectacle that was unfolding on stage.
They had heard about the competition via the gym they attended, and
decided to attend since they had no other plans for that particular Saturday
evening. Throughout, discussing the various candidates on stage, they
remained ambivalent about what they were actually observing. They were
decidedly proud that Tamil men could display such muscularity, but did
not quite desire this for themselves. One of the men, in the process of
finishing his degree in accounting, professed: ‘That’s not for us, really.
We’re just students, just having a good time.’
Attending a newly established private business university on the
outskirts of town, they were from Chennai and would occasionally attend
bodybuilding competitions ‘such as this one’. Familiar with Bollywood
movies, they were, however, quick to turn the conversation to Kollywood,
underlining that their superstars were ‘into fitness as well’. They asked
me if I was familiar with Surya, Atharvaa or Prabhas, the last primarily a
Telugu actor. Prabhas’s performance in the first part of Baahubali (2015)
had showcased his incredibly muscular physique. As soon as Prabhas
became the main topic of conversation, others joined as well, and
declared their admiration for one of the key moments in the movie when
the actor, playing the character of Shivudu, carries a huge Shiva lingam
out of the river, on his massively muscular shoulders.
There was indeed something about the sheer might and charm of the
character of Shivudu (or Baahubali), portrayed by Prabhas with
undeniable vigour and humour. At the time, the second part of the movie
had yet to be released, but part one continued to enchant masses across
India. Looking at the stage and watching the competitors in the overall
weight category, it was clear that one of the attractions of attending this
competition was to see men ‘like Baahubali’ flex their muscles, posing to
the rambunctious applause and whistling of those in attendance. However,
for Victor, this had been a very serious occasion, far removed from the
world of Tollywood or Kollywood; he was returning to the stage after
years of absence. A back injury had prevented him from competing
earlier, but equally, prior disappointments, disillusionment and even
depression had stood in the way of finding his way back into the limelight.
Now he was about to show how his form had improved, how his
knowledge of various training techniques had benefited him, and
ultimately, how his detractors and competitors had been wrong all along.
Discussing what it took for him to get competition-ready as he
finishes the remainder of his Burger King meal, Victor provides a rather
blunt calculation of the costs involved. Over a period of five months, he
estimates he has spent around Rs 70,000, nearly one month’s salary, to get
where he needed to be. This included money spent on whey-protein
powders, metabolism enhancers/fat burners, various other supplements
such as L-Carnitine, glutamine, amino-acids and vitamins, daily doses of
chicken and eggs (about thirty egg-whites per day), vegetables for the
necessary fibre, fish twice a week, and costs related to body-enhancing
drugs, as well as medicine necessary to flush the liver and kidneys
afterwards. These costs were certainly not exceptional. Bodybuilders
across India had provided me with similar summaries, in certain cases
even estimating that they had spent as much as Rs 30,000 per month for a
period of up to half a year in order to become competition-ready. In
Victor’s case, the money necessary for this had come out of his own
pocket, working as a team manager with PayPal, but other bodybuilders I
had gathered data on over time had relied on a combination of income
through personal training and support from family or friends.

A BODYBUILDER’S CAPITAL INVESTMENT

A bodybuilder’s body represents capital, not only in terms of what has
been put in it but also what can be capitalised on. As much as the two
seem to speak to each other, they can be decidedly at odds as well. The
concept of bodily capital, which initially emerged out of Pierre
Bourdieu’s (1978) writing, provides some helpful tools to understand
what the issue is here. While the concept has regularly returned in social
scientific explorations—often in relation to the energy, money and time
people invest in their bodies—it remains a rather elusive concept that
heavily draws upon symbolic interpretations. As such, the male body’s
capital can be equated to its approximation of a particular masculine
ideal, signalling potential attraction and eliciting desire. It aligns with
hegemonic notions of masculinity: raw power, steadfastness, discipline
and control, and the potential of domination over other men.
Loïc Wacquant (1995), writing on the practice of boxing, presents a
somewhat deviating view, highlighting a universe in which the body is
primarily understood as an asset, an instrument and object of work. 75 In
this perspective, personal bodily worth becomes a product of
accumulated labour. Through this lens, we can understand boxers as
entrepreneurs of bodily capital. 76 If we follow this line of thought, we see
how the gym can be thought of as the factory space that converts bodily
capital into pugilistic capital, able to deliver the sharp upper cut, the
powerful lower cut and ultimately the deafening knockout to win a fight.
This is what evokes applause and appreciation from the audience. The
notion of muscular armour is particularly relevant here: the product of
intense training and workouts, it makes the actual fight possible.
Parallels can be drawn between the boxer and bodybuilder’s bodies
in the way they get shaped and moulded in the gym, and eventually in how
they take on the identity of a fighter who can defeat his competition on
stage. But in the world of bodybuilding, it is not just the immediate
reward of winning a competition that matters, but also what the body
communicates when the spotlights are off. A bodybuilder’s physical
capital is thus not necessarily something that only matters during a
competition. In the Indian context, one could argue that winning
competitions is only peripheral to ‘building’ the body. Prize money tends
to be low and the cost of preparing exorbitant. Besides, the various titles
on offer are of little value due to the many different federations involved,
and the limited recognition and appreciation contestants receive from the
public at large. Bodybuilders who can sustain themselves on prize money
alone, or whose annual prize money even approximates the money
invested in becoming competition-ready, are extremely rare. Titles won—
whether Mr India or Mr Karnataka or Mr Coimbatore—are not only
referred to on bodybuilders’ social media profiles to underline
accomplishments and successes, but most of all function as a way to
emphasise their knowledge of bodybuilding itself. What these men display
on stage is not just an outer shell of rock-hard muscles and garden hose-
sized veins, but also a transformation imbued with notions of physical
labour, dedication and having made the right choices with respect to
workout routines, diets and the use of supplements and other substances.
Their bodily capital is thus the sum of being as well as becoming a
bodybuilder.
Bodily capital exists alongside economic, social and cultural capital,
yet it is also deeply entangled with these other forms. In the case of India,
it can be employed or utilised to compensate for the lack of other kinds of
‘capital’, but this requires a negotiation of sorts. While it can be
employed to close a perceived gap in middle-classness, it’s not an easy
matter of add and replace. In the first chapter, Kishore and Vinay utilised
their bodily capital to strategise a path to upward mobility, and in a sense
Manish, Amit and their colleagues at BodyHolics of chapter two were
doing the same, building on their expertise to make a living as well as
climbing the middle-class ladder. However, none of these men were
bodybuilders, nor did they aspire to be. Kishore sometimes participated
in MuscleMania 77 competitions, but he would compete in the swimwear
or modelling categories, where the globalised standards of competitive
bodybuilding do not apply. In fact, he was always deeply ambivalent
about the sport of bodybuilding, which he equated with risky health
decisions and bodies that did not appeal to his client-base.
So what parameters guide the idea of the ‘ideal type’ of muscular
body? The bodybuilder’s bodies that Victor and Akash sport are
decidedly bigger, more muscular and vascular than those idealised in
Indian cinema. In fact, if such a body makes an appearance in Indian
movies, it tends to be one that references aggression, violence and, to a
certain extent, ‘stupidity’. In the Telugu action movie Srimanthudu
(2015), which narrates the story of Harsha Vardhan, a young man who
inherits his father’s business empire, this is precisely what happens.
Knowing little of his father’s background, Harsha starts exploring his
roots and ends up in a remote village in Telangana’s hinterland, which he
subsequently adopts. This angers a local crime boss, and ultimately leads
to a showdown from which Harsha emerges victorious.
Actor Mahesh Babu, who plays the lead, is not known for his
shirtless scenes or muscularity, unlike his brother-in-law, actor Sudheer
Babu, who has made his ‘transformed’ body part of the way he promotes
himself. However, in this particular movie, the character Mahesh Babu
portrays is endowed with incredible strength and a fighter’s capabilities.
Taking on the village strongman’s posse, consisting mainly of
bodybuilders, the contrast is easily made between Mahesh Babu’s lean
and athletic body and that of the bodybuilders he takes on one by one,
without breaking a sweat. Only two years earlier, in 2013, the actor had
made a formal announcement that he was working on his six-pack abs,
which had promptly led to fans photoshopping his body with those future
abs. These photoshopped pictures, which can still be found on the
internet, also show that this imagined future did not have Babu looking
like the henchmen he takes on. Yet, despite this ‘popular’ depiction of the
bodybuilder’s body—as equated with underworld or goonda figures, and
thus with aggression, violence and other uncouth behaviour—there is still
something that allows competitive bodybuilders like Victor and Akash to
attract clients of upper-middle-class backgrounds. How do bodybuilders
and their clients negotiate the difference between the lean, muscular
bodily ideal and that which is required for a bodybuilding competition?
To understand the complexity involved, a deeper examination of
bodybuilding in India is needed, in terms of its practice, organisation,
history and ultimately what matters when on and off the stage.

WHAT THE BODYBUILDER’S BODY STANDS FOR

In the West, the practice of bodybuilding has long been associated with the
working-classes, perhaps because of the easily drawn parallels with
physical labour. 78 Such interpretations are layered with a particular
normativity that locates the ‘pursuit of bigness’ within a class-based
context. It is perhaps no surprise that bodybuilding has frequently been
thought of as ‘masculinity run amok, a frightening example of alienated
behaviour, or a disturbing expression of narcissism’. 79 Alan M. Klein’s
landmark study Little Big Men , which came out in 1993 and focused on
one of the best-known gyms on the West Coast of the United States, stands
out. Zooming in on the gendered aspect of bodybuilding, Klein explores
this in relation to issues of health, sexuality and the willingness to push the
‘spatial’ boundaries of the body. Klein’s study is particularly revealing
for its study of the economic aspects of bodybuilding and the impossibility
of combining this pursuit with a more ordinary existence.
Lee F. Monaghan’s Bodybuilding, Drugs and Risk (2001) builds on
Klein’s assertion and focuses more explicitly on risk-taking behaviour, the
use of drugs (anabolic steroids, growth hormones, etc.) and the idea of the
perfect (bodybuilder’s) body. While such studies have greatly contributed
to a deeper understanding of bodybuilding in a Western context, they do
perpetuate certain commonly held notions and assumptions about the
sport’s location within class hierarchies, its problematic relationship with
masculinity, and how this body is assumed to be the product of the
copious use of steroids and other harmful substances.
Bodybuilders like Victor are aware of such ideas and deeply critical
of them. To them, such concepts reduce their bodies to failed ones:
freakish make-believe bodies that could not, or should not, have a place in
reality. These ideas rest too on the contradiction represented by the
strength of muscles versus the weakness of mind of a person who has
succumbed to the use of illegal substances to grow in size. It does not take
much to think of the lean, muscular body with its ‘natural’ assumptions of
fitness and athleticism as the healthy counterpart, one that popular culture
has not only rendered acceptable but, more importantly, also desirable.
Mobilising bodily capital through a narrative of transformation offers
bodybuilders like Victor a way out of this predicament, centering their
know-how. Even if a bodybuilder in question has pushed the physical
boundaries of his own body beyond what a client might desire for himself,
the notion that transformation is possible still appeals.
 Interviews as well as casual conversations with bodybuilders across
India revealed that they thought of their bodies as works of art, though
principally in unfinished terms and as works-in-progress. Their
employment of the term ‘sculpting’, with the gym providing the tools,
contrasts markedly with the kind of ‘working-class’ lingo used on the gym
floor in order to describe attempts towards transformation. Victor
emphasised the ‘hard physical labour’ that went into his body; during a
competition in Delhi, bodybuilders described it as requiring ‘heavy
lifting’ and ‘back-breaking work’; and in Mumbai a personal trainer and
MuscleMania participant referred to a session that had gone particularly
well as ‘killing it’. It was generally agreed that it had to hurt for it to
work, and that pain was one’s best friend. One should leave the gym
feeling depleted, having turned on ‘beast mode’ so as to ‘destroy the
body’. Like factory workers at the end of a long day, they envisioned
themselves going home exhausted but satisfied with a job well done and
another day put in.
Sociologist Pamela L. Moore (1997) argues that built bodies can be
understood as ‘the ultimate expression of the postmodern belief in
corporeal malleability’. 80 Such bodies are almost absurdly controlled, as
Moore puts it, the flesh really no longer flesh, the body having become a
machine, ‘as when builders describe their arms as guns or their legs as
pistons’. 81 The practice of bodybuilding thus resonates with what is
expected of working-class sports such as boxing and rugby, which revolve
around pain and suffering as well as gambling with the body. Evidently,
this contrasts with a middle-class interpretation of the body as an end unto
itself, as well as for others to view, admire or appreciate. 82 Yet as
anthropologist Niko Besnier (2012) also points out, the relationship
between sport and class designations is historically as well as spatially
unstable. 83 Class dichotomies, therefore, mainly serve as a tool, not a
rule.
There is something paradoxical about the fact that, while the
bodybuilder’s body is seen as the product of hard work and heavy lifting,
signalling a working-class background, it was also bodybuilding that gave
birth to the emergence of the fitness industry and eventually produced a
new middle-class bodily ideal.
While in the West, the new bodily ideal has generally led to a demise
in the popularity of bodybuilding as a competitive sport, with gyms
divorcing themselves from any association with bodybuilding altogether,
in India, bodybuilding competitions have gained in popularity. This is not
as contradictory as it first appears. While, elsewhere, fitness has
gradually come to replace bodybuilding and its associated aesthetics, in
India, the two are umbilically linked through the narrative of
transformation, which resonates with the way ‘new India’ itself is
constantly under construction.
The idea of the malleability of the body, of possible mastery over it,
is an important one. In a fast-changing society where nothing appears
stable and solid, knowing which direction to head, what choices to make
and how to regain or retain some form of control lies at the heart of what
trainers as well as their clients seek. This was also what Men’s Health
offered; the magazine did not simply report on the latest workout
techniques for reducing weight and ‘building muscles fast’, but
simultaneously layered this with notions of cosmopolitanism, success and
ultimately being in control and being able to withstand the caprices of
rampant consumerism. 84 While bodybuilders may ‘embody’ this
information, being masters of their own bodies, developments in the sport
itself seem to reflect the haphazardness and speed of urban India’s
transformation. Their lives are precarious and uncertain. On an individual
level, this is reflected in the high costs and low earnings that the sport
entails, while on a more general level, this precariousness reverberates in
the organisation of the sport itself with its multiple associations,
federations, competitions as well as business people and politicians
involved.

THE ANATOMY OF A SPORT

The evident rise in popularity of bodybuilding as a sport is handicapped
by two developments. First, the rapid proliferation of competitions held at
town, city, state and national levels, often making use of similar titles,
such as Mr Delhi, Mr Haryana, Mr India and Mr South Asia. Besides, the
associations and federations involved frequently change their names; old
ones merge and new ones emerge. When I once asked Victor to provide
me with an overview of the various competitions in which he and his
students 85 had participated in 2017, these included, other than the one
already mentioned, the Mr Tamil Nadu Amateur competition, the Open
State meet (held in the town of Thiruchendur), as well as various other
competitions, such as the Senior Nationals IBBF, the State Powerlifting
Meet, the Open State Meet and so on. Another well-known Tamil
bodybuilder, who now runs a popular gym in Chennai, provided a
radically different list. Some of the men he trained had participated in a
Mr Chennai competition, while others had joined the stage in something
called the NABBA Mr Tamil Nadu, 86 the Open Single Category State
Championship and the Mr South India Contest.
A brief survey of the Delhi–NCR region provided an equally
dizzying array of competitions and titles. A young bodybuilder from the
state of Haryana reported that he had recently won in his specific weight
class of 65 kg in the following competitions: Mr Delhi, Mr Haryana, Mr
North India and Mr India. A Rohtak-based bodybuilder mentioned he had
participated in Mr NABBA India (in Gurgaon), Mr Haryana and Mr
Himachal. However, the Mr Haryana he competed in was not the same as
the one mentioned earlier.
Newspaper reports of 2017 show a similar picture in other parts of
India. Goa held a ‘Federation Cup National Bodybuilding & Physique
Sports Championship’ in the city of Margao in May; the town of Shajpur
in Madhya Pradesh held a ‘divisional-level bodybuilding championship’
in December, and that same month, Punjab’s industrial city of Ludhiana
hosted the Mr Libra 2017 competition, while the city had also played host
to the Mr North Zone competition three months earlier. In early 2014, I
was able to attend no less than three different Mr Delhi competitions in
the course of only ten days, all organised by different Delhi-based
associations, held in locations that were mere kilometres from each other.
 A piece in the Shillong Times by one Bhattacharjee from Guwahati,
who claims to have been involved in bodybuilding for thirty-five years,
underlines this complexity. 87 Reacting to an earlier news report 88 about
Meghalaya bodybuilder and cop Prosonto Basumatary’s alleged
participation in what the author mistakenly refers to as ‘Mr Universe
Body Building Championship’ (the actual name was Mr Universe
Championships) to be held in Budapest, the writer is principally bothered
by the involvement of the Meghalaya Body Building and Fitness
Association (MBBFA), which accordingly is affiliated to something
called the World Amateur Body Building Association (WABBA). As the
author claims: ‘The Indian Body Builders Federation with its
headquarters at Mumbai is the only federation recognised by the
Government of India, Ministry of Sports and Youth Affairs.’ He continues
that this is the only body which can send participants to international
competitions. He is sure that there is no Mr Universe competition in
which India is taking part. What amazes him even more is that the
bodybuilder in question is ‘not even a zonal champion, far less a national
championship 89 (in his weight category)’. What follows is an allegation
one regularly comes across while discussing the state of bodybuilding in
India with competitors, jury members and others involved. ‘[M]any
unauthorised and dubious organisations are springing up and to justify
their existence promoting sub-standard body builders who are winning
“high sounding titles,” and getting undeserved temporary publicity.’ What
the author appears to find particularly problematic is that the bodybuilders
involved are ‘short-circuiting hard-scientific workout and becoming BIG
by random use of banned drugs’. Accordingly, the state of Assam itself
has three different Mr Universe competitions which ‘faded away from
public memory within weeks’.
In 2015, there were at least three associations involved in organising
various competitions ranging from Mr Chennai, Mr Tamil Nadu and Mr
India in Chennai. By 2017, this number had grown to six, each with their
own competitions. It was a pattern that kept repeating over time. The
involvement of official and unofficial federations and associations—often
helmed by men who had business interests in the sport (for instance, as
suppliers of protein powders or gym equipment), or who played a role in
local politics—meant that the field was constantly in motion. With this
proliferation of competitions and organisations came added pressure to be
relevant and to imbue the promised titles with a certain gravity in order to
be taken seriously. As a result, increasingly, well-known American
bodybuilders, who have competed in competitions such as Mr Olympia
(Joe Weider’s Olympia and Fitness & Performance Weekend) and Mr
Universe (Universe Championships) are lured to India as special guests at
events, or to be part of new gym openings to imbue them with additional
prestige. Seven times winner of the Mr Olympia title, Phil Heath, four-
time winner Jay Cutler and Ronnie Coleman—considered by many as the
greatest bodybuilder of all time, with eight straight wins at Mr Olympia—
have all visited India in recent years. Making use of the opportunity,
(aspiring) Indian bodybuilders go through great lengths to meet their idols,
proudly shaking hands with them and posting pictures of the occasion
online.
American bodybuilders come to India not just for the generally
‘handsome’—though rarely disclosed—fees offered for appearing at the
event. They also charge for signature and picture events, score
endorsement deals with whey-protein powder and supplement brands, as
well as use the opportunity to spread the word about their own online-
coaching services. Clearly, for ‘celebrity’ bodybuilders from the US,
India’s rapidly expanding bodybuilding scene offers interesting business
opportunities that may be lacking at home.

THE HISTORICAL BODY

The visits of well-known US-based bodybuilders, whose posters adorn
gyms across India and often feature prominently on local bodybuilders’
Facebook walls as a source of inspiration, hark back to the Indian tour
that ‘strongman’ Eugen Sandow made a century ago. Visiting the cities of
Bombay, Calcutta and Madras between 1904–1905, he apparently
whipped up a ‘physical culture craze’. 90 Between 1900 and 1907,
Sandow was the most famous strongman on the planet, and considered to
be the world’s strongest, most beautiful man, even an apostle of physical
culture. 91 Not unlike current-day fitness celebrities, such as Simeon
Panda or Lazar Angelov, 92 Sandow claimed to have over a million
followers around the world as early as 1904. 93
Carey Watt, who conducted extensive research on Sandow’s India
tour, argues that he was already well-known in India years before he
arrived. 94 His visit sparked phenomenal interest in his system and
products, and inspired men to not only build muscles but even to grow
Sandow-like moustaches. Sandow’s popularity across the globe emerged
out of a momentum that had been gaining steam for a while already. As
Dutch sociologist Ruud Stokvis writes, ‘From the mid-nineteenth century
onwards, self-styled strongmen began to appear throughout Europe and the
USA.’ 95 Thus, Sandow was far from the only one who could count on a
considerable following and popularity. Referred to as ‘physical
culturalists’ at the time, there was the ‘Danish Apollo’ Jørgen Peter
Müller, Britain’s Eustace Miles, the American Bernarr Macfadden,
France’s Edmond Desbonnet, and even India’s own Kodi Ramamurthy
Naidu. 96 The emergence of a so-called Körperkultur in German between
1890 and 1930 was particularly influential in propelling the popularity of
strongmen and working out among men in countries such as England,
France and the US. 97 The ‘philosophical’ muscular Christianity
movement that had its origins in England in the mid-nineteenth century
also played an instrumental role, with its focus on strengthening, building
and maintaining the male body. Notions of patriotism and masculinity
were layered with notions of athleticism, fitness, beauty, discipline and
even sacrifice. 98
Born in East Prussia in 1867, Sandow started out as a wrestler who
occasionally supported himself as an artist’s model until he won his first
strongman contest in London in 1889. At the time, ‘physical culture’
consisted of a combination of what were deemed rational and scientific
approaches to improving one’s health and fitness, usually combining an
amalgamation of calisthenics, gymnastics, weightlifting and breathing
exercises. 99 Unlike current-day bodybuilding, Sandow’s focus was less
on building or showing muscles, and more on teaching ‘the gospel of
health’. 100 It is this focus on health that characterises the contemporary
fitness movement, and also what has gradually eroded its direct
relationship with bodybuilding.
 Sandow considered his India tour ‘something in the nature of a
triumphal procession’. He was mightily pleased with the successes he had
booked with his ‘treatments’ as he called them, and reported that the
‘natives’ had found them to be ‘almost miraculous’. In Sandow’s
Magazine , he went on to belittle Indians, even recycling Lord
Macaulay’s disparaging assertion that Hindus were the children of
children, and were ‘weak even to the point of effeminacy’. 101 Sandow
was clearly influenced by a Western way of thinking about the ‘oriental
other’, which in India rendered certain groups or castes as incapable,
inferior and feminine. While Jats, Gurkhas and Rajputs were celebrated
for their military prowess and fighting capabilities, other Hindus were
thought of as categorically weak. 102 Such demeaning colonial
characterisations eventually also contributed to the lift-off of India’s own
involvement in fitness. 103
Irrespective of Sandow’s impact, towards the end of the nineteenth
century, there was a burgeoning fitness movement in India that reached its
zenith in the 1920s. 104 Anthropologist Joseph Alter notes various
influential figures, such as Kodi Ramamurthy Naidu, who developed a
scheme of mass drill exercises; Baroda-based Rajratan Manikrao, who
established gymnasiums that adopted a type of paramilitary drill regime;
and the Raja of Aundh, who made surya namaskar exercises popular.
Around this time, the game of kabaddi was routinised, the YMCA
developed a way to train physical education instructors and yoga was
reinvented. Under the leadership of Hanuman Vyayam Prasarak Mandal,
Indian athletes toured Europe in the 1930s and went on to demonstrate
various Indian gymnastic routines in the Lingiad, an international physical
culture competition in Sweden. Furthermore, a number of publications that
provided an overview of India’s history and involvement with gymnastics
and athletics saw the light of day, hammering home the point that India had
a long-standing connection with quests for male health and fitness. Joseph
Alter argues that:

As such it was a clear statement against the pervasive colonial

idea—or sense that there was an idea—that India was a country
made up of listless, sedentary peasants, reclusive otherworldly
 ascetics, overfed Brahmin priests preoccupied with scholarly
learning, and ruthless, pernicious despots … 105

CASTE AND MIDDLE -CLASS HIE RCHIES

Recuperating the Hindu masculine self remains a concern for Hindutva-

oriented organisations, and is occasionally touched upon in scholarship
and documentaries that discuss, though often only peripherally, the
connection between bodybuilding and local politics in India. 106 While it
is true that a well-known bodybuilder such as Suhas Khamkar has
occasionally flexed his muscles in the company of politicians—for
instance with the Shiv Sena chief, the late Bal Thackeray 107 —such
connections are invariably more complex than the picture conveys.
Khamkar, a Central Railway employee, is partly sponsored through the
so-called sports quota that enables talented athletes like himself to take up
government positions. It is thus not surprising to see bodybuilders
associate with politicians and government officials if the occasion arises.
There is a clear dependency. Jury members of bodybuilding competitions,
and those involved in associations and federations, also act as
gatekeepers of eligibility for these sports quotas, potentially able to
facilitate (or deny) coveted ‘symbolic’ positions with the railways, police
force, army and so on. At competitions, this is generally cause for
considerable suspicion and gossip, especially when it seems that another
bodybuilder should have been awarded first place instead. While I have
always understood such discussions to relate to a deep-seated sense of
bodily insecurity and even inferiority that almost all bodybuilders I met
over the years carried with them—causing them to constantly discuss and
report on their ‘haters’, ‘backstabbers’ and ‘small men who don’t
matter’—the monetary dimension of this resentment should not be
disregarded. A sports quota job guarantees a steady income and the
freedom to truly invest in one’s bodybuilding career.
The connection between politics, Hinduism and bodybuilding is a
complex one. This is just as true for caste. The popular association of the
sport with rowdy or uncouth behaviour—the goonda figure and the
brusque doorman—is often followed by the all-too-easy conclusion that
these must be men of lower or at most intermediate caste backgrounds.
When I discuss my work with fellow academics, they tend to assume that
these must be Jat or Gujjar men. These ‘easy’ associations point to an
understanding of middle-classness which is still undeniably governed by
the implicit idea of an internal hierarchy. It is in such assumptions that we
also find a particularly puzzling aspect of what class actually denotes in
India. If we take middle-classness as a social and cultural construct that is
centred on relative positions, its assumed relation with particular caste
groups has a tendency to equate upper-middle-class identities as those
‘truly’ belonging to the middle class. It renders the rest as newcomers, or
worse, pretenders.

A TAM B HM BODY

The first time Victor provided me with a glimpse into his personal
biography was on a Thursday afternoon in September 2015. I had made
my way to Karappakam, an enclave situated between the IT hubs of
Thoraipakkam and Sholingallur, home to multiple multinational companies
such as Accenture, Capgemini, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services.
Meeting me over lunch at his company’s canteen, housed in a tall glass-
fronted building, Victor was dressed like any corporate professional: a
short-sleeved button-down shirt, neatly pressed pantaloons and a pair of
decently polished though somewhat dusty leather shoes. It was quite a
different look from what he usually displayed to his fans online: either a
tight-fitting T-shirt of some sports brand, or simply his underwear.
Seated at one of the long tables in the canteen, about to delve into a
sizeable plate of vegetable biryani, it was hard not to notice how Victor’s
body evoked a sense of discomfort. Casual glances from canteen staff and
colleagues confirmed what he had told me earlier, that his muscles always
triggered a rather convoluted mixture of admiration, fear and shock. ‘Right
now I am normal, but when I am eating my veins start popping out. People
get grossed out by that.’
Victor had not always looked like this. ‘I started thin but then I
became a fat teenager,’ he told me. Born and brought up in an
impoverished Tamil Brahmin household in Chennai, Victor described his
childhood home as one of the few with an actual roof in a slum-like
neighbourhood. Having worked for a cable company when he was
younger, Victor’s father met with an accident and was unfairly terminated.
He subsequently established a typewriting institute but struggled with
deteriorating eyesight, only to eventually go blind altogether. His father
used to be ‘quite fit and muscular himself’, and in fact, ‘used to work out
often’, Victor recalls fondly. It is to this that he traces his initial
fascination with ‘getting big and strong’. An incident in his childhood left
a particularly strong impression on him. Victor was playing outside with
his brothers when a cow suddenly charged at them, and his father managed
to stop it by grabbing it by its horns.
Even more influential, however, was finding a poster of Dorian
Yates, a former Mr Olympia who had gone on to win six consecutive titles
between 1992 and 1997. Victor saw the poster on his way home from
school, in a second-hand bookstore that eventually provided him with
some initial bodybuilding literature, and the image never left him. To date,
he has that image on his cell phone. Although he was enthralled by Dorian
Yates’s massively muscular body—‘He even seemed to have muscles on
his feet!’—Victor quickly realised that he did not have the ‘proper
genetics’.
He needed to fuel his body with proteins to bulk up, but in his
Brahmin vegetarian household, there was an injunction against cooking
meat at home. As a solution, he installed an electric kettle in the backyard,
but could only use it when his mother was not washing or drying clothes.
Moreover, he was always worried that his Brahmin neighbours would
complain about the smell of meat being cooked. Later, it was a bit of an
issue in office as well. Desperate to increase his size, Victor knew the
vegetarian canteen wouldn’t do, and so resorted to other means of getting
his proteins in. ‘I would bring these tins of tuna to work but couldn’t eat
them at my desk.’ The smell would bother his colleagues, many from
Brahmin and vegetarian households themselves. ‘Instead, I would go on
the fire escape and eat it there.’ He would make sure to brush his teeth
afterwards.
Although Victor’s mother is now proud of his accomplishments, she
was not happy when he broke the news to her that he wanted to ‘get into
bodybuilding’. Initially, she thought he was ‘into stripping or something’,
and needed extensive convincing, not to mention his father who, even
though he was a muscular youngster himself, could not imagine what this
path would lead to. Yet, the family was hardly a stranger to making
‘alternative’ decisions to facilitate upward economic and social mobility.
Although he grew up in a ‘very proper TamBrahm household’, Victor had
been enrolled in a Hindi-medium school. His father hoped this would
provide him with the necessary set of skills to make his way into a
respectable government job, for which Hindi would not just come in
handy but would simply be required. His father claimed to have
experienced considerable discrimination in his own career for ‘not being
able to speak proper Hindi’ and had wanted to prevent his son from
experiencing the same thing. As a result, Victor never learned to properly
read or write Tamil. When as a teenager he became a regular contributor
to the Tamil-language bodybuilding magazine that was sold at the second-
hand bookshop where he discovered Dorian Yates, this was an obstacle
from the onset. So, he wrote the articles in English and his mother would
translate them into Tamil.
The first gym Victor joined at fifteen was not really a gym, as he puts
it himself, ‘more like a floor with no roof and just some odd dumbbells’.
At the time, he paid Rs 30 per month, a sum which sounds pitifully small
now but still had him carefully considering if his pocket money would
cover it. From this neighbourhood gym, he moved up to a gym that was
attached to the college he had joined, and which was charging Rs 100 per
month. This one did have a roof, but as it was located in a basement and
did not have any windows; it was dark, stuffy and quite hot. It was only at
the third gym that Victor seriously started thinking of becoming a
bodybuilder himself. By that time, he had started taking advice from a
senior collegemate who had won some competitions and who had made
an impression on him. Doing research on the best way to grow his
muscles, he quickly realised that no one he knew would be able to give
him ‘the right information’. All this changed when he met Arasu
Mounaguru, ‘the biggest Indian I had ever seen’. At the time, Arasu ran a
gym called Gold Gym, 108 a non-aircon kind of a place, geared primarily
to youngsters who aspired to become bodybuilders. Arasu continues to be
an influential member of Tamil Nadu’s bodybuilding community, running
several gym chains and being a judge at competitions held across the
state.
A BODY OF INFORMATION (TECHNOLOGY )
Victor showed me around his office, taking me to the company gym that he
occasionally used for his own workouts. Still dealing with a back injury,
he was focusing mainly on cardio-related exercises as well as his arms.
He already sported massive eighteen-inch arms, but had long been fixated
on this part of his body and believed that they could get even bigger. When
I met him two years later at the Mr Steel competition, he proudly informed
me that they were now twenty inches, though he had had to give up a full
inch to get his body ‘dry’ enough to become competition-ready. He looked
ready to take on his rivals, phenomenally muscular and exhibiting a
fighter’s glare I had not seen for a while. His arms were seriously ‘the
guns’ he had envisioned. That same year, Victor also participated in the
annual Mr Tamil Nadu Bodybuilding Championship. The locality of
Palavakkam where it is held is not the immediate surroundings one might
associate with such a competition. As an article in the The Hindu 109 put
it: ‘known for its bustling adjoint IT parks and traffic, [Palavakkam] is
also known for its increasing love for bodybuilding’. The general
secretary of the Tamil Nadu Body Building Association, R.L.
Thiruvengadam, said succinctly: ‘You must be here to believe it.’ Around
one thousand men, women and children came to witness the event. The
Palavakkam area sports around twenty gyms of which no less than ten are
specifically geared towards bodybuilding.
There is something inherently odd about a bodybuilding competition
taking place in an area predominantly housing IT companies. It is not only
the connection to information technology and thus something that utilises
the brain more than the body that feels aberrant here, but also the
association with what is regarded as a typically upper caste, and even
Brahminical, type of profession that is characterised by studying and, most
of all, mathematics. Yet Victor, an IT professional as well as Brahmin
himself, was deeply immersed in bodybuilding even before he had ever
set foot in any one of these IT offices. Although he combined his IT career
with providing online coaching to aspiring fitness enthusiasts and other
bodybuilders, his day-to-day expenses were essentially met by his earlier
investment in his engineering degree, which had provided him with his
first job in an IT company. Eventually, he quit his job with PayPal, and
took on personal training as a full-time profession, earning an average
salary of more than Rs 1 lakh per month.
Growing up in a lower-middle-class (though decidedly upper-caste)
milieu, and receiving most of his schooling in English and Hindi, Victor
now makes more in his ‘new middle-class’ profession than he did in his
‘typically’ upper-middle-class (and upper-caste) profession as an IT
professional. While his switch from developing software to providing
personal training could be construed as downward mobility in social and
middle-class terms, he has made this shift work in a way that justifies the
initial gamble. However, for him to be able to embark on this journey, he
had to convince his parents as well as his wife who were all against him
giving up on a stable income in a job that came with promising career
prospects. At a certain level, the two professions were not altogether that
different, he argued. Both relied heavily on knowledge, on knowing and
understanding how things work, whether a computer system or the body.
While bodybuilding does not immediately evoke an association with
learning or studying, bodybuilders across India underline their
‘knowledge’ as crucial to success in the sport as well as to generate an
income out of personal training. What personal-training clients eventually
seek to understand is how to transform their own bodies and what it
requires in terms of workout routines, diets and supplements. This, in its
most concrete form, is the capital that the bodybuilder’s body represents.
Investing in the body and building it till it is competition-ready signifies
an understanding of how a body works and what can be accomplished
with it. Those successful in the business of personal training, which not
all bodybuilders necessarily are, exude the confidence that the
transformation of their own person can also be replicated in another’s.

Akash is a Bangalore-based bodybuilder whose aim is to become

internationally competitive. Unlike Victor, who now runs his own
personal-training business, Akash is employed by an international gym
chain, for which he works on a commission basis besides receiving a
baseline salary. The city of Bangalore is well known as India’s IT capital
and for its relatively large proportion of highly educated urban
professionals. Some fifteen years earlier, when I was researching the
emerging IT industry in India, Bangalore was the one place where gyms
were already commonplace and easily accessible. Influenced by
management styles that originated in Silicon Valley and which
piggybacked to Bangalore when transnational IT companies such as Texas
Instruments, IBM and Oracle started establishing themselves in the city,
most office buildings and campuses were quickly outfitted with well-
equipped gyms.
Like other Indian megacities, Bangalore now sports gyms in almost
every locality. Akash is a relative newcomer to the city, attracted by
Bangalore’s economic prospects and assumed quality of life. While he did
not move to the city to become a bodybuilder or personal trainer, it was
the direction his career would eventually take.

BUILDING A BODY IN INDIA’S IT CAPITAL

Akash enters the restaurant we had arranged to meet at on 100 Feet Road
in Indiranagar, one of the city’s most upmarket areas for shopping and
retail, with a helmet under his arm. He excuses himself for being late, and
makes a casual reference to Bangalore’s increasingly worse traffic
situation. The arrival of the IT industry is generally held responsible for
this, having robbed the former Garden City of its trees, the Pensioner’s
Paradise of its calm and the (naturally) Airconditioned City of its cool.
Long-term residents of Bangalore, whether Kannadiga or not, regularly
lament the demise of all that once made Bangalore such an attractive
‘middle-class’ city with its beautifully kept bungalows, neatly trimmed
lawns, and the need for sweaters in the cooler months. Today, Indiranagar
has gradually come to epitomise its enduring identification as India’s Pub
City, with multiple craft breweries, cocktail bars and lounges flanking
both sides of 100 Feet Road. But, until recently, this was a quiet inner-city
neighbourhood with a mainly upper-middle-class population.
Indiranagar’s transformation into a leisure district has brought with it
considerable infrastructural concerns, which the area, as the rest of the
city, seems unable to adequately deal with.
 Urban scholar John C. Stallmeyer discusses Indiranagar in his book
Building Bangalore: Architecture and Urban Transformation in India’s
Silicon Valley (2011) and notes how initially the area was intended as a
residential quarter for the city’s growing population. Even though most of
its infrastructure was in place by 1983, it would take till the end of the
1980s for many of the building sites to reach completion. Now considered
decidedly inner-city, until the 1980s, the area was thought to be too far
from the heart of Bangalore. To Stallmeyer, Indiranagar represents a
‘patchwork of urban fabrics’, home to industrial and government
complexes such as Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), the Indian
Space Research Organisation and the National Aerospace Lab. The area
therefore hosts part of the knowledge industry that gave impetus to and
facilitated the rise of the city’s IT industry. Yet, now it doubles as a prime
destination for upper-middle-class professionals, eating at boutique-style
restaurants, shopping at designer furniture stores and drinking craft beers.
This is true of other areas in Bangalore as well. In 2003, auto drivers
would generally refuse to take passengers from the city centre to HSR
Layout where I stayed at the time, a locality beyond Koramangala with a
relatively easy commute to Electronics City, home to, among others, the
headquarters of Wipro. In 2019, it is a sought-after enclave with its own
shopping malls, fast-food restaurants and booming property market. There
is no shortage of gyms in the area either.
Akash, who grew up in a family he describes as ‘a little less than
middle class’, regularly makes his way to Indiranagar to hang out with
‘friends’ or to meet clients who might be interested in hiring him as a
personal trainer. His family, originally from Darjeeling, moved to
Calcutta, where Akash grew up. He moved to Bangalore about a decade
ago, in search of a job in order to take care of his ageing mother. Although
providing fitness training was already on his mind, he initially made a
living selling encyclopaedias door-to-door, and as a call-centre employee
with a local company. Now employed as a personal trainer at Gold’s Gym
in Richmond Town, an upper-middle-class locality that traces its origins
back to 1883, during British rule, Akash makes around Rs 70,000 per
month, considerably more than the Rs 7,000–8,000 he made in his early
days as a floor trainer. He gets Rs 10,000 per personal client per month,
coaching them thrice a week. What the client pays per month to Gold’s
Gym is considerably higher, of course. Like most gyms, Gold’s Gym
works with a commission-based structure, and trainers double as
salespeople who need to make sure they bring in the necessary clients.
Akash claims to be unsure if he has ever made the required target,
and even seems unaware whether he is a silver, gold or platinum trainer,
designations that the gym employs to reflect seniority, certifications
obtained and other markers of distinction. This status also corresponds
with the rate that the gym charges for personal training services rendered.
Akash says it all matters very little. He is never short of attention in the
gym and, as he puts it, ‘always keen to help others’. While his body stands
out in any situation—such as in this restaurant, where the waiters can
barely conceal their glances as they prepare our coffees—his fluency in
English and his general ease with clients makes him particularly popular
among high-end members. Among them are a fashion designer from Miami
who, at fifty-five, ‘still has a very good body’, and an obese five-foot-tall
female manager who has decreased her weight from 89 to 68 kg with
Akash’s help. It is these results that matter, he stresses, ‘this is also what
people see in the gym’. He means that it is not just his body that gets
noticed, but what he manages to do with others’ bodies as well.
While part of Akash’s income goes to his mother, a widow who lost
her husband, a police officer, a number of years ago, his main expense is
the maintenance and preparation of his body for competitions. One day he
hopes to hold an IFBB 110 pro-card, but already there are some
international competitions on the immediate horizon that he wants to
participate in if he can find the necessary sponsor. In order to become
competitive internationally, he has taken two online courses with
professional bodybuilders in the US. For a complete course of around five
months, such bodybuilders charge an average of Rs 3 lakh, about four
months’ worth of Akash’s salary. ‘I was only able to afford one month
really, but I did learn a lot of new techniques that way.’ When he is
preparing for an important bodybuilding competition, Akash spends
around Rs 70,000–80,000 on his body, which does not even include the
growth hormones that he cannot afford for now. Even if his body is central
to his sport and the main vehicle for earning an income, it is ‘the feeling of
being pumped, the tightness setting in’ that is his chief motivator. ‘That’s
the addiction,’ he says. For a more recent competition, he had trained
three times a day and lost 28 kg over a five-week period. ‘I really pushed
my body to the limit that way.’ He had to be really disciplined to achieve
this goal. ‘No salt, no carbs or even water towards the competition.’
Akash has been able to supplement his income with some occasional
modelling; for instance, he recently did a photoshoot for a new protein
brand that was being launched in India. ‘But it’s not my world,’ he says.
‘People are too fake’—something he had also noticed on a recent trip to
Mumbai to participate in the MuscleMania competition being held there.
Attending a gym near the venue for a last-minute workout, he had noticed
‘the looks and stares’ he was receiving. ‘A lot celebs train there.’
Apparently, actor Salman Khan’s brother had spotted him and wanted to
talk to him. ‘He had asked his own trainer, “who is that guy?”’ But Akash
claims he had been too shy to talk to him. Just by being in that gym, he
realised that he could ‘make quite a bit of money there if he moved to
Mumbai’. However, Bangalore has become his home, and he is unsure if
he would be able to provide training to the more elite clients he met in
Mumbai. When he was in Kolkata recently, he had overheard a trainer and
his client talk about him in Bengali, which they assumed he did not speak,
discussing the shirt he was wearing and saying something like ‘that must
be a rich guy’. The shirt was a gift from a client, an aspiring actor, but the
association made him sad, knowing his own ‘humble background’ and
what others read in his body and demeanour. The client in question later
prepared for MuscleMania himself. Akash says, ‘He hopes to win and
then increase his fan following online.’ Apparently, ‘he thinks that that
will get him noticed and finally get him into a movie’. But there is
something inherently sad about the client’s efforts, Akash feels.
‘Sometimes I think: get a life man, you’re always on the phone, you are
not living.’ Reflecting on the popularity of working out and building
muscular bodies, he says: ‘Being on stage for show-off fuels it now, but
it’s hard to maintain such a body.’ It’s something he knows all too well.
Akash’s body represents considerable capital, most obviously in
terms of what he has invested in it over the years—copious amounts of
anabolic steroids, growth hormones and less ‘problematic’ supplements.
Fluent in English due to his convent education, he bridges the gap in
middle-classness rather easily, even if he is constantly aware of how he
navigates the socioeconomic space that separates him from his clients.
Photos on social media narrate his journey from an ‘average Joe’ to a
muscular hulk, and help convince prospective clients by demonstrating
how extensive his own transformation has been. Yet, Akash’s
bodybuilding ambitions go well beyond what he has achieved so far, and
the money he makes through personal training is not nearly enough to
cover the cost of ‘getting bigger’ as well as continuing to support his
family. While he is hopeful a sponsor may knock on his door one of these
days, his predicament typifies the burden and limitations of bodily
transformation.

SELLING THE FUTURE BODY

Located in Santacruz East, a municipality of Mumbai not too far from
Bandra West, K11 is a training institute that specialises in offering
certification courses to aspiring fitness trainers. Its founder, Kaizzad
Capadia, is a well-known senior bodybuilder, and can often be found
giving guest lectures at fitness and bodybuilding events. One such event,
Sheru Classic, was held in Pune in 2014. I arrived early to secure a seat;
the room was bound to fill up, considering its limited capacity. While
waiting for Kaizzad to take the stage, I entered into a conversation with
Sunny, an enormous six-foot-plus tall Sikh Punjabi who was living in
Mumbai and worked as a pilot for one of the budget carriers. He wanted
‘to become huge, that’s why I am here’, to which he added with a smirk: ‘I
want to become bigger than Kaizzad.’ Sunny had started bodybuilding in
2009 when he was still stationed in Kolkata, saying that the main
inspiration had come from a colleague who was ‘pretty big’. His father
was a chief manager safety with an aviation company himself. ‘I was born
into a flying family is what you could say.’ Having completed his training
in the Philippines with a bottom-end training school (‘There were lots of
accidents, like one plane could not get its wheels down, one coach and
two students died in a crash.’), it is now his income as a pilot that funds
his ambition ‘to become truly huge’.
We discussed the ‘huge’ aspect further while we waited for Kaizzad
to arrive. ‘I eat thirty eggs a day, the egg yolks as well.’ According to
Sunny, it was just a myth that you should only eat the whites. ‘I learnt
everything from Kaizzad. His stuff is just damn amazing.’ He regularly
checks Kaizzad’s blog and the K11 website. ‘I follow all of that now.’
Employing Kaizzad’s ‘wisdom’ allowed him to increase his weight from
a skinny 75 to 105 kg at some point. However, Sunny then had to lose
weight for his job. ‘You’re this eight-pack but they don’t care about that!’
Since the standard uniform no longer fits him, he has it stitched near his
home in Powai. It is worth it, though, Sunny said. His parents were
initially apprehensive about him taking ‘all these proteins and pills’, but
when they started seeing results, they were impressed. Although he was
not doing any steroids at the time we met, he was ‘definitely
contemplating them’ for the future.
A huge round of applause erupted when Kaizzad finally took the
stage, followed by some whistling and cheering. When the audience had
calmed down, Kaizzad came straight to the point. The central question he
wanted to address that day was how one can increase one’s muscles when
one does not have the strength. The audience seemed confused. Behind
Kaizzad was a contraption that allowed for various exercises. Keen to
break the gender balance, Kaizzad invited some ‘tiny girls’ onstage ‘to lift
some weights and do some squats’. Joking about the industry’s obsession
with certifiable and proven techniques, he added that what he suggested
was ‘a scientific way’, one he followed himself. At the same time, he
stressed: ‘There’s a right way and a wrong way. But there is no Kaizzad
way. There is only the right way.’ To this he added: ‘If you understand
pure sciences you understand pure fact.’
While observing the ‘tiny girls’ lift and squat, he reminisced about
the various certification courses he had once followed, and which he now
declared were not worth his energy or money. One of them was an ACE
certification, 111 which he completed in 1999 and for which there was no
practical exam. It expired after two years: ‘No exercise, nothing was
required.’ In Delhi, he signed up for a course with another fitness
certification body that focused on strength conditioning. ‘They say
demonstration is important but it is simply multi-choice questions on
screen. It is just a matter of saying right or wrong.’ It was much the same
story with GCC, a training institute that mainly provided online fitness
courses. Even though the institute itself no longer explained what GCC 112
stood for, to Kaizzad it was Gora Chamri [White People] Certification.
‘They are given tremendous importance in our … It’s all about Caucasian
skin. Then I am free to say anything I want.’
Although not active on stage as a competing bodybuilder anymore,
his powerfully muscular body featured prominently on the K11 banners
that adorned the stage. He had taken the effort to prepare himself for this
talk by employing some of his own workout routines and sticking to a
strict diet. As a result, he was now able to show a tapestry of veins
crisscrossing his upper arms, converging in one throbbing nodal point,
which his rolled-up sleeves neatly emphasised. Meanwhile, the ‘tiny
girls’ were employing his techniques and doing lifts and squats that
seemed way beyond what they should be capable of, and the audience
became increasingly more ecstatic. Sunny nudged me and whispered in my
ear: ‘That’s what I was talking about.’

When I meet Kaizzad a few days after the Pune event, in his office in
Santacruz East, Mumbai, I mention that I had been somewhat surprised by
the aspiring young fitness trainers I met in the lobby. There were five or
six young men and women in the process of signing up for one of the
institute’s courses. They did not look at all like archetypical fitness
trainers. In fact, I joked: ‘I think I look more fit than that.’ Kaizzad said he
was also not ‘very happy with some of the backgrounds of the guys we see
here’. He added, ‘They are unambitious, stagnate, and they just do that one
course.’ A major problem, he felt, was that fitness is still one of the
easiest jobs to get into. ‘If you take a course with us, you get a job, it’s
that simple.’ He estimated that a trainer can easily make Rs 40,000 to
50,000 a month—that is, with personal training—but Rs 70,000 to 1 lakh
should be possible as well. ‘It is the easiest field to crack.’ Yet, there is
considerable disparity on the floor. ‘Initiative is key and that is often
lacking with these guys.’ He says that it is not enough to only take the
basic courses but additional ones as well: ‘You have to invest in that.’
 K11 offers a 100 per cent job guarantee but doesn’t place that on
their advertisements because it is ‘against the law’. ‘We have these
contacts with other gyms; all gym brands, we are there across the board.’
Initially, K11 was a gym too, but since Kaizzad realised the potential in
offering certification courses, the brand has focused on this alone. ‘Fifty
per cent is our passing rate at the moment. Interest and motivation are key
in this industry.’ Although initially all the courses were offered only in
English, they have recently expanded and are offering some courses in
other Indian languages as well. ‘Many go through a drastic body change
when they are taking the course themselves,’ Kaizzad says. ‘Part of the
money, they will invest in their own bodies. But one has to factor genetics
in.’

GENETICS ALONE WON’T DO THE TRICK !

Most bodybuilders I met over the years agreed that ‘genetics alone’ did
not do the trick, even if there were bodybuilders known for ‘being lucky’
this way. Their refusal to think of genetics as crucial to physical
transformation and competitive success underlines the centrality of
knowledge. Victor’s ability to capitalise on this knowledge epitomised
success after leaving a promising IT career. The private-training business
he continues to run is entirely built on his own successful transformation,
from a relatively skinny youth to a bodybuilder with some of the biggest
arms in the industry. But his body alone would never be enough to
convince potential clients. As he often reminded me, ‘Many bodybuilders
have no idea what they are doing, they just follow their trainer’s advice.’
It was something he was deeply cynical about. In his experience, this often
resulted in bodybuilders depending for supply on their respective gurus,
who could not be trusted with such important health-related matters, he
felt. Like many other successful bodybuilders, Victor was far from
opposed to the use of steroids and growth hormones. In fact, he
considered them integral to the sport. The problem, according to him, was
that it required ‘real knowledge’ to use and prescribe supplements—
something Kaizzad also agreed with.
It would be a mistake to think that any one of these bodybuilders held
the key to fool-proof success. Their knowledge was largely empirical,
gained on the way to their own transformations. If it had worked for them,
it would work for others, they argued. And this was what they dangled in
their clients’ faces, sometimes making lofty promises about losing weight
and gaining muscle. Akash was particularly critical of this, because he
had observed up close how colleagues had made promises that they
couldn’t possibly keep. He blamed the gym’s system of remuneration, but
also realised that clients were often all too keen to take ‘shortcuts’ too.
‘They think, with a bit of juice, they will magically get muscles.’ Building
his own body had cost him, but he had also gained experience and insight
into the inner workings of the fitness industry. Since Akash’s own
objective was purely to excel as a bodybuilder on the international stage,
he couldn’t quite relate to some of his clients who seemed to entertain all
sorts of ‘illusions’ about careers in modelling and acting, which he knew
were very unlikely to materialise. Building his own ‘bodily capital’, he
knew well how illusive and deceptive its properties could be.
 CHAPTER 4

SOCIETY ON STEROIDS

‘The only people who see the whole picture,’ he murmured, ‘are the
ones who step out of the frame.’
– Salman Rushdie,
The Ground Beneath Her Feet

I
t has been a little over a year since I met Kishore. I last saw him
standing proud though exhausted on the back of the lorry on the final
day of Ganesh Chaturthi. Now I see his grinning face and muscular
body plastered all over a van parked in front of the place where he
operates an outdoor gym. A banner with pictures of people exercising
hangs above the gate to what is ordinarily a wedding ground. Since it is
low season for weddings, Kishore rents the place from its Chembur
owner. Membership is Rs 3,000 per month, or Rs 7,000 for three,
according to another banner. He had been in operation for roughly eight
months, and now employs four floor trainers and one head trainer, as well
as ‘a girl’ who does the administration and gives occasional dietary
advice, for which she has obtained an accreditation course with something
called the American Institute for Sport Science. Like the trainers Kishore
employs, she was born and raised in Chembur. While their own personal
histories are of a working-class or lower-middle-class upbringing, the
open-air gym is flanked by newly built, expensive-looking high-rises with
aircon units humming quietly in the background. Across the road from the
entrance is a shopping mall with all the trappings of middle-class life: a
Levi’s retail store, Adidas and Nike outlets, as well as a KFC and food
court selling various types of Indian food, from north Indian kebabs to
south Indian thalis. Kishore seems to have arrived at a place he could only
dream about when we first talked about his plans, seated on the rocks at
Band Stand in Bandra.
I find Kishore with his clients and trainers doing a handstand
followed by a number of push-ups—a routine he repeats a few more
times. A young muscular trainer follows his example, but the male clients
in attendance shake their heads in disbelief. Meanwhile, another trainer is
doing push-ups with one hand behind his back, his posture ramrod-
straight. He is a relative newcomer among the trainers, but Kishore thinks
he has promise. The clients have now started doing push-ups, using an old
rubber tire for support; a little further, two clients are bouncing heavy
hammers off another such tire. Their grunts are interrupted by occasional
giggles and comments in a mixture of Marathi and English, alternating
between mockery and encouragement. It’s a strenuous exercise which is
also effective for letting go of work-related stress and other types of
frustrations, according to Kishore. In that sense, the entire gym provides
an ‘alternative’ to the day-to-day lives of his clients, mostly professionals
who spend inordinate amounts of time stuck in Mumbai’s sanity-defeating
traffic. It’s dusty, grimy and sweaty, and the tools Kishore has his trainers
employ for workout routines are the exact opposite of the trappings of
their regular lives: airconditioned offices, artificial lighting and social
pressure. ‘There’s always somebody leaving, somebody’s birthday, some
festival to take care of’, as someone once explained, referring to the
never-ending stream of treats being handed out.
As much as I know the ‘wedding ground’ to be a temporary
compromise compared to Kishore’s long-held ambitions of starting a fully
equipped, high-end gym, he has made this current concept work so that it
actually seems to make sense to sweat it out in this place. Like the
Chembur bravura and goonda-infused roughness he sold at a premium to
clients at Malabar Hill, Bandra and other upmarket South Mumbai
enclaves, he has cunningly translated ‘working-class’ conditions—once
integral to the transformation of his own body—into something that
appeals to his well-heeled clientele. His own clothes are very much at
odds with the gym and his trainers (dressed in the latest sportswear): he
sports fashionably torn jeans, brand-new red Ferrari shoes and a tight-
fitting blue V-neck T-shirt.
When we later meet in a dingy pub on the first floor of a rather decrepit-
looking building in a side-street away from the main action, I mention how
I was surprised not to see him in training gear himself. ‘I have to set the
style, man!’ He adds by way of explanation: ‘I should come first, then my
trainers and then my clients.’ What he means is that it should not just be
his muscular body that stands out, but also his sense of style, in fact his
entire comportment, exuding confidence and leadership. Placing a hand on
his chest, he says, ‘It’s something I need to keep up, it’s my business that’s
at stake, you know.’ This is also why he did not want to meet at the mall
across the road but instead at a pub a little further from the gym, where he
knows it is unlikely that he will run into clients or trainers. ‘They can’t
see me drinking, man. That would be wrong.’ He needs to maintain a
healthy image. He does not care about the men in this bar, greeting several
of them like old friends, commenting cheerfully on the Old Monk and
Thums Up they are downing and the greasy chicken 65 that is served on
tiffin plates. ‘They are different, not important,’ he says, nodding in the
direction of a table with young men who have just asked for another round
of beers. He has known them for most of his life but would not expect
them to join his gym. ‘They are not interested in that,’ he explains. ‘They
have other interests,’ he adds ambiguously.
The other men in the pub strike me as a typical crowd for a bar like
this: local Chembur blokes in their twenties, probably fathers already,
neatly kept moustaches and the occasional beard, most sporting bellies of
variable sizes. An old TV set mounted on the wall in the corner shows
vintage Bollywood songs with the sound turned off, though still managing
to have some of the men transfixed. It shows actors from yesteryears
whose chest hair lusciously sprouts from shiny-red silk shirts, unbuttoned
almost halfway, wavy black hair perfectly coiffured, and a voluptuous
heroine coyly hiding behind a tree, which will soon stand for so much
more. Maratha-born, Bangalore brought-up ‘Tamil’ hero Rajinikanth is
probably the only leading man left who can still pull off looking like this,
even if this pub is filled with men with body types much closer to these
older stars than today’s popular actors such as Hrithik Roshan and
Ranveer Singh. Kishore stands out here; some of the regulars remark on
his physique or casually pinch his biceps which he languorously flexes,
smiling but not particularly keen in engaging in conversation any more
than strictly necessary.
Kishore’s muscular body and his sense of style radiate confidence,
but his exuberance and powerful body also act as a façade behind which
he hides financial and other worries that he cannot share easily with
anyone in Chembur. Over the years, he has gradually become franker,
seeing me as a non-threatening person to confide in, a firang who
occasionally sails through Mumbai. ‘Right now, I am making some money,
but it is not enough,’ he offers pensively, taking a determined gulp from
his beer. He had been insistent on having Kingfisher Strong because he
rarely drinks. ‘When I have a beer, I want it to hit me, you know.’ He
hopes it will take his mind off things. ‘Rent of the place is fifty-K [Rs
50,000], salaries eighty, another twenty I spent on advertisement, you
know the stickers on the van, the banners, stuff like that.’ He needs another
Rs 1 lakh for his family, he says. ‘Last month we made about three lakh
and this month it’ll be four.’ The gym has about 150 paying members.
‘Now we are making a profit but before that it was a loss’—something he
is still recovering from. As a personal trainer, he used to make around Rs
1 lakh per month and he seems to be making an equal sum with his own
business too. But there are many hidden costs that make his take-home feel
less than sufficient. ‘I have to look good you know, it costs money.’
Besides that, there are other factors to consider. ‘This place is not
stable, you know, there is no continuity’, meaning the wedding venue.
‘Three times a month, some wedding happens, and I have to take the gym
somewhere else.’ The occasional rain also complicates matters.
Apparently, the owner makes Rs 2.5 crore on weddings a year. ‘That man,
he is now only realising that there may be more money in gymming, but
how to convince him? He has to take a risk!’ Trying to draw the waiter’s
attention for another round of beers and to order some food, Kishore adds:
‘This is not a real gym’, at least not what he envisions for the future. ‘I
need it to be more luxurious, better equipped, all that.’ But he also
realises that because of the simple set-up, his investments are relatively
low. He operates with a limited range of weights, some yoga mats, heavy
balls for bouncing exercises, a few rubber tyres and a couple of kettle-
bells. What the gym offers is a variation on functional training, partly
because of necessity, but also because Kishore feels it is the ‘best way to
become fit’. His clients all live in Chembur, though they may not think of
themselves as ‘being from Chembur’. The newly built high-rise
apartments have lured a young professional crowd to the area attracted by
the relatively ‘easy’ commute to the city’s business districts. The
comparatively easy exercises that the gym offers appeal to them. ‘Girls
can do this too, they don’t have to worry about anything.’ Earlier, I had
seen them go for a jog or doing some casual stretching and light exercises.
According to Kishore, most women come for weight-loss exercises.
‘Waffles are all the rage now, so they have too many of them, they get fat.’
But he would never put it this bluntly to them. His female clients are like
sisters to him, to be treated with respect, he says. He also prides himself
for making the gym a safe environment for them to workout, something he
goes to great lengths to instruct his trainers in as well. ‘Outside, they face
a lot, so inside, they should be able to relax about that.’
Although he is taking care of his ageing parents, younger siblings, as
well as two children (aged six and seven), regular doubts are raised about
the financial risks he takes. ‘I have taken a lot of advance money from my
clients,’ he says, ‘so I have to make this a success. Otherwise, there will
be hell to pay.’ His wife and sister are responsible for making sure that he
is able to keep up with his low-carb, high-protein diet, preparing his
meals in the morning so that he can have them at specific intervals
throughout the day. ‘They don’t understand what I am eating but I taught
them how to make it.’ He also feels it is important that his family
understands the middle-class lifestyle he envisions for them. His children
now wear branded clothes; he is particularly proud of his son wearing
Tommy Hilfiger and Benetton. In that sense, the childhood he is now
providing his children with could not be further removed from his own,
wearing his father’s old shirts, which were already second-hand when his
father bought them, and attending Marathi-medium primary education,
where, he says, he had not learned all that much. Now, his children are
enrolled in an expensive English-medium school, ranked among the best
in the area. While this new middle-class life has offered his family the
kind of comfort and luxury that was unthinkable for the previous
generation, maintaining the current quality of life and making sure that
their trajectory of upward mobility continues is a considerable cause for
concern.

A SOCIETY ON STEROIDS
How do trainers and bodybuilders deal with the financial precarity and
uncertainty that comes with living and strategising toward new middle-
class lifestyles? And how do their well-built bodies relate to this
predicament? On the one hand, there’s the muscular body that supposedly
encases an equally, if not even more powerful, masculine self. On the
other hand, studies have a tendency to emphasise how these muscles
reflect uncertainty and an ambivalent relationship with societal
expectations and changing gender relations. How does this paradox ‘work
out’ in practice? How does the muscular body relate to the masculine
(‘confident’) self? In India, this issue is further amplified by the way the
Indian male has gradually taken centre-stage in debates about what is
wrong with the country in general. Rape cases, street harassment and
gender discrimination point at Indian masculinity’s deeply ambivalent
relationship with societal and cultural change. While this chapter does not
deny that these are indeed significant problems, the popularity of fitness
and bodybuilding also provides an alternative—perhaps slightly more
hopeful—reading. It suggests that the muscular body is not so much an
outcome of masculinity run amok, a way to reaffirm patriarchal
relationships, or even ‘simply’ a product of changing gender relations, but
instead one that reflects and actively engages with the changing nature of
Indian society itself. As observed in the previous chapter, to a certain
degree, the bodies of trainers epitomise a relationship with knowledge.
This knowledge of transformation is directly connected to urban change
and the transformational capacity of new India. Yet, as sure as these men
may be of their own capacity to transform and guide their clients through a
treacherous landscape of overconsumption and sedentariness, their own
world is characterised by flux and uncertainty. In the fields of fitness and
bodybuilding, revolutionary diets come and go; recommended workout
routines change all the time; and there always seems to be some new
miracle supplement on the market that could aid in weight loss, muscle
growth and repair. The scientific facts behind health and fitness claims are
inherently debatable and ambiguous, even though trainers claim that they
hold the keys to the ‘right information’.
While trainers were frequently ‘on steroids’ themselves, they voiced
concerns over a ‘society out of control’, experienced as ‘too soon and too
fast’, which they perceived their clients to inhabit. They felt that it was
their duty to slow down their clients and have them adopt more
reasonable goals. As a twenty-seven-year-old Bihari trainer, working for
a high-end gym in Gurgaon (now Gurugram), once put it: ‘They forget we
are always in this gym ourselves, they only have to come here in the
morning. They have a whole life outside. Then they want this body,’
thumbing his fingers on the six-pack that was visible through his white T-
shirt. ‘It does not work that way,’ he said, flashing a bright-white smile.
Even if trainers envision themselves as life coaches, beyond only
providing ‘fitness training’, their knowledge was almost always
contradictory, something the contents of male-oriented lifestyle magazines
reflected as well. Diets, workout routines and the use of various
supplements—rarely was there any consensus on the best approach.
Equally, if not more troubling, was the question of food safety and
the guarantee that health brands, including those claiming to be ‘organic’,
make. Protein powders were frequently used as a case in point. It was
next to impossible to trust that the label’s promises matched the contents
of the box. As BodyHolics’s manager Manish once explained it: ‘I have
seen this myself: they import these expensive branded boxes of protein,
take out half and supplement it with some other powder!’ As a result it
was not unheard of for clients and aspiring bodybuilders to complain of
unexpected weight gain. His trainers and clients only used the protein
powder that he sourced through a trusted wholesaler and resold himself,
making a ‘small’ profit. A gym owner in North Delhi made perfectly clear
what he thought of the market for supplements in India: ‘You have seen all
these stores selling organic produce now, right? How will I know if that is
the case? It’s the same with these supplements. In India you have no
fucking way of knowing!’ As much as trainers and bodybuilders appeared
to disagree on the best diets or workout routines, ironically, there was a
clear consensus that it was hard to know if the supplements on offer were
genuine or counterfeit. While the muscular body may exude trust and
confidence in the effectiveness of workout routines, dietary advice and
‘supplements’ on offer, this trust also stood in direct relationship with,
even directly building on, the inherently untrustworthy nature of the world
outside the gym.

FOOD SAFETY , ADULTE TION AND DEPENDENCE

Food safety and food adulteration continue to be considerable concerns in

urban India. Anthropologist Harris Solomon’s important studies of food,
fat and related illnesses in Mumbai (2015; 2016) touch upon issues of
plastic usage and the adulteration of milk. Discussing patterns of food
adulteration in urban India, his research assistant once complained that
‘Everything is wrapped in plastic now … Everyone is getting cancer
here … The chemicals go into food …’ 113 Like plastic, milk can also not
be trusted, as it is often perceived to be diluted with unsafe tap water. 114
What is interesting is not so much the factual quality of these claims, but
the fact that they exist and impact the way people reflect on their food
consumption. At BodyHolics, such concerns had led to a growing
preference for organic food among its members and dedicated organic
shops had sprung up across the GK area recently. While no definite
figures are available, the India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF) estimates
that India’s organic food market will have increased three times by 2020.
115 An article in the Economic Times estimated the market to be worth

$0.36 billion in 2014, and projected to grow to $1.36 billion by 2020. 116
Estimates of the size of the market for health products, including the sale
of protein powders, are harder to get. Companies such as Euromonitor
International do offer access to a country report for India’s sports
nutrition market on their website. However, considering how fragmented
and complex the market is in terms of the number of brands competing, it
is doubtful the report is worth its asking price of $990. 117 The visible
presence of organic food shops, and the availability of whey-protein
powders and health supplements even at kirana shops 118 across India,
indicate a rapidly expanding market. However, even if this ubiquitous
availability of organic foods and health products evokes the image of a
more health-conscious India, those in the health and fitness industry are
critical of these products. They would generally make use of alternative
sources to obtain ‘real’ protein powder, high-quality supplements, and
even chicken meat and eggs that were not loaded with ‘hormones and
other shit’ as a certain gym owner phrased it once.
When it came to anabolic steroids and growth hormones, users and
providers were even more outspoken. ‘Getting the genuine stuff is an
issue,’ a young bodybuilder from Delhi (Girish, see chapter six) said.
‘But I trust my trainer.’ He had been on anabolic steroids and growth
hormones for over two years when I first met him, and had experienced no
side effects, something he credited his trainer for. Trainers, often referred
to as teachers or even gurus, clearly made significant money through
dealing in protein powders, supplements and controlled substances. They
were generally men who had been successful bodybuilders in their
younger years and were now operating gyms and related fitness
businesses. In their dealings with younger bodybuilders, they relied on
their past form and current well-being (health-wise, financially and in
terms of social capital), emitting an air of confidence that could counter
any doubt their ‘students’ might have. These trainers often functioned as
gatekeepers, with the keys to the ‘right’ or ‘correct’ information about the
most effective workout routines as well as genuine dietary advice. They
presented themselves as reliable, whereas all these ‘others’ were
cheaters. As such, they offered trust and confidence in a fundamentally
unstable and deceitful world, where nothing could be known for certain.

THE MASCULINE SELF AND BODILY WORTH

The issue of trust extends beyond the world of trainers and bodybuilders
trying to carve out middle-class positions for themselves. The upper-
middle-class clients of a CrossFit box 119 in Delhi—whom we will meet
later on in this chapter—spoke to me about how their idea of an inherently
untrustworthy, changing world impacts the way they relate to their bodies
and workout routines. Even if muscular bodies, practically speaking,
matter very little in their day-to-day lives as highly educated
professionals, these Crossfitters are determined to emphasise their
usefulness otherwise.
As was mentioned earlier, the muscular male body is layered with
all sorts of notions that go beyond its aesthetically pleasing dimensions, or
sexual attractiveness. Magazines such as Men’s Health also discuss it in
relation to it exuding professionalism, control and cosmopolitanism. It is
generally the end product of a long-term commitment to strenuous workout
routines and dietary regimes, that need to be reflected on in this light as
well. The bloodied, callused hands of CrossFit’s clients present us with
an interesting conundrum here. A CrossFit box avoids air-conditioning
and emphasises the need to recreate ‘real-life’ conditions inside. That
these conditions are far more working class than what the clients in
question are used to in their day-to-day lives doesn’t necessarily point at
a desire to involve themselves in working-class ‘labour’, but instead
imbues their muscular bodies with notions of survival and control that add
to their persona as high-end professionals who are in tune with the world
at large.
There is a balance of risk and control at work here, which also runs
through the case of Raj, a Chennai-based IT professional and team leader,
and an aspiring bodybuilder in his spare time. I first met Raj when
interviewing senior bodybuilder Srivat, whose recently established gym
is located on the outskirts of the city. Like the clients at CrossFit, who
obediently follow the instructions of their trainer, Raj had fully trusted
Srivat to provide him with coaching and guidance. However, he also
struggled with the question of whether he should invest in growth
hormones to take his body ‘to the next level’. Once he asked over lunch,
‘What would you do, Michael?’ His quandary was whether the risk was
worth the cost in terms of his finances, health and even social standing.
Up-and-coming Tamil bodybuilder Shanmugan, who is considered
one of the greater talents of recent years, helps situate Raj’s story within a
broader context. When I first met him, Shanmugan had already
participated once in MuscleMania, billed as a clean and natural
bodybuilding competition that was rapidly gaining popularity. However,
he had never been a ‘natural’ bodybuilder himself, something his size and
vascularity immediately betrayed. One of MuscleMania’s sponsors, a
businessman who runs several protein and supplement shops in Chennai,
helped me understand how the idea of a ‘clean sport’ with a wider
appeal, beyond the bodybuilding community, is hampered by an industry
marked by uncertainty and disinformation. While the personal trajectories
of Shanmugan and colleagues are revealing for how ‘unclean’ so-called
‘clean’ competitions are, its very claim of being clean and pure is
ridiculed by bodybuilders who are (relatively) open about their use of
steroids and who claim that one stands no chance of competing otherwise.
While the muscular body may exude masculinity—equated with
confidence, trust and success—the path of transformation is strewn with
potential challenges to masculine self-worth. Financial uncertainty, the
inability to provide for one’s family—even having to depend on family
support—exist and are aggravated by the constant flux of Indian’s urban
environment. Risk-taking behaviour is a natural response to precarious
conditions—created by rapid economic growth, changing gender
relations, the social and physical transformation of cities—and the
potential rewards are as spectacular as the potential failures. The
muscular body is a reflection of all these tensions and contradictions.

BUYING , CONSUMING , INVESTING

In Who Me, Poor? How India’s Youth Are Living in Urban Poverty to
Make It Big (2017), Gayatri Jayaraman paints a striking (though
problematic) picture of debt-ridden Indian youth living in cities. While
her usage of the label ‘poor’ might be jarring, considering the harsh
conditions of poverty that a large section of the Indian population still
experiences on a daily basis, Jayaraman’s investigation of urban poverty
and precarity does indicate a shift in thinking about how this might be an
issue for another, more privileged, aspiring section of society as well. In
her analysis, the decision to deviate from more secure income-generating
trajectories often leads to financial insecurity. Having conducted
numerous interviews with young Indians employed in professions as
diverse as acting, independent consulting and software engineering, she
found their stories echoed similar concerns of precarity, the burden of
credit card debt, and the challenges of urban life and lifestyles. What runs
through these accounts is disillusionment with what ‘new India’ has to
offer and what it has delivered on so far. There’s a certain buyer’s
remorse that filters through the pages—not in terms of products bought as
much as investment made in the idea of an urban middle-class lifestyle.
Jayaraman makes use of findings that emerged from surveys conducted by
PRICE (People Research on India’s Consumer Economy). For 2017, it
was reported that credit cards were seeing an unprecedented growth in
India, touching 32 per cent in 2017, a figure linked to higher consumer
confidence levels. However, this is in marked contrast with a finding from
another PRICE study that zoomed in on what it referred to as ‘a true
middle India’. 120 While the survey confirmed that there was rising
confidence among this group, ‘69 per cent said they met their basic needs
with great difficulty’. 121 PRICE’s 2016 ‘Household Survey on India’s
Citizen Environment & Consumer Economy’ revealed that more than a
quarter of Indian households incur debt. And 27 per cent of these
households have at least one outstanding loan. On average, their debt is
Rs 50,000 in metros, boom towns and niche cities. Furthermore, 12 per
cent have informal loans. 122
Jayaraman’s study touches upon manifold reasons for young Indians
incurring debts, from simply overdrawing on their credit cards, which are
increasingly easy to obtain, to education loans, unexpected medical costs,
investments in alternative career trajectories and so on. Her findings echo
those of a particularly insightful study, India Becoming: A Portrait of a
Life in Modern India (2012), in which Akash Kapur describes the life of
long-term informant Hari, a young, highly educated professional from a
small town in Tamil Nadu. ‘Like so many young Indians,’ Kapur writes,
Hari ‘had great faith in the future … [and] felt he was living in the right
country, at the right time, working in the right field …’ 123 Yet, instead of a
simple success story, Kapur goes on to narrate how Hari overspends,
incurs massive debts and frequently changes course in terms of his
ambitions. Hari dreams big, but his dreams come at a price. 124
Both Jayaraman’s case studies and Kapur’s detailed and sensitive
treatment of Hari echo the tension that characterised the lives of my
informants as well. They worked on a sense of style that costs money and
required a disposable income in the hopes of future returns on the
investment made. But the future is filled with the uncertainty of having
taken these risks, and the outcomes are far from certain. When things go
wrong, they do so very fast and with great personal consequences. As
Kapur shows, Hari’s debts mounted not just because of shopping sprees
but also because of a theft and because Hari came to the assistance of a
friend whose mother needed heart surgery. His friend was unable to repay
the loan due to an accident of his own in which he lost a leg. 125 An
economic downturn in the IT sector, meanwhile, made it more difficult to
find suitable employment. 126
In a related study titled Indian Youth in a Transforming World:
Attitudes and Perceptions (2009), the authors note that ‘Wearing
fashionable clothes is important for a large segment of the youth.’ They
argue that fashion choices often reflect an identity that is aspired to, rather
than real. 127 A short contribution by Swati Ghosh dissects how beauty
and self-esteem are increasingly linked in metropolitan India, specifically
Kolkata. She finds that the firm and slender body has come to symbolise
self-confidence and security. 128 Ray Titus paints a similar picture in Yuva
India: Consumption and Lifestyle Choices of a Young India (2015). In
one of the final chapters, he touches on suicide, as it relates to issues of
physical self-esteem, shifting social and sexual relations, and the stress of
professional careers. Titus notes that India now ranks ‘as among the
nations with the highest number of suicides, especially among the youth
and women’. 129 A psychiatric counsellor informed him how ‘emotionally
fragile the young people she meets are’. 130 The inability to deal with
newfound freedoms, changing circumstances that impact relationships, as
well as loneliness and the lack of social support all seem to be factors
here. 131 Titus concludes that ‘The new social realities of greater
individualism, independence, and self-reliance haven’t fully sunk in.’ 132

The speed of change in India makes the gaps in middle-classness and

access to economic, social and cultural capital starker. It also highlights
the widening gap between different generations. Almost none of the
trainers and bodybuilders interviewed were able to rely on the support of
their parents, not only because their parents had considerable doubts
about the risks involved in the alternative career or business trajectory
chosen, but also because they simply had no knowledge to share on how
to handle the uncertainty and precarity that came with it. As self-made as
many informants were, they were also very much on their own. The trust
they may have otherwise put in family and community relations was
invested in fitness and bodybuilding networks, which are characterised by
a high degree of dependence on, and faith in, the trustworthiness of senior
figures. A Delhi-based bodybuilder once shared a picture of himself
dressed only in posing trunks, kneeling down with hands folded in
worship in front of his trainer, whom he calls his guru, and who confers a
paternal blessing on his head. While the image pays homage to the
relationship pehlwans have with their gurus, it also implies that this
bodybuilder, a successful trainer himself, is part of a network with its
own hierarchy. He is compelled to literally kneel down before his guru’s
superior knowledge. This is, of course, a completely acceptable (and
ritualistic) way of paying respect to one’s teacher in his cultural sphere,
but the gesture underlines how masculine self-worth, no matter how
muscular its subject, is tied up with the relative worth of others in his
sphere.

MIDDLE-CLASS MASCULINE WORTH

One of the most iconic moments in the hit movie Rang De Basanti (2006)
is a scene in which actors Aamir Khan and Sharman Joshi are perched on
the edge of a wall above a water tank at Nahargarh Fort. They arch their
backs to make it more difficult to maintain balance while downing full
bottles of Haywards 5000 Super Premium Beer, a beverage known for its
heavy alcohol content. Aamir Khan perseveres, while Sharman Joshi
plunges into the water while attempting to finish a second bottle. Although
it’s a fairly typical Bollywood scene of male camaraderie, according to
an article in the Indian Express (29 June 2017), it went on to top a list
circulating on Indian campuses of fifty-two different dares. The article
was authored by Rimjhim Jain, a social rights activist based in Pune, who
had brought together a group of young men—known as ‘unruly’ on their
respective campuses—to discuss risk-taking behaviour and notions of
Indian masculinity. Jain argues that the risks such young men take are
attempts ‘to prove that they were different—better—than other men’. 133
Even if men like Kishore, Victor or Akash (see previous chapter) do
not engage in the kind of risk-taking behaviour illustrated above, their
bodies—which are after all exposed to various types of health-related
risk—are very much oriented toward proving a point in terms of their
worth and superiority vis-à-vis other men. Idealised notions of
masculinity and manliness tend to be produced by and among men. While
this often appears to take the form of impressing women, closer analysis
reveals that what matters more is masculine worth in the eyes of other
men. This doesn’t mean that the ‘female gaze’ has not become more
important in India, 134 but that it is equally important to keep in mind that
attracting this female gaze is an important feature of being a man who
stands out among other men.
Sociologist Bryan Turner suggests that in our postmodern
predicament, we all have become flaneurs, surveying and consuming
bodies while passing time (as if eternally stuck in an airport departure
lounge). 135 His argument takes in the visibility of bodies in public, as
well as how the body has become a product to be consumed, perennially
on display, to be acquired and possessed. The ubiquitous presence of
muscular bodies in Indian public space (on billboards) and in popular
media (Bollywood, Kollywood, etc.) is layered with more than simple
sexual attractiveness, especially compared to the way female bodies are
presented in similar spaces. For starters, men on the covers of male-
oriented lifestyle magazines are, in fact, depicted in a sexually attractive
way, but rarely are they framed in this way for the opposite sex alone.
While the final chapter will turn to its homoerotic qualities and same-sex
attraction, these images clearly reinforce a desire to stand out amongst
other men. Not to have a lean, muscular body not only means risking one’s
health, but also losing out in the rat-race in terms of gaining professional
recognition, pursuing new job opportunities and being considered for
promotions. In short, not being able to fully claim for oneself all that new
India has to offer.

BLOODY , CALLUSED HANDS

Hanging out at a CrossFit box in Delhi one evening, I notice Anoop
repeatedly performing clean-and-snatch pulls, rapidly lifting a weighted
bar all the way above his head with arms stretched straight. A trainer
keeps track of the time and counts the number of times he repeats this.
‘Stretch! Don’t forget to stretch at the end. I want to see your arms
straight. Count one-two before lowering the bar down! Don’t be in a
hurry!’ The others who have joined Anoop are all evidently determined to
do the minimum number of repetitions required. Sweat drizzles down
Anoop’s face, and his light brown T-shirt is almost completely soaked
through; the absence of air-conditioning in the box is noticeable, to say the
least. Having lifted the bar above his head one last time, he ceremoniously
drops it to the floor and high-fives another member who has finished the
exercise at the same time. Grinning, he shows me his hands, which are
completely raw and bloody, the skin having scraped off due to the
repetitions. He makes me feel the calluses on the pads where his fingers
meet his palms, deep yellow in colour and leathery to the touch. ‘This is
what CrossFit will do to you,’ he informs me proudly. Anoop wipes his
hands on his off-white shorts, leaving smudges of blood, then pulls out his
cell phone to take a selfie with a friend. ‘It’s the life, man,’ he adds. ‘I am
feeling it every day when I come here!’
Anoop, a Kashmiri Pandit, is originally from Jammu but grew up in
Delhi. Now living in the upmarket neighbourhood of Vasant Vihar, he
works in Gurgaon as a talent acquisition consultant. Basically, he is the
first wall to clear, the first contact point for new recruits, particularly
senior-managers. He mainly sources prospective candidates through
LinkedIn and Facebook, then sits them down to discuss job opportunities.
Having completed a degree in hotel management from Mumbai, Anoop
was employed with Hilton for three years, where he started as a
management trainee and was finally appointed full manager. He
subsequently went on to set up his own café and worked for a consultancy
company that specialised in questions of urban development. His father is
a civil servant and general manager with a government agency, while his
mother is head of an accounting department. His elder brother is married
and works for an architectural firm. Obviously from a privileged
background, he is a regular at CrossFit, where his callused, bloody hands
and scraped knees do not stand out among the rest of its mainly upper-
middle-class clientele.
Anoop’s gym habit was initially triggered by a health scare at a
previous job. During a medical check-up, he was informed that he had
better start working out soon—something a chest pain one night further
underlined. He smoked and drank too much and realised that he could not
go on the way he had. Joining CrossFit had generated positive results
within two months, and he had never looked back. He had no specific
goals: ‘Just to get fit, that’s all.’
He now makes his way to the box on an almost daily basis. Basically
a bunker-like room of about five by five metres with a small mirror on
one side, the box has only ceiling fans for cooling. Its manager, twenty-
nine-year-old Rajiv, is originally from Udaipur but migrated to Delhi
when he was five years old. Rajiv graduated from Jawaharlal Nehru
University (JNU) and his interests were primarily in the social sciences.
His own fitness career started in 2004 when he enrolled in a boxing class
and then joined a friend’s gym in Green Park, another upper-middle-class
neighbourhood in the south of Delhi. A ‘small and thin boy’ when he was
young, Rajiv’s motivation for working out was mainly informed by the
desire to ‘get bigger’. After a detour into event management, he completed
a fitness certification course, joined a hotel gym as a personal trainer, and
finally became part of the founding team of an international gym chain
seeking to get a foot in the door in India. From initially making little more
than Rs 8,000 a month, he quickly managed to double and eventually triple
this. In 2010, he went abroad to ‘up’ his CrossFit skills and to do an
internship in the US before returning to India and starting his own gym.
Currently, he employs three trainers full-time, though he himself is also
still employed two days a week by a well-known sports brand, where he
takes care of the PR, recruitment and special guests that fly in from abroad
to help build the brand.
Karan and Parmesh, two clients, often hang out with Anoop. Under
the guidance of Rajiv, the three exercise together, challenging each other
to do more lifts, chin-ups and push-ups, or simply stand resting their
sweaty backs against the gym walls to cool down for a minute. In between
sessions, Karan tells me he is involved in the family business, selling
various spice mixes, and that he completed his MBA at UCLA. Parmesh
got a degree in commerce from Delhi University (DU), after which he was
employed for over a decade in regular corporate jobs and briefly
stationed in Australia. While Karan joined CrossFit four years earlier,
Parmesh has been with the box for just two years. For Karan, a regular
gym is quite boring: ‘A [normal] gym is crowded and offers no feeling of
community.’ He comes to CrossFit every day and considers the other
members his ‘true friends’. They even celebrated Diwali together
recently. ‘CrossFit is not about coming and going. Like you do in a regular
gym. Here it is not competitive, it’s collegial instead. We are here to help
each other, you know.’
More recently, Parmesh had even become a trainer himself. ‘I got
laid off a couple of months ago and didn’t have anything to do,’ he says.
‘So, I became part of this bunch.’ He now hopes that membership will
increase and that he can attract more clients for personal training. His
view is that ‘fitness is the need of the life’; it is what creates a change in
people’s lives. Karan agrees with this assessment. He feels it is important
to have friends in the city, but when he came back from the US, he found it
hard to fit in with them. ‘Crossfitters hang out with Crossfitters,’ he says.
‘There is something about going to hell and back together.’ He sees it as a
bonding experience. The cheerful ‘see you tomorrows’ that ricochet off
the walls when most members leave at around eight in the evening
punctuate this sense of camaraderie and mutual bonding. Parmesh takes a
little longer to leave, because he wants to show his new laptop to one of
the trainers. Meanwhile, Karan is pressing a tissue against a wound on his
forehead—the result of bumping against a bar while exercising—waiting
for the bleeding to stop. He assures me that it is not too bad and jovially
adds: ‘All part of the job, man!’

An almost violent disposition towards the body characterised the

atmosphere at the CrossFit box that evening, something underlined by
regular, enthusiastic exhortations to ‘destroy the body’ and ‘face the battle
head-on’, and the desire to leave utterly ‘demolished’. While the
CrossFitters were mainly highly educated upper-middle-class men in
senior managerial positions, in the gym they were actually ‘at work’ and,
in a sense, even ‘truly’ accomplishing something, it seemed. However, it
would be a mistake to think of Anoop’s scraped and callused hands as
adjacent to a fetishised working-class masculinity. Instead, he saw his
scars as compensation for the stress he endured in his daytime job,
spending long hours in traffic commuting to and from work, and dealing
with managerial duties and high expectations. As a counterpoint to all this,
the box delivered something akin to instant satisfaction. As Anoop put it:
‘It’s such a good feeling when you get the session over with and it’s
done.’ And his hands were a clear physical reminder that he had
accomplished something. He didn’t mind showing off to colleagues either:
‘They are always so amazed to see them like this.’ In fact, some would
even ask to feel his hands, something he took particular pride in. He saw
the calluses as an extension of, and a more visible reminder of, the
muscular strength he had acquired working out, something that had no
direct use in his work otherwise, nor was particularly visible while he
wore a suit all day.

DISCIPLINING AND PUNISHING THE BODY

Within the context of the West, the ‘extraordinary fetishisation of muscles
and muscularity in young men’ has often been related to the demise of
traditional male jobs that require physical labour and muscular strength.
136 Over time, the muscular body has come to be divorced from its

specific lower- or working-class connotations. 137 The male-bonding and

camaraderie we see in the CrossFit box could perhaps be taken as a sign
of a crisis of masculinity. Faced with changing gender roles and
expectations, men seek to reclaim their masculine selves through working
out. The gym is then held to function as a space of homosocial bonding;
it’s where men can be among men without the nagging interference of
women.
Notions of hegemonic masculinity, as initially conceptualised by
sociologist Raewyn Connell (1995), play a particularly influential role in
such reasoning. Principally a concept of power that points at the
subordination and marginalisation of other possibilities of masculinity 138
—less oriented at ‘masculine’ success, bravura and competitiveness—the
concept also raises awareness of issues of complicity. Hegemonic
masculinity relies on other men not to challenge its exalted position within
masculine hierarchies. As sociologist Michael Kimmel (1994) argues,
failure to comply with social norms of masculinity (e.g. to be strong,
successful, capable, reliable, in control), impacts the way men are
evaluated and judged. Research has argued that the health of poorer men
can be attributed to this. 139 Even worse, it could lead to violence and
abuse of women, other (‘less masculine’) men and sexual minorities. 140
Following gender theorist and philosopher Judith Butler’s notion of
gender performativity, 141 it has been argued that masculinity can best be
seen as a performance on a pre-set stage with only a few directors to be
followed. 142 Macho masculinity takes up a domineering position here, 143
from which a normativity emerges that should be understood in terms of it
needing to be ‘proficiently performed’. In other words: it is something that
one needs to showcase, show evidence and remind others of. Noted manly
virtues are good health, physical and mental strength, stoicism, fortitude,
courage and so on. As David Buchbinder, professor of Masculinities
Studies, argues, ‘many of [these] are integral to the calculus of power by
which a patriarchal system operates’. 144

INDIAN MEN OUT OF /IN CONTROL

Indian masculinities are a particularly complex topic to tackle, not least
because of the intensely negative associations they evoke in a patriarchy-
oriented society that features appalling violence towards women and
entrenched gender inequality. When I present research on fitness trainers
and bodybuilders at seminars and conferences, the question that is
frequently raised is how my work relates to cases of gruesome violence,
such as the 2012 Delhi gang rape. It is a question at a remove from my
research, which mainly indicates men’s willingness to mete out violence
upon their own bodies. Yet, questions from the audience often follow a
rather similar reasoning: surely these men’s drive to build muscular
bodies is just another example of failure to deal with changing gender
relations, stemming from a sense of insecurity?
This assumption contrasts strikingly with gender relationships within
gyms, which are rarely ever male-only. The CrossFit box described
earlier had about 40 per cent female members, who participated in similar
workout routines. The friendships Anoop, Karan and Parmesh had made
‘in the box’ also included these female clients, who held similar positions
as they did in corporate India. In fact, gyms in India often turned out to be
spaces that were characterised by a rather easy mixing of the genders.
Many even offered self-defence classes, thus directly acknowledging the
harassment women face in public space. Fitness training certification
courses also came with specific classes on cross-gender relations and
how to deal with female clients for whom direct interaction with a male
trainer might cause discomfort. Women who worked out at gyms such as
BodyHolics generally considered them a breath of fresh air from stifling
gender relations elsewhere in the city.
Sociologist Radhika Chopra (2004) urges us to look at the relations
between genders, as well as relations within a particular gender, in order
‘to understand the contours of male worlds and masculine subjectivities.’
145 In line with this, anthropologist Geert De Neve (2004) cautions against

negative stereotypes and essentialised representations of Indian

masculinities. 146 He argues that in order to understand Indian male
masculinity, ‘men have to be relocated in the particular “social” and
“spatial” contexts of their everyday lives through which they embody,
negotiate or contest masculinities of sorts.’ 147 Rather than arguing that
their gym-built muscular bodies suggest an ambivalent relationship with
the other sex, let’s look at what the notion of physical transformation
signifies, beyond the immediate goal of an aesthetically pleasing,
‘attractive’ body. If we think of the internalised ‘masculine’ self as an
anchor for men to find stability and confidence, the context of rapid urban
change demands constant re-anchoring because of the way it questions
pre-held assumptions about what it means to be a man. Working out may
be a way to seek some control over this, especially since it revolves so
much around notions of discipline and perseverance. However, it is
simplistic to think of this as merely another way of reasserting male
patriarchal hegemony.
Trainers not only work with female clients—even touching them
occasionally to correct their posture or to help with stretching and muscle
release—but pursuing a career in fitness also requires them to break with
many of the traditional ideas they grew up with. Lean, muscular bodies,
laden with notions of professionalism and cosmopolitanism in magazines
such as Men’s Health point at physical control—not as a reinforcement of
older, patriarchal gender relations, but as a way to seek out a new
masculine self that is in tune with and even embraces societal change.
PERFORMING A NEW MASCULINE SELF
The performance of masculinity—of any gender identity—requires an
audience, whether great or small. The body is an unavoidable, constant
presence in society, consistently performing the gendered self and what it
is held to stand for. In an influential study on doormen and bouncers,
sociologist Lee F. Monaghan (2002) shows how working out and
disciplining the body contributes not only to a larger presence physically,
but also socially. 148 Like the professional boxers of French social
anthropologist Loïc Wacquant’s study (1995), doormen can be thought of
as entrepreneurs in bodily capital who have found a way to utilise their
body to generate income and elevate their ‘social’ worth. 149 Not unlike
gym trainers, the relationship doormen have with their bodies is
principally practical, in that the work they do has a functional need for
their muscular bodies. 150
As in the UK, where Monaghan’s study was situated, gyms in India
do act as suppliers of doormen to clubs and pubs. A complicating factor
in this immediate association between trainers and this class of
professionals is the notion of violence and its class-based associations,
something trainers are well aware of. While engaging violently with the
body was something trainers and bodybuilders would often treat as a
given, the idea that this muscular body would enact actual violence was
perceived as deeply problematic. For the boxer, the main function of his
body is to facilitate punches and provide strength to them in accordance
with nationally and internationally approved sporting regulations. In
contrast, the doormen’s body serves primarily as a tool of intimidation—
ideally never having to utilise its impressive actual strength. Yet, in India,
trainers need to steer clear of even a whiff of suggestion with violence if
he hopes to avoid the all-too-easy association with lower-class goondas.
This he must balance with a physical masculine ideal that speaks of
strength, tempered with the narrative of control and a successful
transformation. And this experience of transformation, while it does
attract clients, is first and foremost about the self; it is about answering a
desire emerging from within, to build, shape and challenge the body—to
see what it is capable of, what one is capable of.
Why torment your body? Why risk its health? Why seek to transform it into
something that is not necessarily a healthier version of itself? Sometimes
working towards a version that is not even considered ‘attractive’ by
conventional standards? I ask Raj these questions over lunch in his office
canteen, a food court in the IT hub of Manapakkam, Chennai. He has just
shown me his latest photographs, which confirm that he is in excellent
shape. His overall muscular physique is incredibly well balanced, with
the various muscle groups all starkly pronounced, even if he is not quite
competition-ready yet. It is his ambition to compete in MuscleMania
Chennai the coming year, but he feels that, in order to achieve his dream,
he will need to make a significant investment in steroids as well as
growth hormones. Already, Raj is spending considerably on his body: on
average Rs 12,000 or more per month. Half of this money is spent on food
alone, Rs 1,500-odd per week, but this does not include protein powder,
supplements and the money he ‘invests’ in steroids. He is contemplating
growth hormones, which will cost him manifold this amount, but is
struggling with doubt. Why should he involve himself in something that is
both expensive and dangerous to his health? Health risks run from an
acne-ridden skin to long-term cardiovascular, hepatoxic (destroying liver
cells) and psychiatric issues. 151 Currently the sole breadwinner, with a
wife to support (an IT professional herself but unable to work at the
moment) and a school-going daughter, he is barely able to meet expenses
as is. Why do it, I ask him point-blank. Why does it matter?
Unlike Victor of the previous chapter, Raj has no interest in
becoming a personal trainer. It is 2018, and his career as an IT
professional is going well and provides him with a stable income. He
makes around Rs 80,000 per month, though half of it disappears in paying
off the mortgage for an apartment he bought near his office. Furthermore,
he has a personal loan of Rs 6,000 per month and his daughter’s tuition
fees to consider. He estimates that Rs 65,000 is the minimum he spends
per month, excluding any ‘additional’ investment in his body. More
recently, his wife has started voicing concerns about his health and asks
him questions similar to the ones I’m asking him now. Meanwhile, he has
taken a loan from an aunt to finance his bodybuilding ambitions, even if he
hasn’t told her exactly what the money is for. It paid for only five months’
worth of various substances at the time, but he believes it propelled him
to the next level; this has confirmed for him the fact that, if he is going to
take any of this seriously, he will have to invest even more.
I met Raj for the first time while interviewing Srivat, the bodybuilder
and owner of a gym in an up-and-coming area of Chennai. A number of
luxury apartment complexes have come up here in recent years, which is a
clear indication that the area is increasingly considered an alternative for
middle-class families who previously might have chosen something more
central. 152 In between, however, are still many plots of vacant land, some
even dotted with grazing cattle, a reminder of the area’s recent
agricultural past. The area epitomises the reality of a new India that is
often monotonous, a rapidly expanding urbanscape that devours former
farmland, carbon-copying itself over more and more terrain with shopping
malls and flyovers, interspersed by small shoebox-shaped concrete
workspaces for small pharmacies, repair and grocery shops. Srivat’s gym,
which he set up two years earlier, fits in neatly with this canvas of
somewhat slapdash urban expansion. While the gym is independent,
similar ones belonging to national and international chains, such as
Talwalkar’s, Gold’s Gym or Fitness First, are located nearby. At night,
their neon lights blend in with those of McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and KFC,
while by day they often seem to hide in the background.
Srivat is Raj’s guru and trainer—the person he trusts to provide him
with the necessary steroids and growth hormones. He has assured Raj that
he really has the potential to be competitive on stage. Yet financial
worries, health concerns, as well as his role and responsibility as sole
breadwinner for his family continue to nag at this young IT professional. ‘I
got into this addiction,’ he says with a hesitant smile. ‘When I walk
around, I can see these guys looking at me, they talk to each other, that guy
has great muscles, they say.’ Giving it some more thought, he adds: ‘Or
that’s what I think they say.’ People in office admire him for his body. He
feels he has become used to other men staring at him. It’s like there is
always an audience, and even though there is no applause, he can imagine
it. However, he also realises that he has come to depend on the attention.
It’s an addiction that translates into ‘exercise dependence’. 153 Even
though he is able to reflect on this critically, he does ask me what I think
he should improve ‘even more’. Raj could well be a textbook example of
what studies call reverse anorexia 154 and body or muscle dysmorphia. 155
Struggling to reflect rationally on what his body looks like as he reviews
its ongoing transformation in the mirror, in essence, Raj is dealing with
significant body image concerns. 156 The risk-taking behaviour this
triggers among fitness enthusiasts and bodybuilders has been well noted in
related research. 157

TO SHINE ON THE STAGE ONCE

‘I just want to do it once you know, shine on stage,’ Raj says, having given
various risks and constraints some further thought. The imaginary
applause that comes his way on the work floor and greets him on the
streets is not enough. ‘People keep telling me I have a great physique.
They put thoughts in my head.’ Through the window of the canteen where
we are meeting, I notice a large billboard with faces of mainly young men
staring seriously ahead, flanked by a larger-than-life image of actor
Kamal Hassan. It was probably put up by a fan club to celebrate the
actor’s achievements or perhaps his birthday. Raj does not read Tamil
either, so there is no point in asking him. One argument runs that these flex
billboards can be seen as a way for subaltern men to counter their
marginalisation, by literally making themselves visible in urban space. In
the case of Chennai, anthropologist Roos Gerritsen’s pathbreaking work
on Tamil fan clubs shows that such billboards position one club against
others, all intended for the attention of local politicians. 158 Raj is a highly
educated IT professional for whom local politics like this matter very
little. Yet his desire to shine on stage, even just once, runs parallel to the
desires of fan-club members or political associations who seek attention
by plastering their faces on enormous billboards. Amidst an incredibly
crowded landscape of commuters, pavement sellers, beggars and others,
Raj stands out. Even if he himself thinks that shining on the MuscleMania
stage represents an important next step, on the street, in the company
canteen, or simply waiting for the elevator, his massively muscular body
is already on display, catching the attention of everyone around him.
MuscleMania promotes itself globally as a premier natural
bodybuilding competition. In recent years, it has made inroads into the
Indian market as well. One day, I met one of its key representatives in
south India, Anand Kapoor, at his sports supplement store in
Thoraipakkam. He immediately made sure to emphasise that this was only
one of three stores he operated, and that he was about to open a fourth one
in Pondicherry. With representation in over twenty gyms, he claimed to be
the largest seller of protein supplements in south India. Anand was
originally with Citibank, completed his MBA with a business school in
Hyderabad, and was working in a sales position where he was ‘easily
making the targets’ and not ‘facing a challenge of any worth’. From a
‘typical business family’, Anand said his father wanted him to become an
engineer, though the ‘business-side’ always attracted him more.
MuscleMania was one of the events he sponsored in order to further
his business interests in sports equipment and supplements. While
bodybuilding as a competitive sport was on the rise across India, Anand
felt that eventually it would hit the decline it had elsewhere. The main
reason for this, he felt, was bodybuilding’s association with substance
abuse, which deterred ‘ordinary Indians’ from getting involved.
MuscleMania offered an alternative: a cleaner version of the sport, drug-
free and with side competitions for those interested in modelling or
simply showing off their accomplishments (think ‘swimwear
competition’). ‘People don’t want to look like they have been using,’ he
explained. ‘When a techie comes into my store, he wants the nice chest
and to pump up his biceps for three reasons. One is that he wants a break
in the movie industry; two, to attract girls; and three, because he is simply
very passionate about it.’ MuscleMania was designed to provide a
motivational platform for this.
Throughout our conversation, Anand was particularly keen to
highlight that MuscleMania was all about being a ‘clean’ competition, as
opposed to the many regionally and nationally held bodybuilding
competitions that were (and are) most definitely not free of drugs. While
talking to Anand, I was reminded—not unironically—of Raj’s
predicament, trying to make up his mind about investing in growth
hormones in order to compete in MuscleMania.
Ongoing interactions with Shanmugan underscored the difficulty in
enforcing a drug-free competition. Twenty-four at the time of our first
interview, Shanmugan was widely considered one of the most promising
newcomers on stage in south India. None of his success had come
‘naturally’, not least because of his ‘humble’ beginnings and the sacrifices
his parents had made for him to excel in his sport. Yet his occasional
‘drug’ use—crucial to his transformation and subsequent ability to be
competitive on the bodybuilding stage—cannot be divorced from the
actual ‘hard work’ and dedication he had put in his training routine and
maintaining a highly specific protein-rich diet. He himself attributed his
success to the ‘transformation’ he had pushed his body to undergo
irrespective of steroids and hormones, something he could rarely afford.
His participation in MuscleMania therefore struck him as justified,
considering that his physique was mainly the product of his own
perseverance, irrespective of the minimal ‘help’ he felt he had received
along the way. In firm disagreement with Anand, who had occasionally
sponsored him (or at least provided him with a steady supply of protein
powders), Shanmugan was adamant that none of this was, in fact, about
attracting girls.

Over a coffee one morning at a shopping mall in 2015, Shanmugan

expounds on his desire to become a legend in bodybuilding. ‘I want to
compete internationally, to be on the international stage, maybe even [Mr]
Olympia one day.’ His ambitions were not unreasonable. ‘Blessed with
amazing genetics,’ as Victor once put it, it was generally believed by the
bodybuilding community and his fans that Shanmugan definitely had it in
him. Funding continues to be a challenge though, not least in terms of
accessing the right steroids and growth hormones necessary to ‘up’ his
body. His father, who was once a talented artist and drew logos and
advertisements for companies, is now a taxi driver. He had lacked the
computer literacy required once the industry shifted to digital illustration.
With only a small additional income coming in from Shanmugan’s sister, a
trained beautician, it is up to him to procure whatever he needs for
bodybuilding by providing personal training.
Asked what he wants to achieve with his bodybuilding, Shanmugan
quietly states, ‘I want to show India the good fitness.’ Something that
resonates with Anand Kapoor’s sentiments as well. However, in order to
prepare himself for his very first bodybuilding competition, he had
invested in ‘drugs’. Lack of funding did not make it possible to repeat this
for the next competition, but he was still able to claim second place.
‘Without medicine I reached this much result!’ He thinks he has his
genetics to thank for this. However, if he wants to compete internationally,
for example in Mr Olympia, he knows he has no choice but to let go of any
illusion that he can do this without the use of drugs. ‘We can’t even stand
in the shade of these guys otherwise.’ He has incredible admiration for
what these men are willing to do for their sport: ‘They are awesome!
Risking their life for passion!’ He even goes so far as to suggest that ‘they
are the best of us’, given the kind of dedication they are willing to put into
their bodies (including the use of drugs). He feels that ‘they are not using
drugs to impress anybody’. Shanmugan’s main worry about ‘using’ is that,
once you ‘get off them’, it is easy to ‘lose confidence’. He has heard about
the bouts of depression some of his colleagues have struggled with as a
result. ‘You can use steroids, but you should be alive to enjoy the results.’
Looking ahead, thinking of the future, is crucial, he feels. ‘What about
your family? Most guys never think about that. They just want to look
good.’

MALE ACTION FIGURES

Shanmugan’s transformation over the years has been nothing short of
stellar: biceps ballooning, pectoral muscles expanding, his legs a dense
patchwork of throbbing veins which his hoof-like calves accentuated even
more. It’s hard to imagine that anyone could believe he was a drug-free
contestant. He was certainly already too large to be a Men’s Health cover
model, which was very sensitive about such associations. Yet a
Bangalore-based high-end trainer—a recurring contributor to the
magazine—once assured me that it was doubtful that any of the cover
models had not ‘juiced’ at some point. ‘It is not really possible to achieve
that kind of definition without the use of something.’ He was convinced of
this. ‘It rarely comes natural.’ It bothered him that not only was
bodybuilding itself not turning drug-free, but even fitness in general—at
heart a health-improving activity—was moving towards drugs for the sake
of aesthetics (meaning: the much-coveted six-part abs, biceps and the
likes). He saw the dangers in this—the untenable expectations of the body
that substance abuse, extreme dieting and risky workout routines created.
In his own contributions to various lifestyle magazines, this trainer and
journalist made sure to emphasise the ‘actual correct way’ of doing
certain exercises, preventing injury and building a ‘fit and healthy’ body.
To him, the answer to moving away from an ‘unhealthy’ emphasis on the
‘perfectly’ lean, muscular body did not lie in discouraging men to pursue
this ideal, but to change the engagement with the transformation process.
When I met Shanmugan again at the competition, in which Victor also
competed, he had grown even more in size and made it to the overall
category, where he took third place. His physique reminded me of a study
I came across a few years ago on the evolution of top male action toys
from GI Joe and Star Wars over the period of 1965–1998. 159 The study
found that these modern figures were not only larger and more muscular
than previous versions, but that they had become so large that some were
now more muscular than humanly possible, even with the help of
substances such as anabolic steroids. Developments in international
bodybuilding suggest that we may not yet know the uttermost reaches that
the body can grow to and be shaped into. Victor’s twenty-inch arms,
Shanmugan’s desire to compete at Mr Olympia and Raj’s ostensibly
simple desire to shine on stage are all products of the narrative of
unlimited potential. Their ‘success’ in transformation contributes to the
idea that this is indeed also possible for other men.
The evening I met Kishore in the dive bar near his gym, he suggested that
he was gradually starting to feel his age. ‘It’s less easy now, Michael,’ he
said with a tinge of regret. It had made him softer on his clients; made him
understand them a little more, as he put it. Meanwhile, he knew that his
plans for expansion, or at least for a higher-end gym, relied on him
keeping his body in tip-top shape. Like Delhi’s CrossFit box, Kishore’s
gym positioned itself as a counterpoint to a society on steroids, not only
with respect to the actual use of steroids but also in terms of a society
seemingly out of control. Kishore, like his CrossFit counterpart Rajiv, not
only acts as a broker of bodily knowledge but also as one who
understands the pitfalls and predicaments of this world. While clients,
often unwittingly, seek guidance about how to navigate their professional
and personal lives, this jars somewhat ironically with these trainers’ own
ambitions.
The idea that India is gripped by a crisis of masculinity, compelling
its men to pursue ever more muscular bodies, even to the point of pain,
does not resonate with the way trainers and bodybuilders themselves
engage with their bodies and the various insecurities, uncertainties and
issues of precarity they face as part of their lives. Instead of thinking of
working out and building a muscular body as a way to show mastery and
dominance in the face of rapid urban change, my research actually
suggests that working out, and the goal of a muscular body, reflect an
acceptance of the reality of a society on steroids instead.
 CHAPTER 5

CITY OF VILLAGE(R)S

One day, when he was

about ten or twelve,
he asked his mother
‘What is my caste?
Some boys in the
school were asking,
I didn’t know what
to say.’ The mother,
got up in the middle
of her supper, ‘Beta,
if you don’t know it by
now, it must be upper.’
– Akhil Katyal 160

I
t’s around one o’clock at night and I am sitting on the back of Shivam’s
Bullet cruising through a nearly deserted Delhi. We are on our way
back from a bodybuilding competition near Aya Nagar, in a village
situated on the border with the state of Haryana. Shivam is in a jubilant
mood, bordering on ecstatic, exuberantly singing various Bollywood
songs about having triumphed in the face of obstacles. I am reminded of
the final notes of the opera Turandot and its main character Calaf’s final
exultation when he is convinced he’ll guess the princess’s name by
morning. ‘Vincerò !’—I’m going to win! Although Shivam has already had
his moment of victory, sleep is just as far from his mind. Swirling across
the road like a figure skater on ice to show me the agility of his
motorcycle, Shivam laughs raucously, beating his chest with glee. He had
taken the stage for the first time earlier today, and even bagged third
place. At this moment, Shivam is invincible.
The competition started in the late afternoon and went on till well
past midnight when the overall winner was crowned. Shivam had walked
on stage, lathered in tanning lotion and wearing a tiny pair of posing
trunks, accompanied by wild cheers from an audience of at least a few
thousand people. The plot of land on which the competition was held had
gradually filled up during the evening, and by the time the final category of
a 100-plus kg was announced, crowd control was getting to be a
challenge. The organising bodybuilding federation had to keep the
increasingly enthusiastic and rowdy local youngsters at bay, so as to make
sure the jury could still follow what was happening on stage. Taking third
place had been beyond Shivam’s wildest expectations, and leaning
backwards, he checks with me again if I had also noticed the nods of
approval he had received from the jury when the double biceps pose had
been announced. ‘Rajender-bhai was insisting on me participating,’ he
yells over his motorcycle’s roaring engine. ‘He said to me, Shivam, you
should go for this one, I know you can do it!’ He is superbly grateful that
he took the advice. ‘I wasn’t sure you know, I had never done this before,
but you saw me, na, you took the pictures?’
Earlier that day, seated in the front row as one of the audience’s
honorary guests and awaiting the first category of 55 kg to take the stage, I
had noticed Shivam animatedly conversing with one of the organising
federation’s key members, Rajender Bainsla. Dressed in Adidas jogging
pants and a tight-fitting blue T-shirt, affectionately tapping a motor helmet
against Bainsla’s chest to underscore his point, Shivam’s silhouette
reminded me of Captain America as he appeared in the 1940s and 1950s;
six feet tall, an almost perfectly V-shaped upper-body, the kind of jawline
that made it look as if he was capable of rescuing a damsel-in-distress,
dangling from a building’s ledge, at a moment’s notice. With the
competition about to begin, Rajender had to take the stage to make the first
set of announcements, and the conversation was wrapped up quickly with
a friendly slap on the shoulder.
Noticing a free seat next to me, Shivam sat down. ‘Bainsla is trying
to convince me to take the stage, but I am not sure if I am ready,’ he
explained. Considering his size, he had at least a few hours to reconsider.
‘I am not sure, man, I have never done this before.’ He was also
apprehensive about the reaction from the audience. ‘In these areas, people
like this sort of thing,’ he added vaguely. ‘Now there are not so many, but
they will be coming for the higher weight-classes, you wait and see.’
Many chairs were indeed still empty. Behind the stage, the sky had turned
a mesmerising orange and the air was thick with the smell of incense. As
was customary with the competitions this particular federation organised,
a richly decorated image of Hanuman had been hauled onstage and a
pooja to seek his blessings was going on. Once completed, the master of
ceremonies announced the first category of ‘55 kg bodybuilder’ 161
competitors to take the stage. Cast in golden hues, twelve men walked on
stage, their bodies a dense filigree of muscles. It wasn’t altogether clear
whether there was any volume to these muscles, or if the men were simply
incredibly lean and wiry. Applause and the occasional cheer from the
audience was followed by the jury’s first instruction: ‘Bodybuilder, first
pose, double bicep, flex.’

THE WORLD-CLASS CITY

Shivam had competed in the Open Mr Delhi Championship (2013),
organised by a Delhi-based bodybuilding federation. The majority of its
members belonged to the Gujjar community, which explained why this
particular competition was held on Gujjar land. As rural as the setting
may have felt, the place could still be reached fairly easily by walking
down from Arjangarh metro station, via its exit on Mehrauli-Gurgaon
Road. However, the lane leading up to the village was unpaved, at times
just a condensed mess of dirt and rubble that had become a road simply by
being walked upon. The half hour-walk from the metro station illustrated
how quickly urban conditions can change in the capital. Multi-lane
highways and metro stations serviced by trains connect the heart of the
city to its outermost suburbs and satellite villages. The not-particularly-
charming small lanes that I wandered through to get to the site of the
competition were lined with half-built houses and workplaces, its
inhabitants busy with repair and recycling work of some sort. It had
rained the previous day, and although the sun had been scorching all day,
there were still many muddy puddles. Tractors and other vehicles battled
for space, women crossing the road had their faces covered in semi-
purdah, and all around was the unrelenting cacophony that could provide a
soundtrack for a village scene in a B-grade Hindi movie. It was striking
how far away the city suddenly seemed, even though the metro station was
only a few minutes’ walk away.
It is difficult to coherently define Delhi. On the one hand, there is
Delhi’s centuries-long history, which speaks of no less than seven
different cities over time. 162 On the other hand, there’s the more recent
development of satellite cities such as Gurgaon 163 and Noida—and the
notion of the NCR, or National Capital Region, 164 that attempts to capture
Delhi’s ever-expanding urban agglomeration. The city’s urban landscape
is best characterised as an interplay of overlaying processes. The need to
constantly redefine itself seems both integral to this as well as an
inevitable consequence of rapid change. While the dream of becoming a
‘world-class city’ is frequently sold by policymakers, property
developers and the media, 165 fuelling large-scale plans of urban
intervention and change, the implementation of this dream raises serious
questions about urban belonging and who has rights in and to the city.
While urban planning has sought to deal with a ballooning population and
inevitable urban expansion, sometimes ‘urban planning’ can also be held
accountable for the chaos that characterises the reality of Delhi at present,
as scholar and activist Gautam Bhan (2016) has argued. 166 Focusing on
the forced evictions of the urban poor from their so-called bastis, Bhan
situates this development within the broader context of a ‘rapidly
changing economic landscape with altered patterns and possibilities of
employment, consumption, production and work’. 167 The trajectories of
those inhabiting the city are uneven. The desire to become world-class
caters to middle-class aspirations that mean little to the urban poor, and
increasingly leave them in highly disenfranchised situations.
At the same time, the NCR’s expansion is increasingly equated with
what has come to be known as village-engulfing, the process whereby the
metropolis integrates rural settlements into the folds of its cityscape,
turning these former rural enclaves into ‘urban villages’. In contrast with
the urban poor of Bhan’s study, a considerable number of villagers in
Delhi’s peripheral rural areas have benefitted significantly from the
increase in the value of their ancestral land, especially the land-owning
Gujjar, Jat and Yadav communities. 168 There’s no denying the ubiquitous
presence of brand-new SUVs cruising down dusty village roads in ‘rural’
parts of the NCR, local youth in designer jeans and branded shirts behind
the steering wheel, bhangra blasting from the speakers. For the upper-
middle-class members of BodyHolics in South Delhi, this was decidedly
‘new middle class’ behaviour. Even if they drove the same SUVs, wore
the same sportswear, similarly obsessed about the latest iPhone or
Samsung Galaxy model, and probably enjoyed Honey Singh’s lurid lyrics,
for the older elite, these supposed arrivistes were to be met with
reservation and distrust. Interacting with Gujjar and Jat youth who were
involved in bodybuilding or fitness, or simply hanging out with members
of earlier mentioned federation, revealed a difficult, even acrimonious
relationship between these communities and the upper middle classes.
This was further underscored by the way popular media engaged with
their presence in the city, often associating them with disruptive,
dangerous or downright violent behaviour within the NCR. Caste was an
intrinsic part of these discussions, whether it centred around demands for
increased quotas in government positions or education, or land-owning
disputes with violent outcomes. The debates that took place on TV and in
newspapers were also to be heard, sometimes in coded ways, on the gym
floor.

DELHI AS A CITY OF VILLAGE (R )S

‘Delhi is, after all, a city of villages,’ Tejas, a regular member of
BodyHolics, once remarked as we were talking about the city’s many
problems—from air-pollution to unsafe conditions for women. Tejas was
involved in a family business that also included his father and several of
his brothers, and which currently focused on various construction projects
in Greater Noida. While the conversation had initially been about
increasingly worse traffic conditions and the need for more flyovers—
something always tinged with a hint of regret the damage to the city’s
aesthetic appeal that this entailed—Tejas was also seeking to explain the
city’s inherent village-like structure to a foreigner like me. To the
suggestion of another client that it might be more appropriate to call Delhi
a ‘city of villagers’, Tejas readily agreed, saying: ‘That’s what I mean,
they are all villagers, after all.’
Noticing how the remark had left me somewhat uncomfortable, I was
assured that it was all about attitude and behaviour. ‘I don’t mean these
guys,’ he assured me, nodding in the direction of Amit who was busy
assisting a client with the leg-press. To Tejas and other clients on the
floor, it was well known that Manish, Amit and several other trainers
hailed from Chirag Dilli, an urban village with a strong Jat presence that
had been part of South Delhi’s urban landscape for decades already.
While these upper-middle-class clients may trust these ‘urban villagers’,
Chirag Dilli itself was an area they would decidedly avoid. Since urban
villages are exempt from building by-laws and government permission to
undertake construction on existing buildings, the chaotic nature of their
set-up may be enough to deter the upper-middle-class gym’s clients to
venture out there. They also simply consist of entirely different worlds,
cheek-by-jowl as they are with high-end shopping malls and colonies.
Like Chirag Dilli, the more outlying urban villages that had recently
become part of Delhi’s ever-expanding urban landscape were treated with
suspicion because of how they contrasted fundamentally with the idea of
the city’s own upward mobility, challenging the very possibility of it ever
becoming a world-class one.
What is it about Delhi’s new middle-class ‘villagers’ that makes
them a scapegoat for the city’s many ailments? Why do they appear to
stand between the city and its world-class future? The Open Mr Delhi
competition provides a glimpse into the processes that bring the rural and
urban into dialogue in Delhi. Those in prominent positions in the village
were regularly called to the stage to be garlanded and honoured with
various awards that reinforced their prestige and position within the
community. Elderly men dressed in white dhoti–kurtas and turbans
shuffled to the front, some leaning gingerly on walking sticks, others being
helped by a younger member of the family. An all-male affair—even later
in the evening, when the crowd had easily crossed a few thousand, there
was not a single female face in the audience—the setting and context was
decidedly rural.
 In Delhi, the gap between what comprises the urban and the rural is
deceptive, even when it seems as if ‘villagers’ can be confidently
identified. The physical body also plays a role in how notions of the rural
and the urban are formulated. While the muscular body may be integral to
trajectories of upward mobility for lower-middle-class men, it needs to
compete with older assumptions of who the natural bearers of ‘such’
strong bodies are. Within the context of Delhi, this association clearly
befalls Gujjar and Jat men, belonging to rural/pastoral castes whose
ancestral villages are located in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. Considering
the popularity of pehlwani wrestling among these communities, this is not
surprising. In fact, Lord Krishna, one of Hinduism’s most revered deities
and a wrestling champion himself, is said to have been born into the
Yadav community, still considered the traditional custodians of Indian
wrestling. Casual conversations with BodyHolics’s clients would also
often bring up the milk-and-ghee-rich ‘rural’ diets of these communities,
which were assumed to lead unavoidably to a powerful build. I was
assured that ‘such men’ were naturally strong. A recurring question the
moment people learned of my research was that surely most bodybuilders
I had met in Delhi must be Gujjar or Jat? I had attended numerous
competitions and events, and they did not confirm this assumption, but
there was always a story gym clients shared of how somebody’s trainer
was a Jat-boy or how so-and-so was training under a bodybuilder who
hailed from ‘some Gujjar village’. ‘These men’ were not just highly
visible in the city but also ultimately ‘knowable’. While references to
Gujjars and Jats were generally negative, direct experiences with
individuals from these communities tended to be more positive. As a
friend once told me about her trainer at the upmarket gym she was a
member of:

He’s done incredibly well, that boy, he must be making what,

forty-K per month? That’s a lot for where he comes from. He
drives down from his village [near Gurgaon] every day, you
know? Takes him at least an hour or so. But he’s never late and
he’s so polite. He always says ‘ma’am today we will work
very hard on your body’. But he’s never pushy … not like some
 of these other guys. No lewd remarks, none of that what some of
these guys have, that you don’t feel secure around them.

A CITY WITH A VILLAGE BACKGROUND

The gym where the Open Mr Delhi pre-judgement took place was a
towering multi-level structure with an enormous billboard featuring a
bodybuilder, his fists held together, combat-ready, the veins on his arms as
well as those lining the side of his head ready to pop. Inside, a small table
had been put in a corner with two rows of white plastic chairs for the
various jury members. The person in charge was an elderly gentleman
with a commanding voice, speaking mainly in Hindi. Any bodybuilder
entering the gym for pre-judgement would first pay his respects to this
chairperson by lightly touching his feet and then bringing his hands to his
chest. One by one they entered the gym in training suits, friends
accompanying them, and stripped to their underwear, followed by
stepping onto a centrally placed weighing scale. Little emotion was
shown and even less acknowledgement made of the place they were in; it
was clearly something to get over with as the actual competition would
still be hours away for most. Since almost all participants would have
kept an extremely strict diet for days already, eating almost no
carbohydrates and sticking exclusively to protein-rich foods, while
gradually reducing their liquid intake and even resorting to diuretics to
make their muscular physiques look even more ‘dry’, it was no surprise
that there was little energy left to spare for pleasantries.
Meanwhile, I had struck up a conversation with thirty-four-year-old
Vikram, a regular trainer at the gym, though not an aspiring bodybuilder
himself. Strikingly lean and broad-shouldered, he was dressed in jeans,
limited-edition Adidas sports shoes, and a Lacoste polo-shirt. Though he
commanded big-city style, while explaining some context for this
particular competition, he seemed keen to highlight his own ‘village
background’ as well. Originally from Khurja, a town around 100 kms
from Delhi and mainly famous for pottery, his family had moved to the city
in 2006. He was initially enrolled in a bachelor’s degree in engineering,
but later switched to mass communications and was then doing an MBA
through distance learning. He had managed to improve his English after
coming to Delhi by enrolling in a one-and-a-half-month intensive course,
though mostly, he said, he had simply picked up the language by binge-
watching Hollywood movies. These movies not only brought him the
necessary entertainment and distraction from family affairs but also
managed to teach him ‘many things about the world’. Throughout, he
emphasised how proud he was of his father, who used to be employed by
the Uttar Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation in a supervisory-type
of position, which he described as ‘not so big of a job’ but that ‘still
managed to get us educated’. However, he stressed that ‘for a better
living, you have to move out’. At the same time, he was not convinced that
Delhi offered better living standards compared to his native Khurja.
Village life came with a certain peace of mind, whereas the city offered
mainly material comfort. ‘My father didn’t want us to work in the fields.
He kept us away from that.’ Now, making a living as a personal trainer, he
hoped to start his own business someday.
Vikram was a spectator during the pre-judgement and the competition
that followed. He was there just to observe, perhaps assist, but most of all
learn how others presented themselves on stage. He knew their bodies
would be judged in terms of certain key criteria such as symmetry, dryness
(vascularity) and muscularity; however, he was also keen to better
understand the ‘total package’ the jury was looking for. While discussing
criteria that might make a particular bodybuilder a winner, Vikram pointed
to a podgy trainer with rather uneven teeth who was sitting behind the
reception desk, commanding a particular air of confidence. Apparently
known as ‘a Mr Gurgaon’, he had put on considerable weight and was
now a shadow of his former self. Vikram remarked that he had ‘lost the
physique’ but that he was still a very respected figure in the bodybuilding
community. He had seen pictures of what he looked like when he was ‘at
his height’, pictures I had also come across online and which were widely
shared and respected.
Most bodybuilders in the competition were from nearby villages.
‘They struggle quite a bit to keep up with their diets and maintain their
bodies as sponsorships are rare,’ Vikram told me. The investments
required were hard to meet for most, ‘but also their diets are not always
what it needs to be’. A Gujjar himself, he knew all too well how
ingrained ‘local’ ideas of health were. ‘Drinking a few litres of milk is
not uncommon among these guys, you know? They’re farm boys, they have
easy access, they like their ghee and all that.’ He himself knew better and
stuck to what his trainer suggested, thus limiting his food intake mainly to
vegetables, occasionally chicken (something that did not come naturally to
him, having grown up in a vegetarian household), and his protein powders
and supplements. ‘It can be expensive, though,’ he added with some regret
but also a sense of pride. ‘Now I can afford it.’

Stepping outside to see how the preparations were underway on the plot
of land where earlier they were still busy erecting the stage, I met
Manosh, one of the federation’s central figures. Dressed in the
federation’s suit-and-tie, he had successfully competed in events such as
Mr Delhi and Mr Haryana over the years, but now considered his
competitive days to be over. Employed as a hospitality manager with an
international hotel chain, he combined his many responsibilities (from
coordinating the airport-based sales team to overseeing the leisure
operations, such as gym and swimming pool) with promoting ‘the sport’.
Originally from Haryana, he traced his roots to a village near
Bahadurgarh but stayed in ‘a village called Najafgarh’, a Gujjar
stronghold. Manosh said he simply considers himself a Hindu with no
interest in caste politics. It is also not something that is supposed to matter
on stage: ‘Only the body counts when you are there.’ As other members of
the federation assured me, all castes and religions were welcome,
something the names of those competing tended to reflect. But Manosh
agreed with Vikram that ‘many of the boys will be from around here’, and
those of Gujjar and Jat backgrounds appeared dominant. Some work out at
the gym that was hosting this competition, ‘others may go somewhere in
the city’.
As for the local akharas, he was less certain about them. ‘That is
getting less now, they are no longer so interested in that.’ In fact, he had
heard that quite a few were now in the process of being converted to gyms
or bringing in gym equipment. 169 ‘Young guys no longer want to stick to
that …’ which I interpreted as a thinly veiled reference to the akharas’
brahmacharya ideal which promotes abstinence, not just of meat and
alcohol but also of sexual intercourse. The influence of Bollywood was
undeniable here. ‘They all want the six-pack, eight-pack, so they go for
that. A different workout is required for that, different food as well.’
Manosh used to train under a bodybuilder who was then preparing
for Mr World and would not be present today. He considers this ‘three-
time all-over India champion’ his guru or teacher. This bodybuilder
himself was coached by Bhupender Dhawan, another well-known figure
in the world of bodybuilding. A Dronacharya awardee 170 for his
dedication to bodybuilding, Bhupender was, in fact, never a bodybuilder
himself. His Dronacharya gym chain remains a well-known source for
bodybuilding talent in the city, and it is where Manosh used to work out.
He fondly recalled his own posing days as we watched young
bodybuilders enter and exit the gym, often looking listless if not downright
sleepy. ‘When they get on stage, you will see a whole different
personality,’ Manosh guaranteed me. ‘Then they will give a good show.’
He was sure of that. ‘But now they won’t show it because they haven’t
eaten anything. They will be reserving their energies to give a good stage
presence.’ The way they presented themselves on stage could make a huge
difference, and for the jury, this often meant taking difficult decisions.
‘Sometimes you have to give a bodybuilder less although their physique is
quite good. On stage he has to be like an actor, they are a different person
altogether.’ But this did not just apply to what they did on stage, he felt.
‘It’s also when they want to make a living out of this, they have to
understand how to present themselves to clients.’ They will not all have
successful careers, he felt. ‘Some of these guys can’t talk, they don’t know
English very well.’ For information about their workouts ‘these guys’
would rely mainly on their trainers ‘who can tell them anything’, making a
rather oblique reference to the copious use of steroid and growth
hormones among bodybuilders. ‘But if they are from the villages, they
also sometimes don’t know how to behave in the city, that is the problem,’
he said. With a father who had always made sure that his son got an
‘English-medium’ education, he felt he had never struggled with this
himself.
 Both Vikram and Manosh were born, brought up and continued to
live in villages, but there isn’t anything that makes them villagers per se,
even if their village origins remain an integral part of the story they
narrate about themselves. This is much less the case when it comes to
their caste background, which only features peripherally in these stories.
As much as their personal trajectories and family histories point to ‘being
Gujjar’, the aspect of their lives that both men emphasised is the route
from village to city that they ‘traversed’, subsequently making a living
away from home and community and struggling to acquire the necessary
education and knowledge ‘to survive’. Now successful professionals, they
reflected on the bodybuilding competition with a certain disdain, even if
they were involved in the organisation themselves. Vikram expressed this
in his opinion of the participants—‘local boys from nearby villages’—of
whom he did not have particularly high expectations. ‘But there will be
some good guys on stage, you’ll see what I mean.’ Manosh was less
outspoken but seemed puzzled by the location of the competition. ‘They
might not like to come to a village from the city,’ he thought. Moreover,
holding the competition in an open field would require waiting for the sun
to go down, considering it was still very hot during the day. ‘It’s better to
do it inside, but these people wanted it to be done here. They take some
pride in that. It gives their village a good standing.’

CASTE AND LAND POLITICS

There is something categorically fallacious about the dichotomy of the
rural and the urban. 171 In the case of Delhi, the urban and rural are
decidedly connected and entangled. Sociologist Sanjay Srivastava (2015),
of the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi, speaks of ‘entangled
urbanism’ when describing the complexities of urban development and
planning as well as the many groups of stakeholders involved across the
socioeconomic spectrum. In research that deals with the complexities that
emerge from such entanglements in India, the focus is often on the urban
poor and the way they negotiate everyday life in the city, struggling against
forced displacement and evictions, demanding a home to live in and a
dignified life, while faced with an often-venal state machinery’s ambitions
of world-classness. 172
 International development and global urbanisms scholar Ananya Roy
(2011) uses the idea of subaltern urbanism to discuss the various
strategies the urban poor engage in to protect their rights and livelihoods.
As with Gautam Bhan’s seminal work on the topic, the focus is on those
who are in particularly vulnerable positions. While ‘village engulfing’
follows a different trajectory, in that it does directly (financially) benefit
the landholders involved, it not only leaves a sizeable segment of the
local population (often ‘landless’ Dalits) in a disenfranchised position, it
also ushers in big-city dynamics and expectations that rural communities
are often ill-prepared for.
While this chapter focuses on Gujjar and Jat land-owning
communities and their rural-to-urban trajectories, parallels can be drawn
with the Thevar and Gounder (Kongu Vellalar) castes of Tamil Nadu, the
Lingayats in Karnataka and Maharashtra’s Marathas. It is also not that
much of a stretch to draw comparisons between Gurgaon and other post-
1991 urban expansions and transformations, such as Bangalore’s
Whitefield or Calcutta’s New Town. 173 Related regional (‘rural’) caste
groups have all pushed for increased reservation quotas and/or a change
in hierarchical designation (for instance by seeking Other Backward Caste
status) at some point. Yet there are obvious differences as well, the most
important being that, compared to Delhi, the urban expansion of cities
such as Bangalore, Hyderabad or Mumbai has intruded much less on high-
value agricultural land, and often involved engulfing areas that could
already be characterised to a certain degree as ‘urban’. 174
It was the 1961 Delhi Master Plan that initially set the tone for the
city’s urban planning and policy. 175 Village engulfing needs to be
understood as an inevitable outcome of what was set in motion then. The
Delhi Development Authority (DDA), responsible for executing the plan,
annexed agricultural land and absorbed villages in its wake, as a result of
which an initial forty-seven villages in 1961 had increased to 135 in
2013. 176
Gurgaon in Haryana is probably the most famous case of how
spectacularly vast and fast the rural-to-urban transformation has been in
the NCR. A small agricultural town till the mid-1980s and the least
developed of all of Delhi’s satellite towns, it would transform into an
international hub with distinctly ‘Americanising’ ambitions post 1991. 177
It is currently one of India’s major outsourcing hubs, housing a number of
multinationals, ranging from Alcatel and IBM to British Airways, General
Electric, General Motors and Nestlé. 178 Besides that, the ‘city’ has
invested heavily in Special Economic Zones to appeal to international
companies—all made possible by the buying up of land from peripheral
villages. 179 While this has enriched land-owning communities, a
complaint regularly heard is that grazing (gauchara) land has disappeared,
leaving a younger generation without much purpose in life, 180 something
that contributes to the impression of aimless youth with new wealth to
spend but without the necessary sociocultural capital to fit in with an
older (formerly wealthier) upper middle class.
A comparative case can be made here for Delhi’s other sizeable
satellite town, the planned city of Noida in Uttar Pradesh. The direct
product of a law that came into being on 17 April 1976, the basic aim of
Noida was to shift industry away from Delhi. However, Noida ended up
growing much faster than expected, and in 1989 an initiative was
undertaken to extend Noida into what is now called Greater Noida. While
Noida was a carefully planned city, Greater Noida engulfed manifold
villages, which were swallowed up by large-scale urban planning and
building activities in rapid succession. As with Gurgaon, the increase in
land value, the backdrop of caste politics, and the complex involvement of
the state, large-scale real-estate developers and myriad other players have
created a volatile situation that not rarely leads to violence and
bloodshed. While on the face of it they ought to be natural allies, the
Gujjar community and the hierarchically somewhat higher-placed Jat
community 181 have rarely joined hands as landowners with joint interest,
as sociologist and public intellectual Dipankar Gupta (2000) also notes.
To the contrary, within the context of urban expansion and increased land
value, both communities often appear to be competitors. The ensuing
conflicts could be understood to at least peripherally contribute to the
continued urban-middle-class perspective of these communities as
boorish, feudal and socially backward. 182 A prominent role in the way
perceptions are shaped is not just the way both communities regularly
make headlines for their involvement in caste-related violence, but also
for their involvement in large-scale agitations and disruptions. While this
is a simplistic sketch of a highly complex situation, it aims only to be
impressionistic, attempting to portray the perception or idea of Delhi as a
city of villages, villagers and village interests. The point I seek to make
should not be understood as to vilify said caste groups, who themselves
are victims of state-sponsored and privately initiated developments, but to
show how the perception of ‘who they are’ continues to colour relations
and constrain upward mobility.

THE F GILITY AND PRECARITY OF THE CITY ITSELF

Jat-led actions in particular are frequently held up as evidence of the

fragility of and the ease with which the smooth functioning of Delhi can be
disrupted. In 2016, Delhi faced a severe water crisis when Jat protesters
forcibly closed the inlet gates to Munak Canal, one of the city’s main
water sources, carrying as much as 60 per cent of its water. 183 It has
become increasingly common to employ the shorthand of ‘Jat agitation’ to
refer to such actions and to question their justifiability by labelling it as
‘quota blackmail’ and claiming that the city is being held at ransom. 184
Often invoked is the argument that Jat and Gujjar communities are
comparatively well-off, with reports citing ostentatious consumerism and
lavish spending on spectacularly flamboyant weddings. Making note of
guest lists running into the tens of thousands, The Times of India remarked
on dowry gifts of cars and real estate, and that even choppers were not
beyond the realm of possibility. 185 The framing is mainly one of
unbridled ostentation run amok, lacking sophistication and restraint.
Already in 2007, author and activist Primila Lewis described the Gujjar
community as having been ‘hurled into raging consumerism of
liberalising, globalising India singularly ill-equipped to deal with it’. 186
This assertion followed a few weeks after Gujjars had laid siege to
various entry points of Delhi and blocked railway tracks in order to
demand Scheduled Tribe status in the state of Rajasthan and 5 per cent
reservation in government jobs.
In an insightful study, with a focus on western Uttar Pradesh, beyond
Greater Noida, researcher Satendra Kumar (2011) concludes that there
are no significant differences in terms of socio-economic status between
Gujjar, Jat and Yadav communities. In terms of education, all three can be
considered backward, with high levels of illiteracy and low college
attendance. 187 While Jats are known for having accumulated considerable
wealth by selling off farmland, Bhatia Singh notes that, with the
continuous subdivision of landholdings due to prevailing inheritance
practices (which means land has to be divided among all sons), average
plot sizes have declined over time. 188 In effect, this means that while
families as a whole may have profited from selling off land—with
‘capital’ having to be shared among many family members—‘individual’
spending power is a different matter. Another consequence of selling off
farmland has been a diminished sense of masculine self-worth for young
Jats. 189 While wealth may have increased as well as opportunities for
consumption, there is ‘simply’ less to do at the same time. As sociologist
Radhika Govinda (2013) describes it, in the context of Shahpur Jat, the
urban village in South Delhi that was the location of her research: ‘Young
Jat men can be seen strutting around in Nike and Reebok T-shirts, tight
enough to reveal their big biceps, mobile phones in hand, with loud techno
and trance music blaring from their swanky cars.’ 190 ‘Eve-teasing’ is a
favourite pastime, but she also notes excessive drinking and visits to
Delhi’s red-light areas as causing the village ambience to deteriorate.
Spending time at home with family is clearly no longer the norm, Govinda
concludes.
Similarly, the Gujjar community more commonly makes headlines
due to caste violence, especially as part of clashes with the (Dalit) Jatav
community with whom they often share villages. Invariably, such accounts
boil down to property disputes, for instance in Ramgarh village, which
made headlines in 2012. Gujjar men had gone to the village’s Dalit colony
armed with sticks, country-made pistols and axes and beaten up men,
women and children. The conflict at the heart was a local land-allocation
issue involving panchayat land that had been allotted to sixty Jatav
families for houses or cattle-sheds. Instead, the Gujjar gram pradhan, or
panchayat head, decided to occupy the land himself. The razing of the
colony was clearly meant to teach the Jatavs not to interfere in the grander
scheme of things. With many Jats having sold their land and Gujjar
families in the process of doing so, Jatav families have been left with
little means to earn an income. Most continue to be landless, mainly
seeking employment as farmhands. A Frontline article that presented a
detailed analysis of the case reveals the broader context: ‘Around
Ramgarh, a private construction company has acquired most of the lands
to build a mega city consisting of housing societies, shopping malls,
private schools and hospitals and large sports facilities.’ 191 According to
the article, most Jat families had already sold their land to the company
that was supposed to build the proposed town called Sushant Megapolis.
Local Gujjar families were most likely going to follow suit.
The case of Ramgarh village reminded me of a similar one a few
years earlier in Kanavani, which also involved a Gujjar–Jatav clash.
Here, the property dispute involved an ex-pradhan and members of both
communities. 192 It revolved around the ownership of sixty-five square
metres of land which the former village head, a Gujjar, together with a
brother and nephew, sought to claim ownership of by raising a token
construction. 193 The Jatav community had objected to this after which it
had come to an all-out confrontation. A twenty-two-year-old was shot
dead and several homes and vehicles destroyed. The man who lost his life
was a recently married ‘B.Com student’ and a Gujjar. As retaliation, a
Dalit school was bulldozed to the ground the same night, and several
families had to flee their homes for fear of further violence. Before the
clashes, the family of the murdered Gujjar youth and the two main Jatavs
involved in the dispute had been on good terms and had worked together
for years in the real estate business. 194
Ramgarh lies just beyond Greater Noida, while Kanavani is located
within Noida’s boundaries, not too far from Ghaziabad. Both are within
the now established parameters of the NCR.
The agitations, conflicts and bloodshed sketched briefly here do not
in the least do justice to the complexity of inter-caste relations, ownership
disputes, or the politics that cause these divides to play out in these
specific ways. All it attempts to do is briefly sketch the interplay of
factors that complicate the deceptively simple rural–urban dichotomy. The
urban is constantly present in these ‘rural’ issues, while rural
complications leave their mark on the city as well. Besides, the way such
agitations and bloodshed get reported on leaves its mark on how Gujjar
and Jat men are regarded (often with suspicion) more generally. The
biographies and day-to-day experiences of lower-middle-class men in
Delhi reflect this quandary, in that trajectories of upward mobility often
require negotiating and renegotiating the relationship between rural and
urban, especially in terms of ideas of masculinity. This is not so much
about actually moving out of one’s ancestral village or the experience of
the village becoming part of the city, but rather about the realisation of
what ‘the city’ and ‘urban life’ itself are held to stand for.
On the one hand, bodybuilding, with its highly specific associations
with massively muscular bodies, resonates a village ideal—that of the
pehlwan or well-built rural figure, a product of the land and diets rich in
ghee and milk—on the other hand, this bodybuilder’s body also has the
potential to appeal to an urban upper-middle-class clientele with its
promise of transformation. The body thus reflects the potential of the city
as well as its limitations.

BODYBUILDING FROM VILLAGE TO CITY

A few weeks after his win, Shivam takes me to Rajender Bainsla’s house
in a busy market area of South Delhi, not too far from Kalkaji mandir. He
was still riding high on claiming third place and had shown the pictures to
all his friends and colleagues. During the day, Bainsla runs a women’s-
only gym but is also involved in various other fitness-related business
ventures as well. Shy about his English, he is mostly quiet, only
occasionally interjecting as Shivam holds forth on Delhi’s bodybuilding
scene. Seated on red plastic chairs in a spartanly decorated room with a
lone poster of Lord Hanuman on the wall, he is keen to make me
understand the mammoth contribution Bainsla has made to the sport and to
him personally. ‘No bloody coach knows all this medical stuff like he
does,’ he says, referring to protein intake, supplements and steroids use. ‘I
will explain each and every one thing to you,’ he adds confidently.
‘There is this tag that we are all poor people here. Why is that?’ I
interpret this to be an echo of the impression Shivam himself has of
Delhi’s bodybuilding scene. Born in a Brahmin family and brought up in
Inderpuri, a somewhat affluent suburb in Delhi, he belongs to the ‘middle’
of the middle classes, and is employed with an agency tasked with
investigating corruption-related issues. He has had an English-medium
education, and his fluency impresses and even intimidates Bainsla, who
usually has an impressive effect on others himself. Vipin, a younger cousin
of Bainsla’s, who has just joined us, and is one of his disciples, also
treats Shivam with reverence. Eager to continue his laudation of Bainsla’s
many accomplishments, Shivam says: ‘Bainsla-ji here, he has been here
and he has done nothing but raise the name of bodybuilding!’ Vipin agrees,
nodding ardently. ‘It is his goal to produce bodybuilders like Shivkumar,’
he says, referring to a well-known senior bodybuilder who often makes
special appearances at local bodybuilding competitions. ‘He has trained
more than hundred bodybuilders!’
For Shivam, Shivkumar is an idol whose form he can only hope to
approach one day. But it is not just his physique that Shivam admires:
‘You know, in 1994 he was only a slum-guy?’ Bainsla smiles in
agreement. ‘He did not get a single meal per day. He did not even have
two, three rupees to spend per day!’ Turning to Bainsla, he says something
in Hindi which translates as ‘if nobody is there for you, God is there’.
‘But God will not come by himself, God will always come as a person.’
And that’s how Bainsla’s entry into Shivkumar’s life should be
interpreted, according to Shivam. ‘He saw some spark in that guy and he
decided to make him a personal champion. He decided that on the spot.’
Apparently, Shivkumar was not involved in bodybuilding at all before
this. ‘I have no words for his dedication that way. He had given him
money, shelter. He has done that for so many. Shivkumar was normal at the
time, not a single muscle!’
Throughout Shivam’s oration, Vipin is vigorously shaking a plastic
flask filled with water and protein powder, the smell of vanilla wafting
every time he unscrews the lid to take a sip. He wears a white vest, black
shorts and faded red flip-flops, and the harsh tube light that illuminates the
room ricochets off his bald head. A neatly kept moustache with the edges
pointing upward complements a carefully cultivated image that combines
the rural strongman with the B-grade Hindi film actor ready to rid his
village of corrupt police officers and an evil property developer. Even
though his body lacks the kind of definition required to be competitive, his
look makes him a popular presence at bodybuilding competitions. An
ostentatious presence at such competitions, he is usually dressed in jeans,
cowboy boots and a white shirt, the sleeves neatly rolled up to reveal his
powerful biceps, a golden bracelet on one wrist and an expensive-looking
watch on the other. Vipin keeps the top three or four buttons of his shirt
open to give his sprouting chest-hair space to breathe. On occasion, he
even carries a small silver gun, deftly holstered and clipped to his belt,
much to the awe and admiration of those in the audience. I know it bothers
Shivam who finds it ‘too village-like’, but there is a palpable effect on the
audience each time he makes an appearance. He is clearly flaunting an
image that appeals as much as it causes confusion. Is he perhaps really an
underworld figure? Might he be aspiring for a role in the movies? What
precisely is he trying to say? I had heard members of the audience gossip
about this but was never quite sure myself, and Shivam admitted once that
he wasn’t either. For all his presence, Vipin was never much of a talker.
Instead, it is Shivam who talks about his financial troubles.
‘You know that his family lives thirty kilometres from this place?’
Shivam gently pats Vipin’s back. ‘But he rents a place here in this building
because one day he will be a big champion.’ Apparently, he has a wife
and two children back in the village, which is located somewhere in
Greater Noida. ‘It’s very different there, you should see it.’ Shivam
shakes his head as if in disbelief. ‘One day we will go there, we will all
go together and make a trip out of it.’ Vipin seems to like this suggestion.
While Bainsla has left the room to take care of some business, Vipin is
encouraged to take off his singlet and flex his muscles to showcase the
progress he has made. ‘Wow, what a physique,’ Shivam says in
admiration. ‘The only thing he needs to do is shave his body. He is too
hairy.’ Vipin flexes a few more times, which leads Shivam to conclude
that ‘he will be such a big star, this guy’.
As always, the conversation turns to the lack of recognition of
bodybuilding as a serious sport by the Indian government. Shivam says,
‘It’s such a craze to be in this game. But the government is not taking care
of us at all.’ In fact, he is contemplating approaching the media about this.
‘I am gonna make them hear about this!’ Pointing to Vipin, he continues:
‘Look at the investment he has made in his body. He has such a big body
now!’ He takes Vipin’s phone and starts browsing through his pictures to
show the progress he has made. Various pictures scroll past, all
invariably with Vipin posing on the hood of a Jeep or next to an SUV, the
sprawling UP-countryside behind him. In one, he is standing next to a
cousin who has a bulky physique; Vipin informs me he is a well-known
pehlwan. In another, the famous Shivkumar is flexing his muscles at the
airport, on his way to a competition in Mongolia or perhaps another
destination, Vipin is not sure.

Vipin and Shivam have clearly known each other for a while, but are
obviously from very different backgrounds. Shivam’s English is fluent,
Vipin is barely able to string a coherent sentence together in the language.
Shivam is from the city, while Vipin’s village background is constantly
emphasised, even though he resides in South Delhi. In a mixture of English
and Hindi, haltingly Vipin explains: ‘I am so messed up with life. This is
a bad test.’ He is finding it hard to put into words what he is going
through. ‘My family, they are expecting much from me.’ Shivam takes over
and explains that, now that Vipin is married, he is supposed to put the
well-being of his parents front and centre, but his bodybuilding
aspirations are in the way. ‘In our culture, we all appreciate that, after
marriage, he has a bride and gives comfort to his father and mother.’
However, the predicament is that Vipin is ‘totally focused on becoming
big’. That way, he will be able to ‘show true respect to his parents’. His
wife takes care of his parents, while Vipin focuses on his bodybuilding
career, which he combines with providing fitness training. ‘He’s always
concerned not to neglect them as a man’—of that Shivam is certain.
As landlords, the family has made ‘some big investments’, as Shivam
puts it. They are involved in construction projects in Greater Noida, but
have also sold off considerable plots of land. There is money, Vipin
seems to suggest, but not necessarily purpose. ‘He is giving it his all,’
Shivam explains, ‘but it is not easy, being a bodybuilder, wife and kids at
home, back in the village.’ This is something Vipin definitely agrees with,
but he also seems befuddled with how Shivam heaps praise upon praise.
Throughout our conversation, it is hard not to notice how Shivam takes the
upper-hand, emphasising Vipin and Bainsla’s trajectory, their limited
English language skills and humble village-like upbringing, while
underlining their successes. Bainsla’s assertion that it is his aim ‘to
improve the bodybuilding and bodybuilders in India’ is quickly followed
by Shivam’s avowal and clarification that it’s Bainsla’s intention ‘to take
it to the height of success’. And Shivam is keen to be part of this himself,
knowing they can use his skills and contacts. ‘I am gonna change the way.
I am gonna make them see about the game,’ meaning the government as
well as the public at large.
Bainsla and his direct associates’ involvement in the local
bodybuilding federation and related fitness business ventures remained
relatively constant over the years I knew them, profiting from the sport
and industry’s growth. They even made use of it for political gain and to
get a foot in the door for lucrative government contracts. But while, in
theory, better equipped in terms of education, English language skills and
his middle-class upbringing, Shivam’s career continued to flounder, faced
with hurdles and obstacles he had not expected to come in his way. His
determination to change how the government as well as the public at large
would perceive bodybuilding fell on deaf ears, while his involvement in
various fitness-related initiatives and businesses was generally
unsuccessful as well.
It is easy to argue that perhaps Shivam himself was just not cut out
for his own larger-than-life ambitions. But that would be selling his story
short. I believe his endeavours shed light on rural–urban entanglements
and the way they colour the rapid transformation of the city’s landscape in
physical as well as socioeconomic terms. Caste politics, class difference
and ideas of the male body and associated masculinity all impact how
Shivam’s individual trajectory as well as that of others unfold within this
context.

A VILLAGE WEDDING IN THE CITY

A few months after we visited Bainsla’s home, Shivam and I are invited
to attend a wedding in a village in Greater Noida. Standing in drizzling
rain next to Shivam, who is dressed in a black embroidered sherwani, we
wait for the bride to exit her parental home and join her new husband in a
white Mercedes that waits with the engine running. The groom is
Bainsla’s cousin, though I am not entirely sure about the actual family
relations and neither is Shivam, for that matter. Having picked me up from
the Akshardham metro station after a two-hour delay due to the heavy
rains that morning, he had instructed his Ola driver to make a pit-stop at a
liquor store first, explaining: ‘We can’t arrive sober, man, they won’t like
that.’ The driver, who seemed somewhat intimidated by Shivam’s hulking
presence and thundering voice, said it would be okay for us to drink in the
car but that we should keep our cups out of sight of other drivers and be
vigilant for police checks. Dismissing these concerns, Shivam said: ‘In
these areas, cops will understand, man. We will just tell them we are
headed for this wedding.’ In fact, it would not surprise him if there were
some politicians in attendance at the wedding. ‘These people have a lot of
land, money, influence, you know.’
The Ola driver dropped us somewhere on the highway from where
we were picked up by an SUV that took us further afield into Greater
Noida at truly breakneck speed. Racing through small villages on muddy
roads lined with half-built apartments and other types of construction
projects in various stages of completion, there was no escaping the
ubiquitous presence of huge billboards with ads for cement companies
featuring uber-muscular figures not unlike the one Shivam had sported
when he took the stage himself. Recently married, he had since put on
considerable weight, and confided in me that he was not working out
much lately. ‘All I want to lift right now is my wife!’ There were also ‘all
these family visits to attend to’, he complained, at least once every week,
which left him no choice but to deviate from his diet. ‘But I will be
making a comeback, you will see!’ A month earlier, at his wedding, I had
noticed that his bride was a rather shy girl who seemed quite perplexed
by Shivam’s boisterousness and that of his brothers. ‘But I am happy with
that, you know, she won’t be so demanding as my girlfriends,’ he laughed,
slapping my back and knocking the wind out me. ‘They were always
asking me for things, demanding shopping, movies, gifts.’ It had exhausted
him and it was also why he had agreed to this marriage proposal when it
came along. ‘I always say: love is for sex, arranged is for forever, no love
in it.’ He did not think it was necessary for this marriage to be about love.
‘She comes from a poor family, but that doesn’t matter to me. Her father
sells shawls … They are also originally from UP, same caste, so that
matters.’ But the wedding we are heading to now will be very different
from his own, he assured me, though the main event would have been over
by the time we reach, as even the Formula One-style driving of the SUV
could not make up for the considerable delay of the morning.
Shivam’s own massive wedding had taken place near his house in
Inderpuri, and there had also been a rather lavish engagement ceremony in
Pitampura a few weeks earlier. Both times I spent most of the evening
outside the venue, drinking cheap whisky from the boot of the car with
Shivam’s brothers and cousins while one of the waiters, who had been
specially instructed, brought snacks regularly. ‘You liked our food, no?’
Shivam asked yet again. ‘You will like the food at this wedding as well,’
he assured me. ‘It will be very rich though; these people really like their
ghee.’ It’s also why they make great pehlwans he suggested. ‘They have
that in their blood, they’re fighters these guys.’ There will be no drinking
from the boot of the car, though. ‘You can do that in the city, but here there
will be too many prying eyes. The elders won’t like it.’ As if reading my
thoughts, Shivam explained: ‘We are coming all the way from the city, so
they would like us to enjoy ourselves.’ And this is why we were still
drinking in the car, though there was more whisky on my pants now than in
the cup I was trying to bring to my mouth, thanks to the state of the road.
When we arrived, the rain had finally turned to a drizzle. Exiting the
car, we crossed several courtyards, all part of the same compound that
consisted of various interlinked buildings, and which was flanked by an
impressive row of SUVs, until we reached an open field where we were
handed paper plates with food. The groom stood next to a white
Mercedes, which according to Shivam belonged to a local politician that
the family had some business dealing with. He was smoking a cigarette
and talking to one of his ‘brothers’ whom I recognised from an earlier
competition. ‘They are all connected, these people,’ Shivam mumbled as
he downed the final sip of whisky and tossed his plastic cup casually
behind him. The groom also used to be a wrestler but is no longer
competing, I was told.
All this information was meant to underline what Shivam had
suggested earlier, that for a Gujjar family like this one, the connection
with working out and ‘building bodies’ is a more ‘natural’ fit than it was
for a person of Brahmin background like himself. In that sense, his own
history with bodybuilding contrasts with that of Vipin and Bainsla, in that
Shivam was very much a ‘skinny kid’ himself. ‘Weak! Kamzor, we say.’
One day, he got into a fight with ‘this guy’ from his neighbourhood who
was much stronger. ‘I thought, if he slaps me one more time, he will fly
home without a school bus.’ But he did not have the physique to follow
through on this and that was his initial encouragement to start working out.
Four years later, he met the same person at a local wedding and had the
courage to tell him, ‘Man, you better get out of my face.’ Apparently, ‘he
could not believe himself that I had become that big’. Shivam added: ‘His
mind could not recognise me.’ He had told his mother to make sure that
‘this guy’ did not come within eyesight of him again. ‘By that time, I was
eating twenty bananas and drinking three boxes of milk per day!’ It was a
memory he always recalled fondly—not just the look on the face of his
former adversary but also more generally the reactions from others in his
neighbourhood. His body had commanded a certain respect that it never
had before. But it had also come with new questions, especially with
reference to what he wanted to do with his life. He had job security but
not necessarily ‘job satisfaction’.

Shoes crusted with mud, the food finished and the remainder of the whisky
left in the car, there is not much to do but wait for the bride to finally make
it out of the house. ‘Won’t be long now, my man,’ Shivam says. ‘Patience
is all there is to it.’ Suddenly, a group of elderly women emerge from the
house and start singing a local Gurjari song, which I am told is sung to
bestow courage upon the bride as she bids farewell to her parents.
Dressed in a bridal-red sari and bedecked with jewels, her face barely
visible because of the veil she is carefully keeping in place, she is
abundantly and ‘sufficiently’ overcome by grief, wailing at the top of her
voice. Dryly, Shivam comments: ‘She is playing her role well, man.’ As
the womenfolk start another song of encouragement, the bride finally gets
into the car and the couple drives off. Somewhat relieved, my clothes
thoroughly wet because of the rain, I discreetly ask Shivam if we can
make an exit ourselves now. ‘Oh no, my brother,’ he says and laughs
heartily, ‘she will come back!’ I stare at him in disbelief—‘What do you
mean she will come back?’ Roughly ten minutes later, the car indeed
returns, bride and groom in it. Barely does it come to a halt, and the bride
jumps out howling. She runs to the womenfolk who had been patiently
waiting, clearly expecting this to happen.
‘What will happen now?’
Shivam looks surprised at this firang’s odd obliviousness: ‘This will
happen a few more times and then we can go.’ He estimates one or two
times, not more. ‘She can’t just leave like that,’ he explains. ‘She needs to
let her parents know how much she will miss them. That’s just the way
they do these things here.’

GARLANDING GURUS AND FLEXING MUSCLES

When I return to Delhi about a year later in mid-2015, I find that Shivam
has decided to invest in a gym himself, and he cheerfully invites me to
attend the opening. I am the first to arrive at the gym, located near Naraina
Vihar metro station opposite a busy flyover in southwest Delhi. It is two
o’clock in the afternoon, the time of the official opening advertised on the
banner near the entrance, but no guests have arrived yet; even Shivam is
stuck in traffic. As I take my seat on one of the plastic chairs that are
placed in neat rows facing a temporary stage, I learn that it will likely be
another hour before the first guests make an appearance. The gym is an old
one, known for its local bodybuilding clientele, but no one will be let
inside until the official programme wraps up. Once guests start arriving,
the connection between the gym and various members of the bodybuilding
federation Shivam belongs to, and whose competition he had participated
in over a year earlier, becomes abundantly clear. Bainsla is there, as well
as various other dignitaries such as Manosh and well-known bodybuilder
and gym-owner Dinesh Aswal. The arrival of senior bodybuilder
Shivkumar is met with enthusiastic applause, whistling and the vigorous
shaking of hands. Once Shivam himself arrives, the official part of the
programme can begin.
After a number of speeches and the garlanding of various
bodybuilders and senior members of the federation, a local politician
steps forward to provide Shivam with some words of wisdom, after
which he asks Shivam’s father to join him on stage. The two then
nervously peel white shawls out from plastic wrappers which are
subsequently handed out to others such as Shivkumar, who is asked to
provide the audience with a bodybuilding show that he ‘reluctantly’
agrees to do. Quickly shedding his T-shirt, he takes the stage in his jeans
and strikes various classical poses underneath the banner of the ‘Hanuman
Gym’. On the announcement banner, Shivam is welcomed as ‘our new
coach’, though he basically owns it. Another banner carries the pictures of
the important guests expected to be in attendance: Sh. Rajender Bainsla
(Hon’ble General Secretary DBBA) … Sh. Shiv Bainsla (Pro Body
Builder, Mr Asia Gold Medallist 2013), Sh. Pradeep Bainsla (Chief
Mentor Hanuman Gym). 195 Shivam’s name is accompanied by the
designation that he had taken fifth place in a Mr Universe competition held
in Italy. Although the federation had facilitated his participation, he had
paid for his own airfare and accommodation, thinking of it as an
investment in his reputation as a bodybuilder and trainer.
The interaction between various dignitaries, politicians and senior
bodybuilders reminds me of the many bodybuilding competitions I had
attended in Delhi and elsewhere over time. In the same year as Shivam’s
own third place, there were various Mr Delhi competitions held across
town, including one in the centrally located Talkatora Stadium. Even
though it appeared to be the exact opposite of the village setting of the
other competition, it was in fact organised by the same federation and the
jury comprised the same members. The village elders were absent, but
there was no shortage of politicians and businessmen who were called on
stage to be garlanded and honoured. Non-participating bodybuilders, no
matter their seniority, would head straight for the various ‘gurus’ in the
front row and touch their feet respectfully.

Back at Shivam’s grand gym opening, Shivkumar has finally been

convinced, at the enthusiastic hollering of the crowd, to take off his jeans
and strip down to his underwear in order to show off incredible leg
muscles. His performance is followed by another bodybuilder who has
been making a mark at various competitions, and finally Shivam himself.
In much better shape than when we attended the wedding in Greater
Noida, it is clear that his capacity ‘to enjoy life’ might mean he will never
quite achieve the austere results showcased by Shivkumar, who has stuck
to a closely monitored diet for years now and lets nothing distract him
from his next workout. Having given up on his secure job, Shivam is now
about to embark on an entirely new adventure. I am struck by the spartan
quality of the gym that Shivam hopes will launch his career in fitness. An
incredibly sober place, the equipment is old and worn though no doubt
functional. As with akharas gradually doubling as gyms, catering to
youngsters who no longer aspire to become wrestlers but aim to build
their bodies, gyms such as this one have gradually been forced to
modernise and let go of their earlier associations with the Indian model of
bodybuilding.
Shivam’s stint as gym manager does not last long. Within half a year,
he has given up, and when I see him again in 2017, he is busy developing
various business initiatives while offering personal training on the side.
We meet in an office above a car showroom in Connaught Place, and I am
introduced to a businessman who is involved in something called Loan
Bazaar and with whom he is planning to organise a fitness event. Part of
these plans include setting up his own federation, a major motivation for
which is his concern that there is ‘cheating’ within older, established
federations, especially the one he now no longer wants to be associated
with. How this new federation will tackle this remains mystifyingly
vague. While I too had sometimes doubted the jurors’ choice of a winner
now and then, I had also come to realise that the very nature of
bodybuilding—with its extreme focus on the body and its relationship
with the mirror—made for an inherently unstable one. Self-doubt went
hand-in-hand with suspicion and paranoia, not rarely fuelled by extreme
dieting and the use of controlled substances. Yet, I also knew that Shivam
had never gone this far, and benefitting from ‘superior genetics’, as he put
it, had not been known to stick to strict diets for very long.
He was also disappointed with the way ‘things’ had worked out with
the gym so soon after his appointment as head coach and manager had
been announced with so much fanfare. ‘The clients were nothing there!
They were just boys, sons of noodle-sellers.’ As a result, he had barely
made any money, even losing a considerable sum, he told me. The rant
Shivam starts on does not seem to bother nor interest the businessman we
are with, and who is now taking care of something on his phone. ‘Bainsla
really cheated me, that guy,’ he repeats. Not only did he make a loss with
the gym, he also found out that the federation dealt in counterfeit protein
powder. Various other business plans had fallen through, one involving a
piece of land and various Gujjar business partners who had squeezed him
out of the deal, he claimed. ‘I am not dealing with these people, anymore!’
He then declared, ‘We are high-class Brahmin people!’

WRESTLING WITH BODYBUILDING

In 2014, Indian as well as international media briefly flocked to the
village of Asola-Fatehpur Beri, which lies halfway between Gurgaon and
Faridabad towards Haryana’s border. With only 3,500 inhabitants, there is
little about the village that is remarkable other than the fact that about 90
per cent of its men between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five work as
bouncers and security guards in Delhi. A short report online shows local
men working out with weights, not unlike the way they would in ordinary
gyms, even though their diets are rooted in pehlwani wrestling. 196 The
name of the head trainer, Vijay Pahelwan, underscores this connection. He
recommends three to four litres of milk per day as well as a dozen
bananas and half a kilo of chiku. 197 In Enter the Dangal: Travels through
India’s Wrestling Landscape , sports journalist R. Sengupta (2016)
describes the diet of one of the wrestling champions he has been
following in similar terms: ‘Satbir … eats his way through roughly a
quarter of a kilo each of almonds, dal and paneer, half a kilo each of fruits
and vegetables, a kilo of milk …’ 198 Even though this wrestler also
makes use of ‘US-made protein powder and vitamin supplements’, his
diet would never result in the desired muscularity, leanness and
vascularity in order to be competitive on a bodybuilding stage. Yet, for the
profession of bouncer or security guard, it will easily endow these men
with the kind of bulkiness required to intimidate.
 While the growing demand for bouncers and security guards is linked
to India’s recent economic growth and new middle-class formations, these
professions offer decidedly less opportunities for socioeconomic mobility
than that of a personal trainer, with its often intimate relationship between
client and trainer. In that sense, these ‘village bodies’ resonate with an
earlier masculine ideal of strength and might, but are less impressive in
terms of the ‘knowledge’ that has gone into crafting them—a fact that is
underlined by the trainers’ repeated stress on their own expertise and
scientific grasp of the arc of transformation. It is typically ‘merely’ a body
that intimidates. Vipin, with his typical (former) pehlwani physique,
moved to South Delhi not just to adopt a different type of workout routine
and dietary regimen under the guidance of Bainsla, but also to put physical
distance between himself and his village. Even though his extended family
is relatively well-off, making it into bodybuilding and offering personal
training to well-off Delhiites, he reasoned, would provide him with
purpose and perhaps even the means to sustain himself and provide for his
family independently.
Delhi’s ambitions to become a world-class city are clearly infused
with the notion of it as a place of upward mobility, both in terms of what
the city has to offer as well as what it facilitates: economic growth, new
opportunities for leisure and consumption, and a buzzing business climate
that guarantees the city’s competitiveness. Delhi is now India’s largest
city and may one day even represent the largest urban agglomeration in the
world. This does not only mean a changing urban landscape that is
‘engulfing villages’ in its wake, but also increasing diversity in terms of
who considers the city ‘home’. The cases of Shivam, Bainsla, Vipin and
other members of the Gujjar-dominated bodybuilding federation discussed
provide a glimpse into the changing dynamics and power hierarchies as
they give shape to trajectories of upward socioeconomic mobility. By
nature, these trajectories are unfinished, ongoing and, like the city itself,
under construction. As enduring and strong as the quality of concrete that
is advertised on giant billboards across the NCR may be, middle-class
lives are far from set in stone, their foundations are constantly challenged
and its flexibility tested.
Within Delhi the relationship between village and city identities is
clearly dichotomous and adversarial. However, they are dichotomous
mainly in the imagination and as a tool to make sense of a rapidly
changing urban environment. What stands out in Joseph Alter’s seminal
work on pehlwani wrestling is that his informants clearly distinguish their
own practices from those of bodybuilders. The dyad informing this also
guides the distinction between bodybuilding and most other types of sport.
The focus in bodybuilding is principally on the exterior, whereas the
wrestler takes a more holistic and ‘internal’ approach here. For a
pehlwan, his body is not just one that is developed keeping victory in the
wrestling pit in mind, but also one that constitutes a lifestyle that extends
beyond working out and strict diets. Yet, within Delhi-based gyms, the
wrestler’s body was rarely appreciated. The association with village
backgrounds, rural masculinities and the potential of encountering ‘such
men’ as ‘rowdy types’ and ‘who make their living as bouncers’, sets
wrestlers apart from the trainers that clients encounter in the gym. The
latter are men they trust with providing guidance in terms of workout
routines and diets, and who would often even function as lifestyle
coaches. But it is clear that the relationship between client and trainer
remains paradoxical. While they were well regarded within the gym and
trusted for their ‘knowledge’, outside these men’s rural backgrounds and
caste identities would be cause for concern and suspicion. As rapidly as
the city might be changing, these pre-held notions were made of decidedly
sturdy material.
 CHAPTER 6

SEX & DESIRE

But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his

face,
It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of
his hips and wrists,
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist
and knees, dress does not hide him…
– Walt Whitman 199

A
s Raj takes a shower, streams of water snaking down his sculpted
chest, it is clear that his mind is preoccupied. The movie is quick to
reveal why—memories of a joyful time spent with his girlfriend
alternate with flashbacks of a romantic and passionate encounter with a
male friend named Aryan. The camera focuses languidly on Raj’s hand
caressing his abdominal muscles, allowing the viewer to contemplate the
predicament he must be in. This is the opening scene of a YouTube
production called Other Side of Love —announced as a ‘gay-themed
Hindi Bollywood Suspense Thriller Drama Film’—directed, produced
and written by Ambrish Bhatia. The scene continues with Aryan
approaching Raj from behind and placing his hands on Raj’s chest. Raj
turns around swiftly and angrily demands to know what he thinks he’s
doing. Aryan retorts that he is doing this because of ‘love’. Referring to
Raj’s girlfriend, he says: ‘She is not at home, that’s why I have come.’
Returning his hands to Raj’s wet chest, he says: ‘it feels pleasurable to
bathe with you… looks like these water droplets are burning after falling
on your body.’ Bringing a wet finger to his lips, he adds: ‘And I feel to
touch these burning water droplets to my body to satisfy my inner self.’
Raj then pushes him away, saying, ‘I’ll sue you in a minute.’ But his friend
is unimpressed and pulls him closer, pressing upon him that this is exactly
what he wants: ‘I want you to turn wild because I love wild men.’
The men speak in Hindi, but there is a point to using the clumsy
translation of the movie subtitles here. It is revealing for the context from
which this movie has emerged and its imagined audience. The filmmaker,
Ambrish Bhatia, is a chain-smoking elderly man in his sixties, and a
software and website developer by day. He is well known in fitness
circles for his photography and videography of muscular adolescent men,
and his following on Facebook and YouTube has rapidly increased over
the years. I first learned of his work when his photographs started gaining
traction on social media around 2013. Invariably shot in heritage sites
such as forts and palaces, most of his photoshoots are meant to look like
they had been conducted as part of a joyful road trip. Even though the
occasional girl is included as well, the vast majority are of young men,
some still dealing with acne, and featured bare-chested in jeans or
underwear, seductively gazing into the camera and flaunting their sculpted
physiques. The idea behind these photoshoots as well as later video
projects is to provide a platform for local youth from Faridabad and the
surrounding areas to showcase their potential as models and to secure
contracts for professional assignments. Yet, Bhatia’s work is also
undeniably homoerotic, and shot in a manner that feels excessive and
convoluted. While he is indeed presenting these men with a platform for
‘local talent’, offering them the opportunity to garner experience and build
a portfolio, the entrenched homoeroticism of his work—and the way
same-sex desire features prominently in his video projects—also raises
questions about who the audience for his work truly is.
In Other Side of Love , both Aryan and Raj are highly skilled
professionals. Raj is the head of a marketing department and Aryan a
software engineer recruited to help him secure an important business deal.
The third role is performed by the only woman in the movie, Neha, who is
the HR manager of a competing company, of which Ambrish Bhatia
himself plays the general manager. While Neha also happens to be Raj’s
girlfriend, from the moment Raj and Aryan shake hands, there is an
intense, brooding energy between the two. A scene, which depicts Aryan
lustfully observing Raj removing his shirt in the hotel room that they share
on a business trip, underlines this. That evening, they make love, but when
the next morning Aryan professes he has fallen in love with Raj and
cannot live without him, the latter brushes this off, telling him not to be
‘too clingy’ and that he has a long list of lovers. The story then quickly
turns soap opera-esque, with bewildering plot-turns involving a fourth
character named Vicky who is after the same business deal. Neha, we
learn, actually has a ‘village connection’ with Aryan, and is mainly out to
teach Raj a lesson because he had an affair with her brother who has been
unconscious ever since. While it remains unclear what exactly transpired
between the two—we only learn that Raj fulfilled her brother’s desires
and then left him in a state of coma—the movie’s subtext appears to be
that there is something innately deceitful and dangerous about same-sex
desire and homosexual relationships. The fact that Aryan has stored
evidence of his encounter with Raj on his laptop underscores this, a
problem that Vicky offers to solve with ‘a hot boy’ who will sleep with
Aryan (for which he has an alleged ‘weakness’). Meanwhile, the plan is
for Vicky to access Aryan’s laptop and phone to delete the incriminating
evidence. Somewhere down the line, it turns out that it was actually
Neha’s idea to blackmail Raj. She had him followed by a detective, who
made the video, which she subsequently asks Aryan to confront her
boyfriend with. Eventually, all differences are settled and we are left with
a somewhat happy ending in which Neha and Raj are reunited, the former
content with the lesson she taught her lover. Even though cordial relations
are restored, Aryan bids them farewell, moving elsewhere altogether. The
danger of same-sex desire has been vanquished, and no longer poses a
threat to the heterosexual relationship that Neha and Raj are now left to
enjoy in peace—thus putting a ‘straightjacket’ on Raj’s sculpted body,
which Aryan had desired so forcefully.
There is a complexity obliquely embedded in Ambrish Bhatia’s
work, freely available on YouTube: while on the one hand there is the
lingering gaze resting casually on the male body, exploring and navigating
its muscular beauty, on the other, the various storylines point at the pitfalls
of male modelling itself, warning against the risk of abuse and
exploitation, and ultimately pointing at the assumed inherent duplicity of
homoerotic desire. Bhatia claims that the movies are based on his
numerous interactions with young aspiring male models. So are these
movies the ‘truth’ as he sees it? Or are they themselves evidence of a
particular urban fantasy? If this is what is being imagined, what does it
build on? In all my years of research, I have only come across one trainer
who is now actually involved in escort work. This does not mean, of
course, that others do not capitalise on the sexual desire their bodies
radiate. In fact, the tagging and descriptions on social media often
explicitly capture their bodies as being sexually attractive. However, sex
itself—whether with women or men—remained paradoxically absent
from narratives throughout. The personal history of Selvam, who does
provide sexual services and is involved in pornographic activities,
provides an entry point to understand how class impacts the way sexual
desire is interpreted, regulated and acted upon in urban India.

THE ABSENCE AND PRESENCE OF SEXUAL DESIRE

One evening in Chennai, I am catching up with personal trainer Selvam. In
his early thirties, he is a strikingly handsome man with clear movie-star
potential. Involved in regular photoshoots across India, he generously
shares the results with his ballooning following on Instagram. I
compliment him on a recent photoshoot with ‘Man of Madras’, a
photographic platform mainly operating on Instagram that somewhat
exclusively works with Tamil models, and ask if he has ever considered a
career in acting. He brusquely dismisses the very possibility. ‘I would
need so many connections …’ Considering his impoverished background,
‘that just wouldn’t work’, he said. ‘It’s not a system based on talent. Or
not purely on talent … I have to live with the chances that I have been
given,’ he adds contemplatively. He has just ordered a mocktail and what
he determines to be the healthiest meal on the menu: herb-coated chicken
breast and lots of vegetables. He is unfamiliar with the ‘French’
preparation but keen to try it out, as he is with most things in life, he
professes. Even if most of his photoshoots take place in lush and luxurious
locations, such as in and around the swimming pools of five-star
properties or inside posh hotel bedrooms—where he does things like
seductively stepping out of a shower stall with a bathrobe barely covering
his private parts—Selvam admits that it’s a world still by and large alien
to him. Now providing sexual services to affluent male customers and
selling pornographic videos on websites such as Only Fans , his career
has taken a direction that is the stuff of urban fantasies.
For men with bodies that are presented as patently sexually attractive
in popular media, and that trainers and bodybuilders often hashtag with
#hotbody and #sexybeast on social media, it is remarkable how absent sex
was from their accounts of day-to-day life. This contrasted rather
amusingly with the way gay friends pulled my leg, suggesting that I had
opportunistically located my research in a candy store with the owner
absent and the laddoos up for grabs. Jat-men especially were always up
for it, I was once assured, ‘not even necessarily for money’, as my friend
put it. In fact, Malayali men too could be easily had, I was told; well-
hung, physically strong and muscular—‘they are quite the meat eaters, you
know’—and most important of all, not perturbed by same-sex contact. ‘It
doesn’t mean much to them,’ an acquaintance from Bangalore had
declared. ‘They don’t think of it as an issue.’ Questions from academic
audiences aligned with the impression that fitness instructors, especially
those from intermediate castes, were easily available for sexual
encounters, whether of the straight or same-sex variety. For instance, I
would frequently be asked whether these men were involved in sex work,
or at the very least preyed upon by female clients for sexual services.
Invariably, such questions would come with the disclaimer that it was not
something the questioners themselves were interested in, but something
they had wondered about, having observed ‘such men’ in the gym.
Rumours clearly abounded!
I once asked a female academic colleague from Delhi where she had
gotten the idea that fitness trainers were easily available for sexual
services. She replied with a dismissive shrug: ‘It’s out there.’ What was
fuelling this idea? What exactly was ‘out there’? And how could it be that
it only played such a marginal role in my discussions with trainers and
bodybuilders, some of whom I had known for years? I had met their
families, knew their wives, interacted with their parents, celebrated
religious occasions together, and had frequently been the listening ear to
deeply held anxieties about financial worries, bodily insecurities and the
potentially debilitating side effects of controlled substances. The idea that
these men were available for sexual adventures clearly contrasted with
the reaction of trainers and bodybuilders themselves; they either said
‘such things’ simply did not happen in their gyms or were puzzled by what
I was implying in the first place. The gym was held to be a ‘straight’ and
straight-forward place; to question the gaze that dawdles on a body in the
process of working out or posing in front of the mirror challenges what is
held to be a desexualised space. Within this space, male trainers were
permitted to touch their female clients to adjust their postures, while male
clients were able to pose bare chested in front of the mirror with these
very same female clients continuing their workout, seemingly unperturbed.
To assume otherwise not only sexualised a safe space—something that
was also explicitly part of the training and guidelines provided to new
hires—but also breached the perceived boundaries that separated clients
and trainers.

Class difference is not just crucial to understanding what informs such

boundaries between clients and trainers but also interpretations of sexual
desire, desirability and availability. While the possibility of upward
social mobility is an important reason why the profession of fitness trainer
has gradually gained in popularity among lower-middle-class men, the
potential of sexual intimacy and longer-term relationships are not on the
horizon. Ambrish Bhatia’s movies attempt to caution young, lower-
middle-class Indians about the pitfalls of male modelling and the
potentially exploitative intentions of gay men. He also seems to point to
the risks involved in transgressing middle-class boundaries. In his vision,
attractive, naïve, adolescent men are up for grabs by those more at home
in a rapidly changing urban India—an India that cares nothing for old
norms. Even though it remains in question what Bhatia’s own motivations
are, his take on the matter does align with accounts of trainers and
bodybuilders and their forays into modelling. The jocular exuberance of
some of my gay friends certainly confirmed that ‘these men’ were preyed
upon and considered ‘easy kill’. While most trainers and bodybuilders
considered the gym a place of work, for my friends, these sites made for
alarmingly red dots on an imaginary map of sexual debauchery. Sex was
everywhere, in the polite but timid smile of an attractive personal trainer,
the gentle correcting touch of a hot yoga instructor, or the determined and
masculine instructions of a handsome bodybuilder whose coy smile
betrayed his softer (naïve, provincial, small town) nature. In their
experience, this was an integral aspect of attending and hanging out in
gyms, perhaps even its most important lure. They told me that the steam
and locker rooms provide bountiful opportunities for same-sex
encounters. Trainers might share their phone number for off-hours
interaction, the anonymity of the spa made ‘hungry’ groping possible, and
of course there was always the possibility of house-calls. Oh, the sheer
glee of all there was to see and sample!

FROM MODELLING TO SEX WORK

There is no denying the abundance of cruising spaces and the possibilities
for same-sex encounters in India, but there was a striking mismatch
between what my friends assumed to be possible and happening, and the
everyday accounts trainers and bodybuilders shared me with me over
time. The slantwise homoerotic quality of some informants’ social media
updates contrasted with their own accounts as well, though. When I
brought this up during interviews—frolicking around on a beach in
Kerala, their bodies seductively smeared with sand, wearing a tiny pair of
swimming trunks from a brand such as Andrew Christian and Aussiebum
(popular among gay men)—the rationale was that such pictures brought
out the strength and muscular qualities of their bodies. These photoshoots
were meant to secure lucrative modelling contracts that could supplement
their income as fitness trainers, raise their demand among high-end
clients, and help finance their trajectories as bodybuilders. In fact,
informants would pay considerable amounts for such photoshoots in the
hope of such gains. Even if the photographer had waived his usual fee
with the idea that the photos might strengthen his own portfolio as a
fashion photographer, the flight to and stay in an exotic location would
still mean a considerable investment on the part of the aspiring model.
However, these men did need to navigate the inherent homoeroticism that
imbued these photoshoots. The complaints that they felt preyed upon by
photographers and Bollywood representatives, who offered to assist them
in return for sexual favours, indicated that their own desirability among
members of the same sex frequently presented itself as something to be
dealt with.
I had initially come across Selvam’s pictures because of his
collaborations with photographers whose work seemed to be gaining
traction among some of my informants. Like with Ambrish Bhatia’s initial
photography work, their output aligned with a certain homoerotic
aesthetic. How did these pictures appear to appeal to such different
registers of desire? At one level there was the pure and unadulterated
appreciation of a fitness- and bodybuilding-oriented crowd, at another
level there were the lurid comments not rarely accompanied by love-
struck smileys and eggplant emoticons. Unlike other informants, Selvam’s
updates directly appealed to a gay audience in terms of how he could
fulfil their wildest imaginations. Who was this man who was confident
enough to put himself out there in this way? When I initially approached
Selvam via Instagram, he responded rather quickly by describing himself
as ‘basically a gym trainer’ who had ‘started other side jobs like fitness
modelling to top up [his] salary’. Our conversation—initially via
Instagram and WhatsApp—quickly turned quite insightful about why a
trainer would sell his body. Yet, even more so, Selvam’s story highlights
the complex interplay of socioeconomic factors that ultimately govern the
way a ‘beautiful body’ like his own might get appropriated, used and even
abused for the very reason of assumed accessibility.

Back in the bar in Chennai, Selvam looks tired. He has come straight from
the airport after finishing a video-shoot in Mumbai for his Only Fans
account. The way he usually organises such shoots is by finding a trainer
who would be willing to have sex with him on camera. His participation
in bodybuilding and fitness-modelling competitions are also oriented
towards this. Selvam knows that he does not necessarily have it in him to
be competitive on stage, but such events brimmed with an abundance in
terms of recruiting ‘new talent’, as he put it. ‘Many of these guys are in
need of money, and salaries in gyms are not so high, so that may convince
them.’ He is surely not the only one who, on top of financing his own
fitness ambitions, has to support a family back home. How far a video
would go greatly depends on the person he works with—from a simple
‘barely explicit’ shower scene, where they would both lather each other
with soap and then rinse off, to oral sex or even anal penetration and
group sex. He considers himself ‘basically straight who became bisexual
due to exposure’, by which he means that when he began with fitness
modelling, ‘some photographers wanted to have sex with me’. Social
media followers would soon approach him for the same. ‘Now we all
kinda know this might happen,’ he says. ‘So we take it lightly. Just close
your eyes and let your dick be sucked. A mouth is a mouth at the end of the
day.’
He now regularly travels to other cities, such as Bangalore, where he
performs as a go-go dancer at gay parties held at a posh five-star hotel.
These are parties where he dances on stage, even though he had no idea
how to dance, he says with a smirk. ‘Just go with the flow, I thought.’
Selvam got involved with go-go dancing through his Instagram profile:
‘They had two models and needed a third one, so I just took the offer.’ For
one evening of work, he was paid Rs 10,000 plus accommodation, which
he considered a handsome sum. But the prime motivator was what it may
generate in the long run. ‘It’s a great place to scout for future clients.’ If he
decides to sleep with a client, his charges depend on the requirements. ‘It
can go from six-K till twenty-K.’ Requirements can vary in terms of
‘duration, soft/hard role etc’. But there are always those who try to
bargain and ‘who want to pay you three-K’. About this he is very clear:
‘God bless the “block” button … I mean, with all due respect, if you don’t
have money, don’t waste it on escorts.’ It’s a service for people with
‘extra available incomes’, he opines, adding that he delivers quality and
that comes with a price tag.

JUST REMOVE YOUR CLOTHES

The first time Selvam got involved in sex work was through a
photographer who had contacted him for a shoot. ‘He said one client from
Dubai likes Indian guys very much and he wants to meet me to see and
touch my body.’ It was clear that he would pay well, though he doesn’t
remember the exact amount. Selvam agreed and went to meet this client at
his hotel. ‘Just remove my clothes and flex my muscles, etc. He touched
my body and jerked off.’ He describes the experience as ‘very OK’. He
didn’t know that this was something he would be doing beforehand
though. But he was okay with the situation since it was not very invasive.
‘I didn’t have to do anything.’ But surely the social stigma must have
crossed his mind? Boldly, Selvam responds: ‘For me, I just think someone
is enjoying my body.’ He goes even further and asks: ‘What’s the point of
having a hot body if you cannot enjoy or make others enjoy? It’s not going
to be a museum piece!’
In the course of our conversations, however, it becomes clear that his
boldness is something of a façade, thinly veiling a rather painful family
history that has contributed to his current position. Growing up in a small
village outside Chennai—which he describes as the ‘one-shop variety’—
he used to work at a small grocery store from six o’clock till nine o’clock
in the morning while completing his tenth standard in school. After that
there was no more money and he left school altogether. His eloquence in
English is, therefore, mainly the result of self-study. He once put this as ‘I
am a pakka village guy’, something which struck him as fairly hilarious
considering where he was now. Most of his English he learned via
YouTube. ‘I watched all the videos for English grammar and all
that … There are so many videos. It’s very easy. Just watch a couple of
videos every day.’ Initially, the family had some money, but his father was
a ‘useless alcoholic’ and there were always any number of bills to be
paid. As a result, ‘there was only money to educate one child, so they
decided to educate my sister’. The reason for this was that ‘she was much
elder to me and she could start working sooner and support the family’.
While his sister studied for her MBBS to become a doctor, Selvam ‘went
to work on the fields’.
When the time came to marry off his sister, the search for a suitable
husband began. In due course, a groom, who seemed to tick all boxes in
terms of caste and education, was found. However, the day before the
wedding, there was a fight between his sister and her fiancé. ‘Some nasty
words were said’, and the wedding was cancelled. ‘My sister couldn’t
take it. She managed to get a bottle of poison and killed herself.’ It left the
family devastated. ‘All our savings and assets were invested in her’, with
the promise that she would start working and start supporting the family.
Now the family had lost everything. ‘Dowry was just the last savings.
After that we were left with nothing.’ But it wasn’t only about the money.
‘I really loved my sister. She was like a hero to me. The one who was
refined and educated.’ She was the one who could speak English, who
was intelligent, Selvam continued. ‘But nobody knew of the demons that
were nesting in her heart.’
With the family’s loans mounting, Selvam decided to head to Chennai
to make money there. He slept on the streets while searching for
employment, which he eventually found with a team that catered at
weddings, for which he was paid Rs 90 a day. He would make roughly Rs
1,800 per month, of which he would send Rs 600 to his mother. He then
found employment as a security guard, which paid marginally better at Rs
2,200 per month. Quite by chance, he found a large sum of money in a
temple, which a worshipper had accidentally left behind. When he
returned the money, he was awarded a job as a supervisor with a
construction company out of gratitude. He stayed there for nearly ten
years. Meanwhile, he had become ‘very focused’ on his body and had
started working out regularly. His ‘good looks’, as he put it himself, had
already told him that there was money to be made with it, though perhaps
not in the most conventional way. Living on the streets of Chennai, he
would sometimes get picked up by men who would want to have sex with
him. Realising his body’s potential, he had also taken to visiting a local
cruising site where he would occasionally make ‘some money’. It was
eventually through his first attempt at landing a ‘modelling gig’ that he
realised that his body would always evoke this kind of desire and that he
may as well capitalise on it.

THE SOFT LOOK OR WHAT ‘EXACTLY ’ APPEALS

Selvam’s difficult story aligns with that of other trainers in terms of the
predicaments that trajectories of upward socioeconomic mobility may
come with, and the way the body can be used as currency in this. It
reminded me of a conversation I once had with Girish, 200 a bodybuilder
from North Delhi who had made no secret of his own modelling
ambitions. Frequently updating his social media accounts, on which he
had thousands of followers, with photographs of himself in the latest
branded underwear and swimwear, he seemed well aware of his good
looks beyond the immediate appeal of his muscular body. The comments
following one of the pictures in which he had lifted up his shirt and pulled
down his jogging pants far enough not only to reveal his highly defined
abs but also the veins which suggestively snaked down to his crotch, had
varied from the rudimentary pictorial thumbs-ups to far more sexually
laced ones. He never read those, he said: ‘I don’t really have time for
that.’ Indiscriminately though, he would provide them with a like , saying
that he was grateful that people took the time to comment and seemed to
appreciate the hard work he had put into his body.
When we met at a Starbucks outlet in Pitampura (North Delhi) one
day, heads craned to size him up and conversations abruptly ended.
Wearing a white polo, the sleeves of which were barely able to cover his
protruding biceps, dinner-plate sized pectoral muscles pushing through the
fabric revealing a muscular cleavage, he was clearly a sight to behold.
Girish had spent the morning in the gym and was now on a break, which
he usually used to sleep in order to be fit enough for his evening workout.
Shyly, he explained that his main goal now was ‘to become bigger’ in
order to be competitive in the next weight class, but he was worried that
this might make him less appealing for future modelling assignments.
‘They don’t like it when we get too big.’ In fact, this was something he
had been told when some recruiters had approached him for a possible
campaign a few months earlier as well. The money coming in through
personal training was not nearly enough to compensate for the investment
he was making in his body in terms of protein powders, supplements,
steroids and growth hormones, something for which he continued to rely
on family for support. Modelling would provide a welcome additional
income, but he had been put off by the requests for sexual favours. ‘I am
not a gay,’ he explained. ‘Some go for that,’ meaning other models, ‘but
it’s not for me.’
It was a sentiment personal trainer and aspiring model Bikram also
voiced when I interviewed him in relation to a recent photoshoot that I
had come across on social media. In it, he is seen cavorting on a beach in
Goa, his precision-engineered body covered with streaks of sand, a pair
of tiny red swimming pants leaving little to the imagination. The pictures
conveyed utter confidence in his body and himself. The videos he
regularly uploaded on his YouTube channel, and which he readily shared
on Facebook to a steadily growing audience, underlined this confidence,
particularly in the malleability of the male body and what could be
achieved with it. Having arrived in Delhi seven years earlier, he had
gradually transitioned from providing fitness and personal training in
gyms to ‘online coaching’ with clients mainly based abroad. In search of
alternatives to taking ‘drugs’ to build his body, he had at some point come
across a link to MuscleMania, a drug-free competition for natural
bodybuilders, which had immediately appealed to him. And because
Bollywood was a dream in the back of his mind, Bikram decided to
compete in the Mumbai event instead of the one in Delhi, where he was
based. By that time, various Bollywood recruiters had already contacted
him, but he had come to realise that ‘90 per cent of these are fake’. They
will suggest developing a portfolio for which ‘they ask you to pay’, but
‘that’s the way they make their money’. Meanwhile, Bollywood was also
not necessarily his biggest dream, as he put it. ‘I wanted to transform
fitness.’ The transformation of his own body, without the use of steroids
or hormones, was key to this plan. Sharing his transformation and various
wins in bodybuilding competitions via social media was paying off.
‘Some see me as their inspiration and motivation.’ And as a result: ‘they
go to the gym ’cause of me’. A growing number of photoshoot requests
followed. ‘Now I have fans abroad, they comment on my pictures all the
time.’ A girl in the US even has his poster above her bed. ‘She said so,
that she had used one of my pictures to make a poster. This feeling left me
so much proud.’
During a long conversation, Bikram mentioned that he received ‘lots
of messages from gays’. Some of these concerned offers for Bollywood
parts, ‘but I don’t know if it’s right’. Contemplating this, he added: ‘I
know one-two things …’ He said he had some friends in Bollywood
whom he utilised as a sounding board to double-check the kind of
invitations and requests he received. ‘They warned me for that. These
people might take your money, more.’ He was even contacted by a US-
based porn star who wanted to do a video with him. She performs live on
camera, so he knew she was ‘the real deal’. He had clearly done his
research. The porn star in question offered him $1,200 to star in a video,
but in the end he did not follow through on the plan. Now that he has some
experience with modelling, he is particularly keen to work with
beginners. ‘I tell them to do something different.’ One of these young
photographers did his Goa shoot. ‘They are not from rich parents, these
guys.’ When they did the shoot in Goa, he paid for his own flight and
accommodation, which cost him around Rs 25,000. But he felt it was
worth it since it had led to other opportunities, such as one where he had
been asked to model for Aussiebum, a deal that eventually did not work
out for reasons he did not explain.
About the shape and form of his body, he is quite specific. ‘I don’t
want to become a bulky bodybuilder.’ Bikram aims ‘to look handsome and
sexy’. What he has in mind is for his clients to say: ‘This kind of body
looks good, that’s what we like.’ As such, he ‘believes in aesthetics’.
Even if he was in the process of ‘putting on weight’ to later convert this
into additional muscle for the next season, he emphasises that he does not
want to overdo it: ‘I want to go for that soft look.’ This is different from
what bodybuilders go for, he once assured me. ‘They want that hard look,
muscles and veins’—not what modelling recruiters are interested in. ‘I
have that balanced body; the fashion industry—they like that.’ He likes
that they sometimes get confused about where he is from. ‘Sometimes they
say Latin, other times Burmese.’ It makes him mysterious, he feels. ‘But
always they wonder, how did he change himself?’

TO GO FULLY BOLD AND NEVER SAY NO

In 2014, I met Ambrish Bhatia at his house in Faridabad, which doubled
as his studio and functioned as a hangout for the kind of adolescent men
who are central to his various projects. Quick to point out that he was first
and foremost a software developer, Ambrish explained that he only
considered the modelling photography ‘a starting profession’ for himself,
meaning that he thought of himself as a beginner. That said, within a
relatively short time he had developed a considerable online and offline
following of aspiring models, mainly hailing from the NCR. Most had
established contact through Facebook or referral, as he put it. ‘They
contact me that way. They contact me and then come down.’ Browsing
through his computer while lighting a cigarette, he mentioned that a shoot
he had recently completed was with six boys and one girl. ‘They are not
friends, they don’t know each other.’ The only person they had in common
was Ambrish himself. ‘I arrange the group events and then I do the group
shoots.’ In selecting potential candidates for his projects, he emphasised
that the figure is not his main criterion. With reference to a photoshoot that
had taken place the previous day, and of which he had shown me unedited
pictures, he suggested that his main interests are style and expression. ‘I
don’t focus much on the body.’ He tapped the screen with a nicotine-
stained finger to underline his point. ‘Attitude is more important, as well
as style.’ However, when I mentioned that most of his work seemed quite
focused on the physique of his male models, he admitted that ‘the figures
are there, sure, some have good figures’. With a couple of clicks of his
mouse, he showed me a young man lying on a tree trunk in nothing but the
tiniest red posing trunk, seductively looking into the camera, his muscular
body on full display. ‘Not many have that body though. They have the
expressions but not that body. We use that.’
At the time, Ambrish was yet to embark on his video project, the
2014 movie Marichika , which is described as a ‘Gay Themed Hindi
Short Film on Exploitation of Gay Models’. The movie, which runs for
about forty-five minutes, commences with two adolescent men casually
hanging out on a boat on the river with some Mughal heritage buildings as
a backdrop. They are discussing what it takes to make dreams come true,
something that is clearly on the mind of the protagonist. He confides in his
friend that he may run away to Delhi and pursue his dream of becoming a
model instead of joining the family business. His friend is quick to
support him and offers to introduce him to a Delhi-based acquaintance
(Anish) who is into modelling himself. When they meet not much later,
Anish immediately suggests that good looks are not enough, and that it
also takes style, attitude and boldness. Since the aspiring model is from a
village, he may need some help with this, which leads Anish to ask what
he is willing to do to become a model. The response is ‘anything’, to
which Anish retorts: ‘Anything means a lot in this world.’ 201 First of all,
he will have to change his lifestyle. ‘Fully Bold!!! You should never say
NO for anything.’ After some sessions in the gym, he is also informed that
he needs a portfolio for which he will have to arrange a photoshoot which
may cost him about Rs 20–25,000. However, Anish has a friend who may
be able to make this work for as little as Rs 10–15,000. It leads the main
character to take out a loan on a 20 per cent interest rate. With the stage
set for potential abuse, we witness how a casting director asks him to
strip during a session and subsequently manages to sleep with him. As the
story unfolds, we realise that he has done this to others as well, but that
there are also honourable men in the business who will not take advantage
of a beginner model’s precarious financial situation. As the movie comes
to a close, a final warning is offered: ‘People will exploit you, if you are
ready to get exploited.’
The understanding that those involved in India’s male fashion
industry run a considerable risk of exploitation is confirmed in a long
piece that appeared in the magazine Open , in which Shefalee Vasudev
investigates the world of male models in India. 202 While there is
substantial demand for female models, it is much more limited for their
male counterparts. As the president of the Fashion Design Council of
India (FDCI) put it, only 5 per cent of the shows that are held as part of
Amazon India Fashion Week include menswear. 203 Besides, menswear
brands tend to prefer film celebrities and sport stars. 204 Accordingly, in
India’s smaller towns, male models work for anything between Rs 2,000
and Rs 6,000 per assignment, which could be as long as two days. Male
models get only a quarter of what female models are paid. 205 Sexual
favours turn out to be common, as Arry Dabas, a winner of various
modelling titles, reveals. Dabas suggests that because of the combination
of good looks, great bodies and sex appeal, they are automatic objects of
desire. ‘We are trophies, to be given away in the bedroom, a benchmark
of attainment for power brokers.’ 206 Furthermore, unregistered model
coordinators who act as event managers are known to abuse young
aspirants, making them work without pay, even sending them out to parties
with open-ended possibilities. The comments of one brand director are
revealing. He notes that a good body itself does not make for a good
model, ‘as scores of boys from small towns seem to believe’. What is
also necessary are ‘good manners, personality, grooming and educational
background’ 207 as well as the ability to make the ‘right decision’. The
willingness to become models—even if the total package does not add up
in terms of the body, its dimensions and additional prerequisites—thus
becomes one of desperation if we approach it from the logic of
socioeconomic difference, understood from the perspective of all those in
the know about what is required ‘besides’ a good body.

While the characters portrayed in Ambrish Bhatia’s movies are generally

highly skilled professionals and businessmen, the actors speak in Hindi
and appear to be portraying an aspiration rather than something they are
actually familiar with. The subtitles too betray an ambivalent relationship
with the English language, something that the comments section underlines
as well. The videos clearly cater to adolescent men of similar
backgrounds, and appeal to their desire to act and learn more about
opportunities in modelling. Bhatia’s own goals are somewhat mystifying
here. Over the years, I have attempted to discuss this with him, but he
constantly emphasises that his involvement is mainly about making sure
that male models are prepared for what awaits them.
His concerns are not limited to exploitation by conmen and
gatekeepers in the industry but also by what young models themselves
might be willing to provide in exchange for favours. During our
conversation in Faridabad in 2014, Bhatia provided me with the example
of a model named Vikas who had recently requested Ambrish to shoot him
naked. ‘But I am not giving! I am not into that!’ Apparently, this aspiring
model had made acquaintance with a person in Australia who had offered
him Rs 15,000 if he did the shoot naked. He had sought Ambrish’s advice,
and he had told him, ‘No. Don’t do it.’ Most men who had made similar
requests over time had wanted ‘these photos to flatter themselves’,
desiring ‘to present themselves in the glamour world’. He assured me it
was ‘clicks’ they were after, meaning likes on social media. Given that
he’s a straight-identified man with a wife and children himself, why does
Ambrish often insert gay themes in his movies? I asked him that question,
and he answered: ‘No, it is not like this, it’s the concept which I get in
mind.’ For this he took inspiration from the many stories that had been
shared with him about male modelling, he said. His actors were never
uncomfortable with depicting same-sex attraction or relations, he assured
me, ‘because I teach them that an actor is one who can play any character,
and in my last movie, I played myself as a gay father.’ None of the actors
he had worked with were gay themselves, he said, and added: ‘few are
students, few are doing business’, as if to underline that it was not a
genuine possibility that they were homosexual.

SEXUAL CAPITAL OF THE MALE BODY

Desire and desirability are crucial elements in understanding what
produces the lean, muscular body in the gym as well as the way it is
imagined, represented and depicted outside. There is something
incontrovertible about how building, developing and working on the body
is layered with an interplay of desire and desirability. The scripted
adulation around the bodily transformation of male heroes in Indian
movies is imbued with a homoeroticism that has often been explained in
terms of the relatively limited possibilities for sexual contact between
members of the opposite sex in India and the strength of male friendships.
The argument is that this may also explain same-sex contact between
adolescent Indian men who do not necessarily identify as gay or question
their sexual identity because of same-sex attraction. However, this
explanation does not adequately consider the manner in which class
difference factors into the way same-sex contact and desire operate and
are negotiated in India. Male friendship is often captured as ‘dosti’, a
Hindi descriptor that has gradually come to denote a whole interplay of
notions such as camaraderie, companionship and closeness among men,
describing an imaginary spectrum from holding hands in public as a sign
of affection to same-sex contact in the absence of access to members of
the other sex. The use of the word ‘mast(i)’, on the other hand, comes with
a tinge of sexual flavour, naughtiness, casualness, taking on a sexualised
fun quotient. While a movie can be mast, or a particular actor can look
mast, masti friendships may also involve same-sex contact, though
primarily understood as a temporary phase characteristic of adolescent
years. Increasingly, such notions of dosti and masti have come to reflect
socioeconomic difference because this type of male friendship and
intimacy has been downgraded to exclusively reference working or
lower-middle-class ‘vernac’ relations between adolescent men. 208 This
is then held to contrast with relations between English-speaking upper-
middle-class men who would, for instance, not consider holding hands
because of its ‘globalised’ association with same-sex identities.
Bollywood, therefore, treads a precarious balance, and it is not
always easy to understand the specific intention of a movie’s homoerotic
undertones. A Delhi-based friend had once slyly remarked about this: ‘It
kind of depends what you read into it.’ A rare example of a hit movie that
does acknowledge the homoerotic potential of the male body is Dostana
(2008), even if it does not necessarily take seriously the potential for
same-sex relations. Homoerotic innuendo and same-sex desire mark more
recent movies, such as Gunday (2014) and Padmaavat (2018), even if
their storylines ultimately revolve around a desirable woman. In an article
for Firstpost , author Deepanjana Pal hilariously captures what is truly at
stake in the movie Gunday . 209 Although it was released on Valentine’s
Day, this action flick is perhaps not an automatic romantic choice.
However, as Pal puts it, ‘the way Ranveer Singh and Arjun Kapoor bared
their cleavages and looked into each other’s eyes in the trailer’, many
deduced ‘that there was bromance broiling under Gunday ’s macho
surface’. Pal even typifies the movie as a love story ‘of two men whom
heterosexuality—as embodied by Priyanka Chopra—tries to separate’.
The characters Singh and Kapoor depict, therefore, make for an ideal
couple: ‘they run together, they dance with each other, they mud wrestle
without breaking eye contact, they can communicate with one another
without words’. In fact, Pal even argues that the character portrayed by
Ranveer Singh ‘flounces his hair the way heroines have for decades in
Bollywood’, while Arjun Kapoor ‘responds with the jealous rage that
heroes have traditionally exhibited for their female love interests’. The
two even ‘drink from one heart-shaped glass and sleep together in one
bed, wearing matching pyjamas that have enormous hearts positioned right
over their bums’. The big fight between the two characters has Ranveer
Singh take off his shirt while Arjun Kapoor watches him and smiles:
 They stare at one another, take a deep breath and then charge at
one another in such a way that one has a fistful of the other’s
shirt in his clutch. With a smooth flourish, they disentangle,
leaving both men shirtless, their shiny, oily torsos glistening
expectantly. All this is done in slow motion, naturally.

Controversial historical drama and blockbuster movie Padmaavat (2018)

received a comparable analysis by writer Sandip Roy, who discussed the
subversive aspects of the movie in an article for Firstpost as well. Roy
argues: ‘The film is so over-the-top, it veers into camp.’ While the lead
actress Deepika Padukone remains covered from head to toe, even in one
of the movie’s most iconic dancing scenes, ‘the men are all heaving bare
chests, always happy to soak in a bathtub or take a break from battle to
wrestle glossily … No bosom heaves as much in the film as the pectorals
of Ranveer Singh and Shahid Kapoor as they go mano-a-mano, seemingly
drawn to each other by some inexorable force of animal magnetism.’ In
fact, Roy notes, the two ‘even go to great lengths to be alone together,
their faces inches away from each other’. To Roy, the movie is ‘the stuff
of gay fantasies’. 210
Faced with the jocular but insistent inquiries from gay friends, whose
casual banter had followed me over the years as I looked into the
emergence of a fitness and bodybuilding scene in India, I had to confront
my own set of gay fantasies as well. As much as I had been all set to
approach the topic on hand with the kind of clinical analytical gaze
required by my profession, I also realised that, as an anthropologist, my
own gaze mattered as well. Surely I found some of these men attractive,
my Delhi friend once rather exasperatedly asked. Indeed, there was no
point in denying that. However, encountering these men up-close at
bodybuilding competitions, where they were covered in tanning lotion,
their bodies strong yet weak, the penetrating smell of protein powder
inescapable, and paper-thin skin revealing the ravaging effect of acne
(usually the result of steroid use), had also shot holes in this gay fantasy.
As I hung out endlessly in gyms, I was never not aware that to be an
openly gay researcher would make everything I wanted to know about the
topic suspect. Once, a senior bodybuilder, who was about to advise a new
disciple on which anabolic steroids and growth hormones to use,
suddenly demanded to know if I was gay. He had been a friend on
Facebook for a while, and even though he had thousands of such online
friends, something must have triggered this question. I quickly confirmed
that I was, but that this was not the reason why I had become interested in
the topic, something he accepted without further ado. A somewhat
warbled account of a bodybuilder who had been found to render same-sex
services backstage at a competition somewhere in Tamil Nadu followed.
It had ‘deeply disgusted’ him, not because he was against ‘the gays’, but
because sex had no place at such an event to begin with. It was precisely
what I had been so adamantly keeping out of my own analysis as well,
realising full well that this was an often unspoken opinion across the
bodybuilding and fitness spectrum. Yet, the very absence and presence of
sexual desire and activities did inform the production of these muscular
bodies so ubiquitously on display across urban India.

HOMOEROTIC DESIRE AND HOMOSOCIAL BONDING

Within the gym, the talk about building bodies, about breaking the body
down or even demolishing it, produces a lingo of construction that
mingles and merges with the hammering and drilling of building sites in
the background. Yet, these lean, muscular bodies are not merely a product
of new India; they are also repositories of people’s imaginations and
fantasies that know a much longer history. The homoerotic layering of
photographs and other depictions of muscle- or strongmen has long been a
topic of fascination for historians and aficionados alike. In an insightful
study titled Universal Hunks (2013), author David L. Chapman, who also
published an influential biography on Eugen Sandow (1994), brings
together the pictorial history (1895–1975) of muscular men from around
the world. In the foreword, sports historian Douglas Brown raises the
question of what a hunk actually is, pointing at the very subjectivity of
hunkiness itself. While this might indeed be a matter of individual
interpretation, the photographs selected are all of decidedly muscular men
whose framing conveys a heady mix of admiration and adulation. Without
explicitly stating this, the male gaze is circuitously present and there is an
undercurrent of same-sex desire that seems to have profoundly influenced
the curation of the book. Even the very word ‘hunk’ points to this—
something a magazine such as Men’s Health staunchly avoids, having
always made it a point not to be seen as a ‘gay magazine’. 211
One set of photographs in Universal Hunks is of the Bangalorean
bodybuilder K.V. Iyer (1897–1980), who featured occasionally in
American and British muscle magazines in the 1930s. Iyer also wrote
books on health and bodybuilding, and contributed to the Indian magazine
Vyayam (Physical Training). Allegedly, he was well aware ‘of his own
beauty’ and claimed that he had ‘a body which gods covet’. 212 Most of
the pictures included in Universal Hunks are not nudes. Almost all men
don either posing slips, underwear or have their private parts covered
with a leaf of some variety. Douglas Brown notes that ‘[E]ach photograph
is inter-textual and, at any moment in time, is admired or scrutinized
according to a multitude of shifting ideas about health and fitness, male
beauty, masculinity, sexuality, pleasure, and desire.’ 213 He warns that,
like literary texts, they build on pre-existing codes, discourses and other
texts. It is an observation that resonates with the analysis author Erick
Alvarez provides in Muscle Boys (2008), with its focus on gay gym
culture. Interviewing Robert Mainardi, author of Strong Men: Vintage
Photos of a Masculine Icon (2001), Alvarez poses the question of whom
these pictures were intended for. Mainardi explains that most were meant
to be sold to women but that many also ended up in collections owned by
men. However, he hesitates labelling these men as gay per se, since the
concept of homosexuality itself was poorly developed at the time. 214 That
said, strongmen photography did pave the way for homoerotic media later
on. 215 Until the 1920s, such photography contributed to the idea that one
could appreciate a man for being handsome. However, with the arrival of
Charles Atlas (1892–1972), an Italian-American bodybuilder born
Angelo Siciliano, there was a gradual shift in thinking in terms of the way
the muscular body speaks to or denies homosexuality. In the infamous
marketing campaign, Charles Atlas contrasted scrawny, ‘sissy’ guys with
far more successful muscular ‘real’ men, suggesting muscularity as an
antidote or cure to manly underperformance. 216
Bodybuilding continues to be characterised by an ambivalent
relationship with same-sex desire and admiration, something already
underlined in anthropologist Alan Klein’s classic study Little Big Men
(1993), which focused on the West Coast bodybuilding scene. While some
of the bodybuilders in his study were involved in sex work, such as
offering their bodies for ‘muscle worship’ to male clients, same-sex
desire and homosexuality remained taboo topics in the gym. Gender
scholar Ellexis Boyle (2010) points out that there is a homoerotic paradox
or contradiction in bodybuilding that arises from the fetishisation of the
male body as well as the intimate relationships that men develop in all-
male sporting cultures. 217 Therefore, homosocial bonding and
homoerotics often appear in a dialectic though not always amicable
relationship with each other. If one contrasts this with the depictions of
Greek gymnasiums and its sportsmen in its earliest days, one sees that this
relationship has gradually become unhinged. Joseph Alter (2005) notes
that Athenian gymnasiums were places where men came to become men
and to develop themselves into citizens. Plato and Aristotle thought of
gyms as institutions of embodied knowledge, something that has
progressively been filtered out of modern philosophical thinking. 218 The
depiction of naked wrestlers, often referred to as an early source of
homoerotic contemplation and desire—with the penis clearly visible—
needs to be understood within a context whereby the sexual relationship
between older and younger men was understood as central to an embodied
development of arete , or the idea of living up to one’s full potential. 219
From this, it follows that we can understand the gym to be a place where
men gave birth to men, as Alter also pointed out.
The gym as a space where men make men, give birth to them and
themselves, finding their true selves that were hidden behind fat and
weakness, is a train of thought that potentially stitches together a whole lot
of assumptions about why men might be interested in building muscles.
However, such reasoning often works better in theory than in practice.
Theories such as those underpinning the idea of a crisis of masculinity 220
and the potential for homosocial bonding in gyms—away from the ‘prying
and judging eyes’ of women and changing gender relations—works best
when the gym is in fact a male-only space, which it rarely ever is, even in
India. Besides, gyms in urban India are also meant to be safe spaces
protected from the harsh gender relations outside. An important caveat,
though, is that the one thing that is not left at the door is class difference
itself. And this comes particularly to the fore when we look at the way
same-sex desire operates inside as well as outside the gym with reference
to the muscular bodies of lower-middle-class trainers and bodybuilders.
Ambrish Bhatia’s movies point to this, even if mainly employing a
homophobic framework.
So how then do we understand the ostensibly ‘straight’ identities of
trainers and bodybuilders in light of the occasionally explicitly
homoerotic photoshoots they engage in? Explanations would generally and
‘simply’ hold that these men saw such photoshoots as an opportunity to
showcase their bodily accomplishments, primarily via social media
(Instagram, Facebook and more recently TikTok). Like bodybuilding
competitions on stage, the suggestion that the audience’s gaze could
venture beyond mere physical appreciation was staunchly ignored and
even rabidly dismissed as something that had either not occurred to them
or something they were not interested in. In contrast, the sexually explicit
comments that their social media posts generated confirmed that their
audience often proceeded well beyond mere whistling. The rather explicit
hashtags that bodybuilders themselves used in these posts, such as
#sexybeast or #hotboy, also indicated a certain awareness of the
sexualised or erotic qualities of their bodies. If the gym can be thought of
as a space where men make men, these men are definitely engaged in
producing men that cater to a diverse array of spectators, even if the
presence of some of them is often only obliquely acknowledged.

UNDERSTANDING THE BODYBUILDER’S BODY

Research on bodybuilding has always been preoccupied with the question
of gender and what the bodybuilder’s body communicates. Media and film
scholar Niall Richardson (2004), for one, argues that such a body can be
considered a vehicle for the display of masculine power. At the same
time, this notion is challenged by the bodybuilder’s inherent passivity on
stage, where it is objectified by those in attendance. 221 Central to any
analysis of the bodybuilder’s body is the way it deviates from the normal.
It is a radically perplexing body that often triggers confusion and
misperception among those who are not part of the sport themselves. As a
gender-dissident body, it unites both feminine and masculine
characteristics: curvaceousness, hairlessness and tanning lotions,
combined with the harsh angular lines that characterise powerful muscles.
In the gym, when a bodybuilder or trainer inspects himself—not rarely
filmed by a workout partner, to be uploaded on social media—those
present in the gym will find it hard to ignore this body. But is one
supposed to look? And if one does, what is one supposed to see? What is
being inspected and filmed is the progress made, a trajectory of
transformation. However, the bodybuilder in question has no control over
how the visual is consumed. The Indian wrestler’s body presents a similar
conundrum. It represents an older masculine ideal, one that never held the
same middle-class appeal as the lean, muscular body does now. Yet, in its
depictions as well as the way wrestlers relate to their bodies, we stumble
upon a similar set of issues. In his insightful study of Indian wrestling, R.
Sengupta wonders what sport is as vividly erotic as wrestling. 222 ‘The
tensions of wrestling’s homoerotic power have rippled through the ages.’
While the pehlwan’s body continues to be a source of inspiration for
amateur and professional photographers, often there is a disconnect
between the homoerotic desire that such photography tends to ooze with—
lusciously shot on the ghats of Varanasi or in rural akharas in Haryana—
and the way Indian wrestlers relate to and engage with their own bodies.
James Alter’s extensive body of work on the topic is particularly
revealing here. Through an analysis of the history of jori club swinging 223
in akharas, Alter points at the way exercise itself can be understood as a
way of man-making. Jori club swinging and/or the fashioning of the ideal-
type male body through exercise can be thought of as a kind of symbolic
onanism, where a man turns himself into a man. 224 Pehlwans live celibate
lives and locate their strength in their semen, making retention integral to
their life philosophy and the way they engage with their sport. Turning
men into men by means of semen, Alter points at a sexual act that only
matters at an abstracted symbolic level, whereby the sex and fluid
substance in question is contained by the self. Control over the body and
self are crucial here, something that characterises building muscular
bodies as well.
 Richardson (2004) notes that even if the bodybuilder’s body radiates
the illusion of phallic or masculine strength, his near-nakedness on stage
invites what could be thought of as a castrating gaze, one that sees him in
the nude, so to speak. In symbolic terms, this renders him sexually weak.
While a bodybuilder disavows this gaze with the very flexing of his
muscles, radiating strength and being the envy of those in the audience, the
combination of judgement and the lack of control over what the audience
may be admiring and desiring means that there is a certain tension built
into the act of posing. Richardson argues that ‘the very nature of a
bodybuilding competition distresses the masculine paradigms of
patriarchal society’. 225 The oblique heterocentrist representation in
fitness and bodybuilding magazines can be understood as a way to deflect
homoerotic connotations.
In his analysis, Richardson draws upon French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan’s conceptualisation of ‘hysteria as gender confusion’ in
order to point at how we may understand the potential ‘erotic numbness’
that the audience might experience at a bodybuilding competition, unable
to deal with the confusing interplay of masculine and feminine
characteristics on display. 226 In my years of attending numerous
bodybuilding competitions across India, I wasn’t always able to equate
this with the actual hysteria going on—crowds cheering loudly, whistling
and hollering. This ‘appreciation’ from the audience informed the way
bodybuilders, trainers and fitness enthusiasts ‘performed’ in photoshoots
and presented themselves to a much larger online audience. The queer
dimensions of muscular bodies seemed less about their potential to upset
notions of masculinity and femininity, and much more about their appeal
across a (de-)sexualised spectrum. Although they were often presented as
sexually attractive, informants were not necessarily after ‘sexual
attraction’ per se. Therefore, this sexual appeal was also not always
interpreted as potential for ‘actual sex’.

CLOSENESS AND INTIMACY AS A FINAL FRONTIER

Inside the gym, though, ruminations of this kind would seem far more
grotesque than the bodies on display. Even talking was often discouraged,
considered a distraction from what the focus ought to be: whipping the
body into shape and pushing its outer limits, at most pausing to reflect on
the actual workout and to take a quick snapshot of the progress made for
uploading online. In front of the mirror, the focus would be on the
achievements so far and the muscle groups that still required ‘work’.
Conversations about physical dimensions and training routines could go
on for hours, but what this masculine body was supposed to stand for was
considered self-evident. As with the city itself, asking questions that
attempted to penetrate the thick muscles and oiled skin just bounced or
slithered off. It was as if to linger, pause and explore would reveal the
queerness of it all. ‘Obviously’ this body was much stronger, more
attractive and masculine than the weak and effeminate Indian body of the
colonial past? It was ‘definitely’ to be preferred over the post-
Independence middle-class potbelly that had once signalled health and
prosperity. There was ‘surely’ no doubt that ‘this’ fast-moving new India
was to be desired over a sluggish post-Liberalisation India, shackled by
Licence Raj and bureaucratic incompetence? Adopting a queer gaze helps
move away from the ‘ostensiveness’ that characterises this kind of
reasoning. It takes the sheen of obviousness off all this, so to speak.
The question of sexuality and sexual attractiveness was generally
considered a non-topic within gyms and at bodybuilding competitions.
Whether in the gym or on stage, the body was to be examined, studied,
analysed and dissected in purely physical terms. While sitting next to jury
members, I found that their judgement often alternated between
appreciation for a particularly ‘massive chest’ or ‘awesome triceps’ and
far more dismissive remarks about ‘skinny legs’ or ‘weird nipples’ (the
latter often a result of ‘juicing’). But on social media, these same bodies
drew a highly sexualised reaction. The comments sections had many in the
overwhelmingly male audience judging them in terms of sexual
attractiveness and potency. My ‘straight’ informants seemed unperturbed
by this. A lack in fluency in the English language sometimes simply meant
that the message had not come across. More often, however, was the very
possibility of a sexual encounter itself deemed too far-fetched. The lack of
time, and the need to invest money and energy in building the body, were
also why they didn’t have girlfriends, I was often told. It would just
impede their work as trainers and/or progress as bodybuilders.
 As always, there was another side to the story as well, a
contradiction that would gradually emerge the more I probed. Rather
dismissively, trainer Srivat once pointed at a number of muscular
youngsters working out in his gym, saying that for them it was ‘just about
impressing the girls’, something he as an accomplished bodybuilder
frowned upon. Naturally, a difference in age played a role in this, not to
mention the fact that he was married, had two young children and was
faced with the financial burden of having recently opened his own gym.
However, his next remark that ‘it’s about show-off’ and that ‘they want
that body to boast’ complicates matters. Within a context of limited
possible contact between young men and women—certainly those of
lower-middle-class ‘vernacular’ backgrounds—the very fact of being
noticed adds to what could be understood as ‘masculine worth’ among
young Indian men. While gender relations are gradually changing in urban
India, as with other processes of change that touch the lives of
individuals, this change does not necessarily keep pace with that of the
transformation of urban space itself. It was within this context that ‘getting
noticed’ mattered, something the casual glance of a girl who might notice
one’s pronounced biceps or powerful chest may confirm, but which
required the confirmation that other men had noticed ‘her glance’ as well.
As one young fitness enthusiast who regularly worked out in a gym in
Santacruz (Mumbai) once formulated it, ‘I like it when they see me
[meaning girls], my friends all notice it.’
The awareness of a more sexualised gaze was only ever diffidently
admitted to, and sexual encounters within the gym or between trainers and
clients even less so. If at all, such accounts were rarely recounted in a
boisterous or positive manner. The difference in social and economic
standing between the two was a crucial factor, of course. Referring to a
colleague, a twenty-five-year-old trainer in Delhi once mentioned that ‘he
is very good with the ladies, they all want him’. It turned out that he
provided training at home on the side, which the trainer I interviewed
somewhat cynically described as ‘yoga’, mimicking quotation marks with
his fingers. But it was better that the gym they worked for should not find
out. ‘It is not encouraged, they warn us against it.’
A twenty-seven-year-old trainer working in a high-end gym in
Gurgaon, explained that ‘we are not to get too close to our clients’. Again,
management was very particular about this. ‘There have been some
complaints,’ he added. ‘Some issue was there, but we should not be
talking about this.’ When I probed a little deeper, it turned out that there
had been an affair between a married customer and her personal trainer.
‘There had been complaint, that guy is no longer with us.’ While the
complaint had boiled down to harassment, according to the trainer his
colleague had simply misinterpreted the one-night stand he had had with
his client. ‘He was very much in love with her, he would send her lots of
messages.’ She had clearly not appreciated this. While the informant who
recounted this saga spoke of ‘company policy’ that prohibits such
encounters between clients and employees, he nonetheless understood the
negative outcome mainly in terms of class difference. When I mentioned
the incident to a friend who regularly updated me about his own sexual
encounters with lower-middle-class men across town, he laughed heartily
and pointed out: ‘Well, there you have the limitations of social mobility!’
Indeed, it did seem to be a boundary not to be crossed. Closeness and
intimacy across class boundaries could even be thought of as the final
frontier here.

CAPITALISING ON SEXUAL A CTIVENESS

About a month after our initial conversation via Instagram and WhatsApp,
I contacted Selvam to ask about his recent participation in a fitness event
in Goa, which he quickly dismissed as ‘ridiculous’, suggesting it was
more like a marketing event. Apparently, the focus had not been on the
participants but the organisers and participating celebrities instead. ‘We
were just secondary. So typical Indian, in a way.’ Over dinner with two
other participants from Delhi, the conversation had turned to the topic of
sex work. Selvam described how the conversation between the two
trainer-models progressed: ‘If someone from the organisation wanted to
enjoy with them in exchange for some benefits, they were open to it,’ he
said. What made this particularly interesting to Selvam was that ‘most of
the participants were already known to some of the organisation’. His two
dinner partners had, in fact, managed to claim first and third place in the
category they participated in. ‘So I cannot say directly, but yes, there is
lots going on … people in the fitness industry kind of assume that they
need to do stuff.’
Once again, Selvam stressed that they do not see it as something gay;
‘it’s just the way it is’. He added that ‘in fitness case, it’s also the
acknowledgement that people are ready to pay to enjoy your body’.
Furthermore, he felt that ‘money is a force more powerful than
ethics … Very few people have a profound incorruptible moral ground’.
In fact, at the time, he was convinced that most fitness trainers are into ‘it’
one way or another, and that the balance between money vs name is an
important consideration here. ‘If you are sexy, you keep getting these
offers from eager men. And if one day it hits you in a low financial
moment, you just go for it.’ In that sense, he really didn’t ‘know a single
guy who hasn’t done some kind of escorting at some point of time’. Yet, he
also admitted that even he usually heard about this ‘via 3rd parties’,
meaning that it did not concern first-hand accounts. ‘It’s kind of a shameful
activity for many’, since ‘your manliness might be in question’, as
‘everybody knows that with a client you need to be flexible’. This entails
doing ‘some things you wouldn’t do as a straight macho man’, something
that he also considers himself to be. ‘It is performance’, to which he adds:
‘But as in every performance, sometimes might be more or less pleasant.’
A year later, we meet in the bar in Chennai as I mentioned earlier. By
this time, it appears, he has been able to build himself a network of
trainers who may be interested in generating an income as he does. His
Only Fans account has been doing well, and ‘others’ have clearly taken
inspiration from it, ‘attempting the same’. He now collaborates with some
of these trainers for sex scenes, to which he adds, ‘If I like somebody, I
can do very satisfying.’ It remains unclear to what extent he feels
alienated from his own sexual identity in this process. ‘Gay for pay’
though he is, Selvam doesn’t necessarily appear to not enjoy it. Yet, when
I inquire what he prefers, he breaks down. With tears in his eyes, he
recounts how he got married when he was nineteen as part of a strategy to
alleviate the family’s burden of debts. ‘She was my uncle’s daughter and
we had taken a loan with him.’ That the loan was no longer a cause for
concern could be thought of as dowry here. He has a young daughter now,
and without further ado fishes out his cell-phone to show me a video of
her dancing in his living room. Then he excuses himself to wash his face
in the bathroom. When he returns, Selvam explains that this is very
emotional for him, and that his wife does not know about the work he
does. ‘She is not aware of this at all, she does not know what that is.’ He
is very particular about keeping it that way, even if there is the constant
danger that word might travel back to their native place on the outskirts of
Chennai. That he uses his actual name as part of his social media presence
and pornographic work does not make this any easier, something he knows
too. At the same time, he also feels a certain pride in how he has
persevered, thinking of himself as a survivor who has nothing to be
ashamed of. He loves his wife, would rather wake up next to her every
day, but is also taking care of his family in a way that his father never did.
He feels it gives him ‘some leverage’ to make his own decision about
how he actually does this. As he puts it succinctly: ‘If they [meaning the
larger family] have a problem with it, they will be begging on the streets.’
But he was not particularly worried that they might find out about his
erotic modelling and sex work: ‘They are all villagers, so not much into
social media, etc.’ At the same time, he has no doubt that some of the
photos will find their way to them at some point. It is an inevitability he
has to prepare himself for. He feels, ‘It’s all about the balance between
money and name (reputation).’ He compares himself with middle-class
folk whose financial situation is under less strain. ‘When there are dire
financial needs, Indians will be ready to do anything,’ adding defiantly,
‘and fuck the name, regrets may come later on, but that’s how it is.’

BRIDGING THE OSTENSIBLE GAP IN MIDDLE -CLASSNESS

While all three men discussed in this chapter capitalise on the sexual
attractiveness of their bodies in one way or another, Selvam is the only
one who has actually resorted to providing escort work, something the
others vehemently deny ever having engaged in. Still, their homoerotically
saturated photoshoots utilise sexual capital to further their ambition,
whether it is to enlarge their personal training client base or source
‘lucrative’ modelling assignments. While Selvam was adamant about his
belief that most trainers had at some point involved themselves in sex
work-related activities, he also admitted that information about this had
often reached him via third parties, meaning he did not know the person in
question. Even if gay friends emphasised the easy availability of trainers
for sexual services, I often found direct accounts and experiences lacking.
I couldn’t help think of it as an urban fantasy that was revealing for the
way upper-middle-class men thought of lower-middle-class men whose
bodies they admired and sexually desired, but whose position in society
they certainly did not envy. In fact, for most of their lives, they had been
used to these ‘lower classes’ catering to their every need: as drivers,
cooks, gardeners, security guards, tutors and so on.
Instead of focusing on the ‘truth’ here, the question of the availability
of fitness trainers and bodybuilders for sex work should be considered in
light of the puzzle of a changing India itself. As this book has argued
throughout, India’s change does not necessarily translate to the same pace
at an individual level, where things move slowly. The way new middle-
class professionals, such as Selvam, Bikram and Girish, make use of the
opportunities that a new India presents them with is not generalisable per
se.
Selvam’s sister’s suicide profoundly impacted the family and made
an already precarious financial situation worse. His marriage at nineteen
only partly solved their predicament, and Selvam feels the weight of his
family’s obligations on his muscular shoulders every day.
Bikram’s father passed away and left his mother and siblings in a
financially precarious situation. He knows that whatever financial risk he
takes next—venturing into sportswear or building a fitness brand for
himself—will impact those he has vowed to take care of.
Girish’s ambitions to become a competitive bodybuilder requires a
considerably higher financial investment than what Bikram and Selvam
need to maintain their muscular bodies. His limited personal training
client-base cannot nearly provide for this, and as a result, he remains
dependent on his family when a ‘man his age’ should be starting a family
of his own. Besides financial constraints, his usage of anabolic steroids
and growth hormones might render this impossible in the longer term as
well.
All three, however, now make considerably more per month than
their parents ever did, and are able to afford lifestyles that were
previously unheard of in their families and communities. In their attempts
at upward mobility in a ‘new India’, these accounts continue to tell of the
roadblocks and boundaries to be negotiated along the way. While they are
part of a muscular India, flexing admirably large muscles that are desired
at multiple levels, this same India with its inherent class hierarchies does
not hesitate to flex its own muscles as well. India is never not its own
muscular doorman that way.

Having read one of my earlier publications, Selvam once messaged that,

even though he didn’t reach twelfth standard, ‘I guess I am just an extreme
case of what you so inspiringly call “bridging the ostensible gap in
middle-classness”,’ to which he adds a ‘ ’. In this article I had argued
that an ‘ideal type’ body alone was not enough to be successful in the
Indian fitness industry. ‘Equally if not more important was the way a
trainer was successfully able to bridge the ostensible gap in middle-
classness.’ 227 It resonated with Selvam’s own experiences, though in his
ambition to make money and live the lifestyle of his ‘clients’, staying in
high-end hotel rooms and traveling to lush locations across India, he had
gone decidedly further than most others I met over the years. It had
rendered him proud but also deeply cynical. At some point, during our
long conversations about his work providing sexual services to male
clients and uploading regular pornographic content to his Only Fans
account, he said: ‘We are tissue papers for clients to blow their noses in
and then toss away.’ While it is probably unnecessary for me to explain
what exactly he meant by ‘blowing their noses’ here, it did point at
something that resonated through other accounts of fitness trainers as well:
that as unique as their bodies may be, they were also ultimately
replaceable.
 EPILOGUE

I
n 2018, I take a taxi from Bangalore airport to the suburb of RT Nagar
to visit my in-laws. The urban landscape has changed dramatically
once again. However, this time it is not the ongoing urban sprawl that
catches my attention. Normally, the city greets visitors first with towering
billboards advertising a whole array of goods and services, but this time
they are all gone. Threads of former advertisements dangle haphazardly in
the wind, giving Bangalore the feel of an abandoned frontier ghost town.
A Google search reveals that a ban had been issued on commercial
hoarding within the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) area,
excluding areas such as MG Road and Brigade Road. Gone are the
advertisements for the construction of new apartment complexes with
fancy European-sounding names; the announcements for new McDonald’s
and KFC menus have disappeared; and the sculpted men advertising a
whole gamut of products from deodorant to holidays in Goa and Kerala
are gone. Like the construction projects, cars on the road, and Café Coffee
Days flanking the roads, these billboards had always appeared to have
multiplied each time I visited the city.
As much as I wondered about these ghostly billboards, my family
and friends in the city took little notice. It was mainly perceived as a
glitch, a short interruption of business as usual. Surely, this was some
political stunt, somebody trying to make money, I was assured. These
billboards would be up in no time. This was not something that would
last. Just wait and see!
The idea of a new India almost automatically evokes the notion of
speed—things happening in a hurry, faster than they can be tracked. It
appears that research somehow needs to mirror that speed. How else can
we understand what’s going on? This book shows that the speed of change
at an individual level rarely meets the speed with which things appear to
be changing in general. There is an important reason for using ‘appear’
here because the narrative of a changing or new India is one that could do
with a healthy dose of nuance. Sure, India is in motion, but wasn’t it
always? Late professor Mario Rutten, an expert on Gujarat and a dear
friend, once remarked that it had always struck him as fundamentally
flawed to argue that ‘things were really changing now’ in India. They had
always been changing, he felt, nothing had ever been set in stone, there
had never not been a time when everything was heading in a completely
different direction from before. It was something he had observed over
decades of spending significant amounts of time in second-tier towns such
as Anand and elsewhere in semi-rural Gujarat. This doesn’t mean, of
course, that change is not real, and that people don’t need to find a way to
deal with the changes they face in their lifetimes.
That is why, I will wind up this tale with an impression of how the
lives of the men discussed in Muscular India have developed since we
met them last. These men’s trajectories are principally ongoing, of course.
Like arriving at a comprehensive estimate of the size of the Indian middle
class, an answer to the questions I have raised throughout the book will
never quite be able to capture the complexity of a society in motion, of
how illusive yet massive, how slippery and truly momentous change is.

THE ‘CLASSIC ’ ASPI TIONS OF A SH

Following my encounter with empty billboards, I meet Akash for lunch at

the same place in Indiranagar we had gone to earlier. As he walked in
earlier than expected, I couldn’t help noticing how he looked even bigger
than before. Truly enormous arms, colossal biceps and a gigantic chest, he
clocked 112 kg at the time, even though the competition-category he was
aiming for was in the 90 kg range. It was not something he was
particularly worried about, he explained. During this bulking phase, he
was enjoying not having to worry about every bite that went into his mouth
and was keen to devour one of the restaurant’s famous burgers.
The previous year, Akash had competed in his first international
competition, held in Mongolia. By the time he reached Ulan Bator, he
realised he would have to lose another 10 kg if he were to have any
chance of reaching the top three at all. He eventually managed to pull it off
with the help of diuretics and steam baths. ‘I was being cooked man, I was
in that steam bath the whole time!’ But it was also during the Mongolia
competition that he started to realise that he was not nearly big enough yet.
In his own weight class of 90-plus kg, there were ‘much bigger guys,
much more muscular!’ He did enjoy competing because the atmosphere
was so different from that of India, where he had found his fellow
competitors to be ‘nasty and aggressive’. Yet something had changed in
terms of what he saw himself aiming for in the coming years.
In Mongolia, he had learned of the so-called Arnold Classic category
for the first time. He described it as ‘going back to the figures and posing
of the 1980s, basically what Schwarzenegger looked like’. It is something
he now wants to achieve for himself as well. ‘When you are this big,
nothing is easy, you know.’ When he had lost weight for the competition,
he noticed how much easier certain things were, even if he felt completely
depleted of any energy. ‘Now I am putting all this weight on me, my knees
are taking a beating as well.’ But he also appreciates the aesthetics of it
more. ‘It is not just about becoming huge, it just looks better.’ He pulled
out his phone to illustrate what he meant.
After the two competitions he still has lined up, Akash is
contemplating becoming smaller, not bigger. He has discussed this with
his Australian coach to whom he pays Rs 10,000 per month for online
advice. He hoped to derive an income out of a similar scheme himself
someday, saying: ‘… he doesn’t need to work all that much for it.’ Turning
to a ‘more natural look’ and participating in Arnold Classic-like
competitions would also help his online appeal internationally, he felt.
Even though he was still employed by the same Gold’s Gym, the idea
of starting his own fitness business had become more concrete. An
additional reason for this was the politics and favouritism he had
encountered at the gym, which was beginning to get to him. He still wasn’t
meeting his targets, but he had been consistent with his results, so his
clients liked coming back to him. He was now a Super Platinum category
trainer, above which there is only one more category. But he was not sure
if he wanted to ‘take’ that category because it was very hard to get people
to pay so much for training. ‘Only really rich people can afford that.’ It
comes down to about Rs 70,000 for twelve sessions. It still amazes Akash
that new trainers hardly seem to possess any real knowledge of how
bodies function and transform, in spite of the certificates they boast of.
Akash feels he has the body to show for his knowledge. However, he
also realises that others may think his physique was built only on juice.
The idea amuses him and strikes him as ridiculous. ‘They have no idea
how many hours we put in the gym to get there. How much time,
energy … how much we give up for it.’ Coming to the topic of the risks
bodybuilders take, the conversation turns to a bodybuilder from Mumbai
who had supposedly used synthol to make his muscles look bigger. ‘So
many are dying now.’ It was something he kept hearing about all the time,
and which had made him even more determined to—eventually—focus on
a ‘healthier’ massively muscular body.

RIP SAMSON SOLOMON

My very first informant and dear friend Samson Solomon (real name)
passed away early September 2018. Like so many, I had first met Samson
on Facebook where he posted regular updates of his progress as an
aspiring bodybuilder. The first time we met, he drove me around on his
motorcycle, which barely supported his colossal physique, and showed
me his old bodybuilding haunts in Mumbai. Through him, I came to know
an older generation of bodybuilders and fitness enthusiasts who provided
a glimpse into the sport’s much longer history in India. In those early days,
Samson was not particularly successful in deriving an income as a fitness
and personal trainer. He often complained that high-end chains like Gold’s
Gym were not interested in his services because they were afraid that his
enormous body might scare off customers. ‘They don’t like to be
associated with that,’ he suggested, adding: ‘They think I am a monster.’
When I went to Delhi to start my fellowship with Nalanda University
in 2013, Samson had just moved there himself, and was now living close
to his best friend, female bodybuilder Rita Singh. He shared his house
with four enormous dogs and twenty birds, including cockatoos and
macaws. Even if he was involved in various fitness-related businesses,
his own bodybuilding career was faltering. He had started injecting
synthol to enlarge his muscles, which made them look odd and ill-
proportioned. As a result, he was frequently denied entry into
competitions, something that weighed heavily on him.
Samson died while sedated during a routine treatment to deal with a
deviated septum, which he had had since childhood. The bodybuilding
community was quick to link his synthol-use to his untimely passing, even
if it appeared not to have been a factor in his death. It did, however,
underline how the sport continues to struggle with health-related issues
and how the pursuit of bigness is rarely just about the man in the mirror,
but also the reflection of oneself in the eyes of one’s community.

VICTOR CONTINUES HIS WAY UP

When I met Victor in 2018, he had just learned of Samson Solomon’s
death and was keen to share his opinion with me. Well aware of synthol
use among aspiring bodybuilders, his critique was not so much about its
use but the way people professed to know the way it operated in the body.
He had recently taken over the branding and activities of a well-known
gym chain in Chennai, and continued to combine this with providing
personal training on the side. His income was much higher by this time
than it had ever been when he was working for PayPal, and his family no
longer doubted that he had made the right decision.
But his relationship with various bodybuilding federations and
associations remained acrimonious. He experienced considerable
backlash from ‘the old guard’ when he recently organised a competition
without their backing. In fact, he even received some thinly veiled threats
on social media to underline their dismay. However, he remains
committed to freeing the sport from the ‘corrupt’ involvement of those
who only care to see their own people win, as he puts it.
Now that he is also involved in the training of talent outside the field
of fitness and bodybuilding, who may eventually qualify for the Summer
Olympics in Tokyo, he is branching out in a way few of his competitors
have. His Instagram account now counts over half a million followers.
Key to building this following have been regular videos, in which he
provides diet advice, workouts and other health-related matters. His own
incredibly muscular physique fuels ‘his brand’ as much as it raises
questions about how much longer he will be able to maintain it in its
current form.

RAJ SHINING ON STAGE

Raj did shine on stage eventually—not once but several times. A picture
he sent me at some point shows him posing victoriously backstage. He had
indeed put on considerable mass and it looked like his decision to invest
in growth hormones had paid off. More recently, he informed me of his
decision to move away from bodybuilding and to focus on his IT career
full-time. Even if he continued to attend the same gym and train under
Srivat, his new position in handling automation and robotics was
demanding his undivided attention.
When I met him for lunch in 2018, he cheerfully commented that I had
put on weight since he last saw me, even if his own weight-gain was not
particularly easy to ignore either. As a researcher, surely I had plenty of
time to keep myself fit, he reasoned. He himself was faced with the busy
demands of his job and the challenge of keeping a regular schedule with
the gym. It is a predicament that continues to dominate our conversations
on WhatsApp, even if I am unlikely to ever come close to the figure he
once sported. I sometimes remind him of the question he once asked me,
about what I would do if I had his body. I distinctly remember telling him
that I would have signed up a long time ago, but the kind of discipline and
dedication he had put into building his muscles was something that would
never come ‘natural’ to me. Even if his bodybuilding career had not been
particularly ‘natural’ either, what he had accomplished was self-evident.
The occasional glances from co-workers confirmed that he hadn’t
completely lost what he had so carefully built over all these years.

MANISH IN SEARCH OF THE NEXT OPPORTUNITY

In 2019, I caught up with Manish in Delhi. He had just taken over general
management of a new gym in Gurgaon; a highly specialised, high-end one
that makes use of Spanish technology imported from Dubai. While visiting
Manish at his new gym, I also met the investor in the project, part of a
Dubai-based business family that was originally from Delhi. He
immediately started probing me about whether I could help him with any
leads into the ‘Singapore market’, which he considered very promising. I
was quickly given the run down and sales pitch, during which I watched
Manish’s usual confidence and patience diminish.
When his investor left for an ‘urgent’ appointment, I asked Manish
why he did not seem his usual self. ‘That guy is all about business, no
emotions,’ he answered. I had always known Manish to be a salesperson
himself, but over lunch at a burrito place nearby, he explained that he had
serious reservations about the project. Earlier he had asked me to
participate in a trial of an odd-looking suit with electrodes attached to
various body parts. An incredibly sweaty contraption to be in, the idea
was that the suit would give small electric shocks to the different muscle
groups while working out. It would make weight loss and building
muscles much easier while it was also supposed to prevent potential
injury. It seemed an incredibly complex and invasive way to work on
one’s health, and I wondered who would be willing to go through the
hassle of putting on the suit every time and pay the rather exorbitant fees
—something Manish did not seem entirely convinced about either.
Evidently, he was still searching for an alternative after his
involvement with BodyHolics came to an end. As usual the conversation
turned to ‘the gym’, and how he missed his trainers and clients. His
emotions also got the better of him when he stated that he ‘helped
everybody but when I needed help nobody helped me’. It had hugely
disappointed him. Long-term members had complained that he had taken
their membership fees in advance, and that when the gym closed, he had
not been able to return this money. He had hoped for their understanding,
but it had tarnished his name instead.
Before taking up management of this high-tech gym in Gurgaon, he
had managed a gym called Chisel, which was started by Virat Kohli.
When we drove down to a nearby market, he pointed at the gym, which
was located on top of a branch of 24/7 Fitness. Again, it struck me how
fitness chains themselves had increased over the years. Near BodyHolics,
two new gyms had established their businesses. Manish still does not like
driving down that road because of the emotions it brings back. Recently,
he consulted a numerologist and concluded that he is ‘a very emotional
guy’ who sees enemies everywhere, even though he is a hard worker.
 I couldn’t but help notice how Manish looked strangely tired. His
sister had recently got married and, as usual, the family had knocked on
his door for money because of his image as a money-maker. ‘There is
always something that needs taken care of,’ he said and sighed. But he felt
very proud and content that his sister was now married because ‘that was
a huge responsibility for me’. The family still resides in Chirag Dilli, a
hundred metres from Amit, with whom he is still in touch. They had
briefly collaborated to provide personal training to the CEO of Amazon
India. ‘I learnt so much from that guy!’ Contemplating this some more, he
added: ‘Most people will beg to get five minutes with him, but I was able
to establish a real relationship. When you talk to him, he will explain
things with hundred things connected. He is like that.’ Meanwhile, Manish
was exploring various alternative business options, having little faith that
the current gym he was managing would take off. Indeed, it wasn’t long
before he started another business, this time in event management, with
which he hoped to venture well beyond the confines of ‘just’ fitness and
bodybuilding.

AMIT AS A POOR MAN WITH THREE CARS

I had met Amit at various intervals earlier and he would usually invite me
to his home in Chirag Dilli. The first time I had to find my way there, I got
completely lost in the narrow alleyways and eventually had to text him my
location on Google Maps so that he could come and find me. Unlike
Manish, he had fully moved on from BodyHolics and rarely reflected on
his time there. Whenever we met, he would briefly inquire if I was still in
touch with some of the gym’s regular clients, such as Supriya, who had
since moved to Canada with her family.
Amit’s personal training business had taken off, and it was something
he combined with an involvement with the local chapter of the BJP. An
avid supporter of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, he had become
involved in ‘arranging’ solutions for neighbours and community members
whose financial situation might not be as flourishing as his own. For
instance, if a family is short on dowry money, he operates a funding
organisation that may be able to provide the couple with, say, a
refrigerator. ‘Or we give them some contribution to the wedding, like pay
for the venue or dinner.’
Occasionally I see him post updates where his smiling face is
plastered on some billboard next to a range of other local figures, adorned
by a decidedly larger image of the prime minister himself. When I once
remarked that he seemed to be doing well, Amit assured me that he was
still a poor man—something I continue to tease him about because of what
followed next. After having lunch at his family home, he offered to drive
me to my next appointment at nearby Select Citywalk. When we walked
down to a parking area nearby, he could not quite decide which car to use.
There were three nearly identical Tata Indica’s parked in a row, but the
key he had brought along was only for one of them. The cars belonged to
his family, he explained somewhat apologetically. He could use any one
of them anytime. ‘A poor man with three cars, huh?’

SHIVAM IN THE NATIONAL CAPITAL REGION

Shivam was invariably enthusiastic every time I said I was coming to
Delhi, promising me a wild night out or at least lunch at his place. It never
quite happened as planned, which is something I had come to expect.
Shivam’s life was always in motion and there was never not a next ‘big
thing’ waiting to happen. Most recently, we met in a mall in Gurgaon. He
was there to discuss involvement in the business of air purifiers and water
alkalisers. Though it was a deviation from his plans to set up a
bodybuilding federation and organise fitness events, these plans had been
far from shelved. When he gave me a bearhug as soon as I walked in, I felt
the raw power in his biceps. It appeared he had returned to working out
regularly. He launched immediately into his disappointment about having
had to delay his plans. ‘Indians are shit, man, I will tell you that.’ They
just didn’t seem to understand his vision. ‘One day I am going to be so
big, you won’t even believe it!’ Arnold Schwarzenegger had done the
same. He had gone from bodybuilding to Hollywood and then became a
governor! Shivam imagined a similar trajectory for himself one day.
Meanwhile, I learnt that Rajender Bainsla had taken up a political
position—the responsibility for the maintenance of an upper-middle-class
neighbourhood in South Delhi, not too far from where I had lived myself
at some point. Cynically, Shivam put it as follows: ‘So that’s how it
works: get some bodybuilders around you, build that network, and then
say I can do this and this.’ And that’s what Bainsla had done, he said.

KISHORE’S HAPPINESS FUCKED UP

I continue to see Kishore on regular visits to Mumbai, usually in Chembur,
where he now runs a new gym. The last time I visited him, he had handed
over day-to-day management to twenty-six-year-old Shalini, who grew up
five minutes from his house in Chembur. Even if they had only known each
other for three months, they appeared to be close business partners and
avowed to have ‘incredible faith’ in each other. Shalini also knew
Kishore’s wife well and often ate at their place, even if his father
apparently ‘hated her’ and often gave her a disapproving look.
I met her for the first time in 2018, arriving in Chembur from Bandra
West. The Uber driver had considerable difficulty locating Kishore’s new,
semi-outdoor gym. Eventually ‘things’ had not worked out with the person
who owned the wedding ground that he had previously used as a site, and
this new place offered a more permanent home for his business.
Meanwhile, Shalini had tried calling me a few times already via
WhatsApp to inquire where I was. It was a Sunday afternoon, and since
the gym would close at three that day, she was worried I might not get to
see the place in action. While we waited for Kishore to arrive, Shalini
filled me in on her involvement in Kishore’s gym. After seven years ‘in
media’, and having worked with almost all of the Bollywood stars, she
had felt it was time for a change. She grew up in Chembur, but unlike
Kishore, she had attended an English-medium convent school; she clearly
belonged to a different layer of middle-class society altogether. Her father
is an important property developer in Chembur. Eager to convince me
how close she had become with Kishore in a short period of time, even if
he is clearly not of her world, she mentioned that they had hit it off almost
immediately after she had joined his gym to lose weight. She no longer
had the body for it, but she had been a Kingfisher calendar girl at some
point, and was eager to get back in shape.
With the gym closed for the day, we decided to take an auto to a
nearby bar that specialised in various types of craft beer. It was a place I
had not imagined existed in Chembur, recalling the area’s rather dingy
‘old school’ bars we usually frequented. The walls of this bar were
adorned with advertisements for new types of brews, and it even seemed
to work with a fancy system of bidding to determine the popularity and
price of each beer.
Shalini appeared to frequent it quite regularly, but Kishore noticed
my surprise to find him hanging out in a place like this. Growing up in a
Rajput family, Shalini had dated a ‘Marwari boy’, but the relationship
came to an untimely end when her mother made it clear that the family
would never allow them to get married. Now in her late twenties, she felt
she had lost considerable time on the wedding market. It was not hard to
see how enthralled she had become with Kishore, pinching his biceps and
eager to tell me how intimate she had become with his family. When I
joked that she was like his second wife, both laughed loudly though, with
an embarrassed smile, Kishore assured me nothing was going on. Over the
course of the evening, however, it became clear that Kishore was not
entirely convinced by what this alliance meant to him.
After having ordered our third round, Shalini started rolling up
Kishore’s T-shirt sleeves so that his biceps showed more clearly. She felt
that he should show off more, even if I had never known Kishore to miss
an opportunity to do so. His Facebook and Instagram accounts are still
filled with almost daily updates of his body and athletic prowess.
Apparently, she was keen on him participating in a Mr India competition,
perhaps even progressing to Mr Olympia level. This puzzled me
considerably since I knew he had always been quite concerned about
steroid and hormone use. He was proud of his natural body, and
bodybuilding had never been an ambition as far as I knew.
While she laid out her plans for him, I noticed him waiting for me to
interrupt her lengthy explanation to ask the very obvious question about
where all of this actually came from. When it came to steroids, he
confessed that he was ‘considering it’ but that he was keen ‘to maintain
the youth’ and not to ‘become big’. It was clearly more her idea than his,
and while she kept talking about this, he actually did not participate much
in the conversation and looked unhappy.
There was a competition coming up in the next few months and she
seemed to think that Kishore had a chance. At some point she said, ‘I will
fuck up his happiness in the next six months,’ suggesting that she was
really going to push Kishore to work harder on his body and to become
more competitive. Throughout the evening, she referred to a recent event
they had organised, and for which they had invited bodybuilder Rajesh
Yadav. She had been quite impressed by the show he had delivered, and
seemed to believe that Kishore could become ‘like this’ as well.
When I wondered out loud how he felt about the amount of ‘juicing’
required for this, Kishore confirmed that he had indeed always been
uncomfortable about it. ‘I have always been this guy, as long as Michael
has known me, I have been like this.’ His pride was centred on being able
to maintain his body and the look of a fit and healthy guy, he said. He was
well-aware that other men looked up to him for this. ‘I have never been
too keen to get so much into this medical stuff.’
The evening provided a snapshot from Kishore’s ongoing journey,
where he must negotiate questions of his body in relation to the path of
upward socioeconomic mobility that he has been on for more than a
decade. The ‘relationship’ with Shalini did not last long, and when I
messaged both a few months later, it turned out she had left the gym to
focus on ‘other things’, and Kishore was keen to forget about her
involvement in his life altogether.
Shalini was clearly fascinated by Kishore’s working-class
background as well as his body, which she openly admired. I never quite
understood what compelled her to give up her career in media to involve
herself in the business of fitness, which she had no experience in, nor the
body that one would expect for it. For Kishore, the deal was more clear-
cut. Shalini’s father was a leading property developer in Chembur, and a
possible alliance with the family could help him sort out the nagging
concern of the temporary nature that (again) characterised the place he
rented at the time. Moreover, I knew he had plans to grow beyond just the
one gym. Time will tell how he closes the gap in middle-classness that the
brief involvement of Shalini once again accentuated.

SELVAM IN CHAINS AND SHACKLED

In a particularly striking update on Instagram sometime in 2019, Selvam
wears an elaborate gold chain around his waist; it almost looks like some
sort of dowry contribution. Barely concealing his cock, it’s a strikingly
erotic picture that shows off his talent for taking incredibly suggestive
pictures. In his right hand he holds a sword with the tip facing down, as if
it were a walking stick. The picture is captioned: ‘Warrior ready for
battle.’
When I asked him for an update about his life by means of
WhatsApp, he described it as ‘OK, so I keep doing bold shoots’. He
added that ‘escort work has been a bit slow during summer’. The reason
for this was that potential clients had gone off on holidays. ‘But it’s
catching up again.’ I was reminded of our discussion earlier, when he
mentioned that it wouldn’t surprise him if news of his activities found
their way back to his native village.
‘It did actually happen,’ he responded almost immediately. ‘It’s
unbelievable but it did.’ Somehow, his pictures ‘got into the hands of
some gay fellows there’. And they had gone straight to his aunty. ‘But I
was able to manage.’ She had clearly been scandalised, ‘but then I
explained that I was making money out of it’. As we discussed earlier,
‘the money argument kinda softens everything up’. According to Selvam,
poor people like his family understand this. ‘Money talks and everything
can be done for money … And eventually money is stronger than
morality.’ The family is now aware of his ‘modelling’ activities, but not
of the services he delivers as a sex worker. This is likely to change though
since police officers have recently come to his door asking about his
online activities, having been tipped off by what Selvam assumed to be a
jealous cousin.
Rumours about sex work and the availability (‘interest’ in) same-sex
contact continue to imbue the narrative and mythology that surrounds
fitness trainers and bodybuilders in India. Even if Selvam emphasises that
he knows of plenty of examples of men who are engaged in similar escort
and ‘modelling’ work, most of this also reaches him via third parties.
What it points to most of all is that, within the fast-changing context of a
‘new India’, there is little that is certain. Earlier, I drew the conclusion
that these stories of the availability of trainers and bodybuilders for
‘sexual services’ signals an enduring, resilient internal hierarchy of what
it means to be and belong to the middle class. The story of urban India and
its associated fast-moving change is never completely told and finished.
 NOTES

1. It is furthermore suggested that the movie was inspired by the 1951

British movie Happy Go Lovely, which confusingly was itself loosely
based on a German comedy from 1933 titled And Who Is Kissing Me?
.
2. T.B. Macaulay’s ‘minute’ is available at
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaula
y/txt_minute_education_1835.html (visited 24-10-2018).
3. Joshi, 2011: 83.
4. Ibid: 85.
5. Ibid: 2.
6. Varma, 1999: 157.
7. Gupta borrows the term westoxification from the Iranian intellectual
Jala-e-Ahmed, referring to the so-called middle-class obsession with
electronic goods, foreign brands and other aspects of ‘modernity’.
Also discussed in Belliappa, 2013: 10.
8. Mawdsley, 2004: 85, see also Mario Rutten, 2001.
9. P.R. Ramesh, ‘Out to Bait the Middle Class’, Open , 3 February 2014.
10. Ibid: 14. The drawing described is by Anirban Ghosh.
11. Ibid: 16.
12. See for a detailed analysis of the construction and layering of Brand
Modi: Business Today , ‘Just the Right Image’, by Shamni Pande,
available online: https://www.businesstoday.in/magazine/case-
study/case-study-strategy-tactics-behind-creation-of-brand-narendra-
modi/story/206321.html (visited 11-02-2019).
13. The Washington Post , ‘Modi Promises “Shining India” in Victory
Speech’, by Annie Gowen and Rama Lakshmi, available online:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/hindu-nationalist-narendra-
 modis-party-heads-to-victory-in-indian-polls/2014/05/16/c6eccaea-
4b20-46db-8ca9-af4ddb286ce7_story.html?
noredirect=on&utm_term=.38fb63778d79 (visited 11-02-2019).
14. Shurmer-Smith, 2000: 29.
15. V.G. Kulkarni, 1993, ‘The Middle Class Bulge’, Far Eastern
Economic Review , 156: 44.
16. Sheth, 1999: 337–333.
17. Fernandes, 2006: xiv.
18. Baviskar and Ray, 2011: 2.
19. E. Sridharan (2004). ‘The Growth and Sectoral Composition of
India’s Middle Classes: Its Impact on the Politics of Liberalization in
India’, India Review , 3(4): 405–28; reprinted in Elite and
Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes
(2011), edited by Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray, as ‘The Growth and
Sectoral Composition of India’s Middle Classes: Their Impact on the
Politics of Economic Liberalization’, 27–57.
20. Dickey, 2012: 567.
21. Here Dickey refers to studies by Achin Vanaik, ‘Consumerism and
New Classes in India’, in Sujata Patel, Jasodhara Bagchi, and Krishna
Raj, eds, Thinking Social Science in India: Essays in Honour of
Allice Thorner (New Delhi: Sage, 2002), 228; Satish Deshpande,
Contemporary India , 2003: 134; William Mazzarella, Shovelling
Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India
(Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2003), 264–265. It
thus needs to be noted that the studies that buttress the suggestion that
the exaggeration of the higher numbers build on data that was gathered
in the early 2000s.
22. Surinder S. Jodhka and Aseem Prakash, 2016: 7.
23. See Fernandes, Donner & De Neve, 2011: 4, referring to Appadurai,
A. and Breckenbridge, C., 1995. ‘Public Modernity in India’, In: C.
Breckenbridge (ed.) Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a
South Asian World . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
24. See Michiel Baas & Julien Cayla, ‘Recognition in India’s New
Service Professions: Gym Trainers and Coffee Baristas’,
Consumption Markets & Culture , 2019, DOI:
10.1080/10253866.2019.1586678.
25. See for a more extensive discussion, Shurmer-Smith, 2000.
26. See among others Vinay Sitapati’s (2016) Half Lion: How P.V.
Narasimha Rao Transformed India (New Delhi: Penguin) and Jairam
Ramesh’s (2015) To the Brink and Back: India’s 1991 Story (New
Delhi: Rupa Publications).
27. All names in this book have been anonymised unless it concerned
people whose reputation and ideas are commonly known and shared.
Sometimes other aspects of informants’ lives are changed as well to
make sure their privacy is properly protected.
28. CR stands for Chittaranjan, while GK for Greater Kailash, the latter
which consists of two parts. It is uncommon to refer to them by their
full name.
29. As one of many urban villages in Delhi, Chirag Dilli was granted a
special status as part of a city planning dilemma which revolved
around how to categorise the various miscellaneous village
settlements within the ever-expanding city.
30. See for a more detailed exploration of the symbolic value of the
English language in India Chaise LaDousa’s book Hindi is Our
Ground, English is Our Sky: Education, Language, and Social Class
in Contemporary India (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014); as well
as Sazana Jayadeva’s work on the topic (2018).
31. There are various spellings, such as gujar, gurjar, gurjjar, gojar, etc.
Gujjar seems to be the most commonplace though.
32. All three are Tata brands.
33. Spaaij, 2011: 18. The field of cultural mobility studies is decidedly
less ‘systematically’ developed.
34. See also Friedman, 2014: 356.
35. See also Bourdieu, 1993: 32–33.
36. Coleman, 1998, also discussed in Spaaij, 2011: 26–7.
37. Bourdieu, 1986, as also discussed in Spaaij, 2011: 25.
38. Episode 8, around 23:54.
39. Bourdieu, 1990: 56.
40. Thompson, 1991: 13.
41. Ganesh Chaturthi is the annually held ten- or eleven-day festival in
celebration of the elephant god Ganesha. Though it is celebrated
 across India in a variety of ways, for Mumbai and Pune it is the most
important festival of the year.
42. A murti is a general term for an image, statue or idol of a deity or
mortal in Hinduism.
43. In Hinduism, a pandal is a temporary structure set up to venerate a
deity.
44. During dry days, no liquor may be sold in shops, restaurants or bars.
45. The diversity in terms of customs during the festival is partly the
product of the history of Ganesh Chaturthi itself and the way it
evolved over time as a city-wide practice. See among others here a
recent article in the Hindustan Times titled ‘How Ganesh Chaturthi
celebrations have evolved over time’, to be found here:
https://www.hindustantimes.com/mumbai-news/history-of-ganesh-
chaturthi-from-uniting-indians-to-helping-parties-reach-out-to-
masses/story-IeVHulDmbUJfv3iQyYgTrN.html (visited 08-03-2018).
46. Kollywood, the Tamil movie industry, is named after the suburb of
Kodambakkam in Chennai where most of the industry is located.
47. The Indian edition of Men’s Health ceased publication in September
2015.
48. Instead of thinking of globalising forces as principally homogenising,
from the 1990s studies have increasingly described the way such
globalisation ‘lands’ locally in terms of heterogeneity, meaning that
the specific form it takes locally differs from location to location.
49. An article in The Guardian titled ‘Brawn again: why Hollywood’s
muscle heroes are bigger than ever’ (18-09-2018) notes that we are
(again) in the ‘age of the strongman’. It referenced Mark Wahlberg’s
daily fitness and dietary regime which includes two gym sessions, six
meals and one hour cultivating his chest making use of a cryogenic
recovery chamber. The author Alex Hess argues that ‘a man’s cultural
worth these days can be accurately gauged by the circumference of his
biceps.’ Yet it must be noted that all the actors the article lists, ranging
from The Rock to Van Diesel, are known for their roles as action
heroes.
50. See for instance ‘Farhan Akhtar is more ripped in “Wazir” than he
was in “Bhaag Milkha Bhaag” says his fitness trainer Samir Jaura’,
 http://www.thehealthsite.com/news/farhan-akhthar-fitness-wazir-
bhaag-milkha-bhaag-samir-jaura-k1214/ (visited 14-06-2017).
51. See for instance ‘Celebrity diet and fitness secrets by Samir Jaura’,
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/health-
fitness/fitness/Celebrity-diet-and-fitness-secrets-by-Samir-
Jaura/articleshow/48342773.cms (visited 14-06-2017).
52. The first was published by Simon & Schuster, the latter by Om Books
International.
53. ‘Automatic Bodies’ by Paromita Vohra, The Indian Quarterly ,
available online: http://indianquarterly.com/automatic-bodies/
(visited 26-03-2019). It’s interesting to compare this to how Mukul
Kesavan discusses the issue in The Ugliness of the Indian Male and
Other Propositions (2008): ‘… with a few exceptions (Dilip Kumar
was a persuasively broody lover, Dharmendra was an old-fashioned
hunk, Shashi Kapoor was the pretty boy par excellence, and Aamir
and Shahrukh have some claim to cuteness) the men who figure in it
[Bollywood] are, by most standards of male beauty, aggressively
unbeautiful. Ashok Kumar was a charming man, but he had the
physical presence of a cupboard wearing a dressing gown. Kundan
Lal Saigal was possibly the ugliest leading man in the history of
world cinema. Rajesh Khanna, the first superstar, looked upholstered
for most of his career, like a bolster wearing a guru shirt. Rajendra
Kumar … well, what can you say? And yet, these men were serious
stars … Why does Indian cinema, deal in beautiful women and ugly
men? … Indian cinema favours good-looking women and bad-looking
men because its audiences consist of good-looking women and bad-
looking men … Think about it: what choice do they have? In nearly
every arranged marriage in North India you will hear an older woman
say reassuringly: “ Ladkon ki seerat dekhi jaati hai, soorat nahin”,
which, roughly translated, reads: you look at a boy’s qualities, not his
looks.’ (2008: 16–17).
54. Sen, Ronojoy, 2015: 217.
55. See also excellent biography by Rajiv Vijayakar (2018) of the actor
Dharmendra.
56. Tulsi Badrinath, Madras, Chennai and the Self: Conversations with
the City , New Delhi: Pan Macmillan, 02–15: 156.
57. This is a common misconception, India is not, of course, a largely
vegetarian country. See, for instance: https://thewire.in/food/india-
food-eating-vegetarianism (visited 5-3-2020).
58. While the idea of a ‘new India’ is ubiquitously present in popular
media and academic research, there are a few books which have
specifically informed my analysis here: Jyotsna Kapur’s (2013) The
Politics of Time and Youth in Brand India: Bargaining with Capital
(Delhi: Anthem Press); Anthony P. D’Costa’s (2010) A New India?:
Critical Reflections in the Long Twentieth Century (New York and
London: Anthem Press); Sirpa Tenhunen and Minna Säävälä (2012)
An Introduction to Changing India: Culture, Politics and
Development (London: Anthem Press); Adam Roberts, (2017)
Superfast Primetime Ultimate Nation: The Relentless Invention of
Modern India (London: Profile Books).
59. See Baas, 2009. ‘The IT Caste. Of Love and Marriage in the IT
Industry of Bangalore’. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies ,
32: 2, 285-307.
60. This in itself is a matter of discussion of course. For those living on
one to two dollars a day, upper-middle-class lives of the South Delhi
or Bandra West variety can seem very elite.
61. One lakh is a hundred thousand.
62. See also Metabolic Living by Harris Solomon (2016).
63. ‘Goonda’ means hired thug.
64. There’s a difference in opinion what exactly ‘morya’ means here.
Some suggest that it references the saint Morya Gosavi, who was a
well-known fourteenth-century devotee of the Lord. Pleased with his
worship, as the story goes, he was granted the boon (or wish) that his
name should always be associated with Ganesha. Others suggest that
‘morya’ is actually a splitting of the words ‘mhora ya’, which means
‘come ahead’ or ‘be in front’. In my experience, devotees mainly
interpreted the sentence in terms of it being an honorific way of
welcoming their God and not necessarily something that was
concretely translatable into English. Besides, although Mumbai is the
capital of Maharashtra and the state’s official language is Marathi, it
is not a language shared by all in the city. Kishore, for instance,
 speaks Odia at home, while Vijay is more likely to converse in
English and Hindi.
65. Dasgupta, 2014: 16, italics in the original.
66. Shaadi means wedding.
67. See the example described in the first chapter for starters.
68. Unlike Hollywood, Bollywood actors are usually referred to by their
first name. It hints at a particular intimacy ‘fans’ feel for their heroes
and heroines that is much less pronounced in the West.
69. Bhakti poetry celebrates love for and devotion to specific Hindu
gods. It originally emerged in the seventh century, and is considered a
reformist trend in Hinduism, offering a more individual-focused
notion of devotion and spirituality.
70. I discuss caste-relations in particular with reference to Jat and Gujjar
men in much greater detail in chapter 5.
71. Hindustan Times , 12 October 2013.
72. An akhara is a traditional place of wrestling that often also comes
with facilities for boarding, lodging and training.
73. Informants usually called me ‘Michael’ rather than ‘Michiel’.
74. Director Sanjay Leela Bhansali also went on record to say that the
reference to ‘Rasleela’ should not be interpreted as a reference to
Lord Krishna.
75. Wacquant, 1995: 66.
76. Ibid.
77. MuscleMania promotes itself as one of the world’s leading natural
bodybuilding competitions. A relatively recent addition to the
bodybuilding scene, it differentiates itself from more regular
bodybuilding competitions in that it usually includes separate
competitions for (actual) bodybuilding, sports modelling, swimwear,
fitness, etc.
78. Crossley, 2006: 23.
79. Linder, 2007: 452.
80. Moore, 1997: 2.
81. Ibid.
82. See Besnier, 2012: 493 for a more detailed discussion.
83. Ibid: 449.
84. See also Baas, 2017 where I discuss this in greater detail.
85. Indian bodybuilders usually refer to the junior/aspiring bodybuilders
they coach as their ‘students’. These students frequently refer to their
coaches as their teachers or gurus. It is not uncommon for younger
bodybuilders to honour their trainers by respectfully touching their
feet.
86. NABBA stands for National Amateur Body-Builders’ Association.
Originally founded in the United Kingdom in 1950, it has since
become a label that is often used to provide an official élan to
competitions in India as well as elsewhere.
87. Bhattacharjee, ‘Of Fake Mr Universe!’, The Shillong Times , Letter to
the Editor, 7 December 2017.
http://theshillongtimes.com/2017/12/07/of-fake-mr-universe/ (visited
24-03-2020)
88. See here: http://theshillongtimes.com/2017/11/01/meghalaya-cop-to-
represent-india-in-world-body-building-meet/ (visited 17-02-2020).
89. I assume the author means ‘champion’ here.
90. Watt, 2016: 1927.
91. Ibid: 1921–22.
92. Simeon Panda has an Instagram following of six million plus and his
page on Facebook boasts 5.8 million likes. Lazar Angelov counts
nearly six million followers on Instagram and over fourteen million
likes on Facebook (visited 23-04-2020).
93. Watt, 2016: 1.
94. Sandow’s India trip is also discussed in David L. Chapman’s (1994)
book, Sandow the Magnificent: Eugen Sandow and the Beginnings
of Bodybuilding. Chapter 7, ‘Triumphs and Travels, 1901–7’, 129–
163.
95. Stokvis, 2006: 466.
96. Watt, 2016: 2.
97. Wedemeyer, 1994: 472.
98. See also Carden-Coyne, 1999.
99. Watt, 2016: 2.
100. Ibid: 3.
101. As discussed and quoted in Watt, 2016: 8, though plenty of texts on
colonial India and (related) issues of masculinity have similarly
touched upon Macaulay’s words.
102. Budd, 1997: 81.
103. See also Osella and Osella, 2006: 5.
104. Alter, 2004: 509.
105. Ibid: 509–510.
106. See for instance Joseph Alter’s work on Hindu militancy (1994);
Thomas Blom Hansen’s 1996 study ‘Recuperating Masculinity:
Hindu Nationalism, Violence and the Exorcising of the Muslim
Other’, Critique of Anthropology , Vol. 16, no. 2, 137–72. Or Anand
Patwardhan’s well-known documentary (1992) Ram ke Naam (In the
Name of God).
107. See for instance https://www.indiatvnews.com/news/india/maratha-
bodybuilder-flexes-his-muscles-before-bal-thackeray-5122.html
(visited 22-05-2018).
108. No connection with the well-known gym chain ‘Gold’s Gym’.
109. Parshathy J. Nath, The Hindu, ‘Palavakkam’s love for body
builders’, 1 March 2017: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-
features/tp-metroplus/palavakkams-love-for-body-
builders/article17386018.ece (last visited 17-05-2018).
110. Oddly, this now stands for International Federation of Bodybuilding
and Fitness.
111. ACE stands for American Council on Exercise.
112. See also their website: https://www.gcctraining.net/ (visited 19-02-
2019).
113. Solomon, 2015: 177.
114. Ibid: 178.
115. IBEF does not provide source material information for the way they
have calculated different growth scenarios of the Indian food market.
Figures can be found here: http://www.ibef.org/industry/indian-
food-industry.aspx (visited 06-12-2016).
116. Article can be found here:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/cons-
products/food/organic-food-market-growing-at-25-30-awareness-
still-low-government/articleshow/49379802.cms (visited 06-12-
2016).
117. See here: http://www.euromonitor.com/sports-nutrition-in-
india/report (visited 06-12-2016).
118. Kirana shops are small neighbourhood retail stores selling mainly
everyday items. Although supermarkets are on the rise, the bulk of
Indian groceries continue to be purchased at such shops.
119. CrossFit refers to a functional training routine which takes place in a
‘box’, as its members will put it. Such a box is usually a rather
spartanly equipped workout space that is low on equipment, instead
focusing on exercises that mimic how the body is used in day-to-day
life.
120. This ‘true middle India’ seems to be conceptualised as consisting of
60 per cent of households by income, or 164 million households. See
Jayaraman, 2017: 8–9.
121. Jayaraman, 2017: 8–9.
122. Ibid: 10.
123. Kapur, 2012: 50.
124. Ibid: 51–52.
125. Ibid: 253.
126. Ibid: 254; as we find out later on in the book, Hari does manage to
pay off his debts and now lives a more stable and disciplined life.
127. de Souza, Kumar and Shastri, 2009: ix.
128. See for the full case study de Souza, Kumar and Shastri, 2009: 38–
39.
129. Titus, 2015: 122.
130. Ibid: 124.
131. Ibid: 124–6
132. Ibid: 133.
133. The Indian Express , ‘From road rage to sports rage and more—
masculinities in modern India’, 29 June 2017.
134. See Gill, Henwood and Mclean, 2005: 39.
135. Turner, 2000: 42; as also discussed in Gill, Henwood and Mclean,
2005: 39.
136. Gill, Henwood and Mclean, 2005: 40; see for further discussion
Simon Winlow, Badfellas: Crime, Tradition and New Masculinities
. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001, 98–9.
137. Gill, Henwood and Mclean, 2005: 40.
138. See for its initial conceptualisation R.W. Connell’s influential study
Masculinities (1995).
139. Lohan, 2010: 14.
140. See Monaghan, 2002b: 334–5
141. According to Butler, gendered behaviour is performative because of
the desire of the subject in question to be taken to belong to a
particular gender category (e.g. male or female). The connection
between anatomical sex and gendered behaviour is, in a sense, not
important in this.
142. See Beynon, 2002.
143. As discussed in David Buchbinder, Men and Masculinities .
London: Routledge, 2013, 2010: 35.
144. Ibid.
145. Chopra, 2004: 37.
146. de Neve, 2004: 62.
147. Ibid: 65.
148. Monaghan, 2002a: 409.
149. Winlow, 2001: 103, see also Monaghan, 2002a: 409.
150. Monaghan draws on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1962)
phenomenology of embodiment here.
151. Melnik et al, 2007; Voelcker et al, 2010.
152. See for a more extensive discussion of India’s middle class, patterns
of consumption and the impact on urban space Brosius, 2010 and
Fernandes, 2006.
153. See for a more detailed study of exercise dependence Banberry,
Groves and Biscomb, 2011: 1–18.
154. See Hatoum and Belle, 2004, with specific reference to the role the
media plays; Drummond, 2010, for the increase in food related
disorders among men in a western context; Marzano-Parisoli, 2012,
who discusses this with specific reference to bodybuilding; Williams
and Ricciardelli 2014 for the influence of social media.
155. See Olivardia, 2001; Harvey and Robinson, 2003; Brown and
Graham, 2008; Fardouly and Vartanian, 2016.
156. Mumford and Choudry, 2000; Sarah Grogan, 2008.
157. Monaghan, 1999, 2001, 2002; Lenehan, 2003; Probert et al, 2007;
Petrocelli et al, 2008.
158. Gerritsen, 2019.
159. Pope, Olivardia, Gruber and Borowiekcki, 1999: 65–72.
160. This poem appeared in The Times of India on 2 September 2018, as
part of Akhil Katyal’s column ‘Poetic Licence’. It is also available
here: https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/voices/poetic-
licence/ (visited 01-09-2018).
161. Competitions in the Delhi/NCR-region would often refer to
bodybuilders in the singular as ‘bodybuilder’.
162. For a short but insightful portrait of the city see Malvika Singh,
2013.
163. Gurgaon was officially renamed Gurugram in 2016, but the
competition took place before that. The reason I continue to use
Gurgaon elsewhere is to avoid confusion.
164. ‘NCR’ is increasingly employed as a ‘colloquial’ shorthand for
Delhi and its various surrounding areas which are spread over three
adjoining states: Haryana (Faridabad and Gurgaon), Rajasthan
(Bharatpur) and Uttar Pradesh (Ghaziabad, Meerut and Noida).
165. See for a detailed exploration Brosius’s (2010) seminal work.
Dupont’s (2011) article on Delhi’s dream of becoming a global city
is also relevant here. Seth Schindler (2014) discusses such
ambitions by focusing on the (changing) relations between street
hawkers and the new middle class.
166. Bhan, 2016: 47.
167. Ibid: 150.
168. I use caste and community rather interchangeably in this chapter, as
is also common practice in Indian media. While membership to
communities such as the Gujjars and Jats is caste-based, not
everything these communities do or stand for is always directly
related to specific caste-related issues (e.g. arranged marriages,
dietary restrictions or temple practices).
169. Occasionally such stories also make it into newspapers, such as in
The Times of India on 28 March, 2018: ‘Old wrestlers “fight” to
keep legacy alive.’ With a focus on Madurai, it says: ‘Unlike earlier
days, youngsters today join the school [akhara] for bodybuilding
purposes. With only a few opting for wrestling, the sport at the
school is limited to elderly wrestlers… Keeping in mind the waning
demand for wrestling, the school’s trust upgraded it into a
gymnasium in 1990.’ Available online:
 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/madurai/old-wrestlers-fight-
to-keep-legacy-alive/articleshow/63495099.cms (visited 11-09-
2018).
170. Officially known as the Dronacharya Award for Outstanding
Coaches in Sports and Games, this is a sports coaching honour that is
named after Drona, often referred to as Dronacharya or Guru Drona,
a character from the Mahabharata. It is awarded annually by the
Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports.
171. See also Govinda, 2013.
172. Roy, 2011: 223–238.
173. Chatterji, 2015: viii.
174. Acharya et al, 2017: 3.
175. See for a critical take on Delhi’s Master Plan, Sharan, Awadhendra.
In the City, Out of Place: Nuisance, Pollution, and Dwelling in
Delhi, c. 1850–2000. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014.
176. Govinda, 2013.
177. Chatterji, 2015: 75.
178. Narain, 2017: 146
179. Ibid.
180. See for background Chatterji (2013), with its focus on the ‘micro
politics’ of urban transformation within a context of globalisation,
specifically focusing on the case of Gurgaon. The way such
developments have impacted the local Yadav community is also
discussed by Cowan, 2018a as well as Dubey 2018 (with reference
to Ghaziabad and Noida). Furthermore, Narain (2009) discusses
land acquisition-related issues with reference to farmland (formerly)
owned by the Jat community.
181. See for the Jat community: Jeffrey, 2010: 910. In contrast, it is
interesting to note Fernandes and Heller’s (2006) three-tiered
classification of the Indian middle classes here. According to them,
first come the senior professionals and higher bureaucrats; second,
rich farmers and the urban petite bourgeoisie; and third, poorly paid
members of the salariat, such as nurses, clerks and teachers.
Although they do not provide further detail on what constitutes rich
farmers, one may assume what is meant here are the upper-caste land
owners, such as the Thakurs, though it wouldn’t be much of a stretch
 to include certain Jat farmers here as well. See: Fernandes, L. &
Heller, P. 2006. ‘Hegemonic aspirations: new middle-class politics
and India’s democracy in comparative perspective’, Critical Asian
Studies 38(4), 495–522.
182. Singh, 2011: 20.
183. ‘The unrest in Delhi shows that caste issues still blight India.’ The
Guardian, by Priya Virmani, 24 February 16.
184. It led one of India’s leading magazines Open to dedicate an article
to the community’s demands and aspirations titled ‘The
Unreasonable Jats’ (1003–2017). Others who have taken a critical
eye to ‘Jat demands’ and the background of their various struggles
include Radhika Bhatia’s analysis in the Economic and Political
Weekly titled ‘Jats and Reservations in Haryana’ 16 April 2016; and
Ashwini Deshpande and Rajesh Ramachandran’s (2017) ‘Dominant
or Backward?: Political Economy of Demand for Quotas by Jats,
Patels and Marathas.’ Economic and Political Weekly , 13 May
2017.
185. ‘Big, fat Gujjar weddings: Easy come, easy go.’ The Times of India
, 13 March 2011. Available online:
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/deep-
focus/Big-fat-Gujjar-weddings-Easy-come-easy-
go/articleshow/7689163.cms (visited 4-09-2018).
186. ‘The Gujars Of Delhi.’ Outlook , 18 July 2007. Available online:
https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/the-gujars-of-
delhi/235119 (visited 04-08-2018) See also: Aakash Joshi, ‘Gujjar
Reservation: What They Want, and Why.’ The Quint , 28 May 2015.
187. Singh, 2011: 21.
188. Satendra Kumar, ‘Ethnography of Youth Politics: Leaders, Brokers
and Morality in a Provincial University in Western Uttar Pradesh’.
History and Sociology of South Asia 6(1), 2011: 41–70.
189. Govinda, 2013.
190. Ibid: 4.
191. Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta, ‘Land and caste’. Frontline , 19
May–1 June 2012. Available online:
https://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl2910/stories/20120601291010
500.htm (visited 04-09-2018).
192. See: The Indian Express (30 April 2014), ‘Noida village simmers
after Gujjars and Dalits clash.’
https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/noida-village-
simmers-after-Gujjars-and-dalits-clash/ (visited 04-09-2018). And
The Pioneer, ‘Youth Dies as Gujjars, Jatavs Fire 150 rounds.’ 29
April 2014. https://www.dailypioneer.com/todays-newspaper/youth-
dies-as-Gujjars-jatavs-fire-150-rounds.html (visited 04-09-2018).
193. There’s a law that requires 25 per cent of a plot of land to have been
built on so as to guarantee continued ownership. A common practice
in the Greater Noida region is to build some basic structure of bricks
to meet this requirement and prevent the government seizing the land
as unused.
194. See for further details: Pankaj Bhatia, ‘On Delhi’s outskirts,
violence over real estate, not caste.’ Governance Now , 26 May
2015. Available here:
https://www.governancenow.com/news/regular-story/delhis-
outskirts-violence-over-real-estate-not-caste (05-10-2018).
195. ‘Sh.’ stands for Shri, or honourable.
196. See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfWg2dfA7gQ
(visited 20-02-2019).
197. Chiku, chikoo or sapodilla is known as an energy-boosting food
because it is loaded with fructose and sucrose. It is believed to have
various other health benefits, rooted in ayurvedic thinking.
198. Sengupta, 2016: 16.
199. A fragment from the original poem titled ‘I Sing the Body Electric’
(1855), which first appeared without this title in Whitman’s Leaves
of Grass . The book’s 1867 edition mentions the title for the first
time. The full text can also be found here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45472/i-sing-the-body-
electric (accessed 22-04-2020).
200. Please note that I have referred to this informant as Kishore in
another publication (Baas, 2017). In order to prevent confusion with
the Kishore who featured in chapter one and six, I will refer to him
as Girish here. Kishore as well as Girish are pseudonyms, of course.
201. Please note that the quotes that I am using here are those from the
English-language subtitles (the actors speak primarily in Hindi).
202. Shefalee Vasudev, ‘The New Second Sex. Exploited, Underpaid,
Underemployed, and Still Dreaming, the Agony of the Indian Male
Model’, Open , 4 December 2017: 20–29.
203. Ibid: 23.
204. Ibid: 24.
205. Ibid: 26.
206. Ibid: 24.
207. Ibid: 27.
208. Rohit K. Dasgupta analyses this in ‘The Queer Rhetoric of
Bollywood: A Case of Mistaken Identity’,
http://interalia.org.pl/index_pdf.php?
lang=en&klucz=&produkt=1353788763-695 (visited 17-04-2019).
209. See here: https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/gunday-review-
its-all-about-ranveer-singh-and-arjun-kapoors-bromance-
1390339.html (visited 17-04-2019).
210. See here: https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/padmaavat-amid-
rajput-romance-and-valour-bhansali-gives-us-a-most-queer-love-
story-4333679.html (visited 17-04-2019).
211. In a 2009 article in The Guardian , we read the following: ‘ Men’s
Health does not take kindly to having its sexuality questioned; as an
ex-staffer told me: “There’s total bewilderment over there the gay
thing. And yet look at it! It’s high camp, isn’t it?” The Men’s Health
men do indeed respond with bewilderment and a degree of crossness
to the gay question: “There are lots of great gay titles out there,” says
Mike Shallcross firmly; “ Men’s Health is not one of them.” (“I just
don’t get the gay thing,” adds Toby Wiseman. “I mean, what’s gay
about those bodies? Skinny androgynous boys in fashion shoots in
other magazines—surely that’s much more gay?”)’
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/sep/27/magazines
(visited 17-04-2019).
212. Chapman, 2013: 193.
213. Ibid: 9–10.
214. Alvarez, 2008: 48–49.
215. Ibid: 50.
216. See also Ibid: 57.
217. Boyle, 2010: 156, drawing on Pronger, 1990.
218. Alter, 2005: 47.
219. Ibid: 48. The discussion of the term is long and varied. It can mean
excellent of any kind, but has also been held to refer to moral virtue.
It sometimes points at an understanding of virtue as (human)
knowledge, the highest human potential, etc.
220. E.g. Whitehead, 2002; Hearn, 2004; Lohan, 2010. I am obviously
making significant shortcuts here, but the gist of the argument does
follow this type of reasoning. I am not necessarily critical of the
studies that genuinely sought to argue for such a crisis but argue that
it’s not an easy argument to transplant to the Indian case, even if it
may seem that India with its patriarchal gender relations and
violence against women makes for a ‘perfect’ case here.
221. Richardson, 2004: 50
222. Sengupta, 2016: 141.
223. An important exercise to build strength for wrestlers, involving jori
or clubs of various sizes which are swung in a variety of ways over
and around the body.
224. Alter, 2005: 47–60.
225. Richardson, 2004: 53.
226. Ibid.
227. Baas, 2017: 10–11.
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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Anonymity and Research-Friendships

Research for this book was conducted on-and-off over a ten-year period.
During this time, I visited India numerous times. However, the bulk of the
interviews and data gathering took place during nine months in Delhi
(2013–14) and three in Chennai (2015). My Delhi-based fieldwork was
made possible as part of a fellowship with the then newly established
Nalanda University; while my stay in Chennai was facilitated through
funding by the Asia Research Institute of the National University of
Singapore. Many of the trainers and bodybuilders I met and interviewed
during these phases became friends which allowed me to follow their
lives over a much longer period. They were always well-aware of my
intentions to write a book about the topic and would sometimes indicate
for certain aspects or happenings not to be mentioned. I would like to
thank all trainers, bodybuilders and others involved in the fitness industry
for sharing their life stories, opinions and insights with me. Except for
those informants whose opinions and life-course trajectories are already
part of the public domain, all names in this book have been anonymised. I
know this will disappoint some informants who were keen on having their
real names featured in the book. However, this was not possible due to the
following reason: even if informants were fully informed about how their
stories were to be treated in this book, they were not aware of the broader
context in which their narratives and life-course histories are discussed. If
we consider a chapter as a space of characters brought together to make a
particular argument, these characters themselves are not necessarily
aware that they will occupy and share this space in such a manner. I am
reminded of an instance some years ago when I was invited on stage at a
bodybuilding competition to garland some of the winners. The chief
moderator of the organising federation introduced me as ‘Michael, a
researcher who has come to write about us bodybuilders!’ He was
mightily pleased that I had come to tell ‘their’ stories and how well they
were doing. With roughly 5,000 people in the audience and some 150
competing bodybuilders about to take the stage, he encouraged me to
speak a few words of encouragement. I found that my research was often
interpreted as having the potential to set the record straight, and that my
writing would highlight the struggles Indian bodybuilders face in the
absence of official governmental support. While it’s my sincere hope that
the situation of lack of support changes in the future, I did not embark on
this research project with this specific objective in mind. Considering the
nature of academic research, it was not always easy to get this across.

A Word of anks
I owe a debt of gratitude to my agent Kanishka Gupta who for not
altogether clear reasons believed in this book from the start. At Context, I
thank the wonderful Ajitha for her amazing editing, and Karthika for her
enthusiasm in taking on this book. It’s presses like Context that allow
authors like myself to unshackle ourselves from academic constraints and
to seek a wider audience for the research we have conducted.
I would like to thank Nalanda University’s former vice-chancellor,
the formidable Gopa Sabharwal, and her right-hand, the inspiring Anjana
Sharma, for their unrelenting support. At the Asia Research Institute of the
National University of Singapore, I am particularly grateful to Jonathan
Rigg, the institute’s director, and Brenda Yeoh, one of the institute’s
leading academics for providing a deeply inspiring work environment. I
would also like to acknowledge the Institute for Social and Economic
Change in Bangalore, for kindly hosting part of the research, and Sujata
Patel for facilitating important contacts there.
Over the years, the research has benefitted from countless
conversations, discussions and suggestions from academic colleagues,
journalists and friends. First of all, I would like to express my deep
appreciation for Itty Abraham’s encouragement to turn the material on
hand into a book. He saw ‘a book’ long before I had the courage to admit
that maybe I did so too. I would also like to mention my dear friend and
colleague Michelle Miller here. Co-confidante and researcher
extraordinaire herself, it was our long-term conversations about research
and related predicaments that inspired and gave me the courage to carry
on. Ronojoy Sen, who was writing his unmatched A History of Sports in
India (2015) when we were at the same institute, and Joseph Alter, who
joined Yale-Nus as a visiting professor of anthropology at the same time,
should not be omitted here either. Sen’s encouragement and Alter’s
enthusiasm for this book, as well as his own profound work in the field of
Indian masculinities, were crucial to the project at large.
In an earlier phase, the project benefitted immensely from input from
a number of colleagues and friends. Caroline Osella was one of the first
to believe that this was a project that begged further investigation.
Similarly, Amsterdam-based Niko Besnier, Jeroen de Kloet, Giselinde
Kuipers, Annemarie Mol, Mattijs van de Port, Rachel Spronk, Sylvia
Tidey and Peter van der Veer all provided important input to fine-tune its
focus. In the years to come, I would receive excellent advice, guidance
and suggestions from Sunil Amrith, Baptist Coelho, Assa Doron, Roos
Gerritsen, Knut Axel Jacobsen, Mathangi Krishnamurthy, Ritty Lukose,
Kama Maclean, Shekhar Krishnan, Omita Goyal, Chris McMorran, Ursula
Rao, Parmesh Shahani, Atreyee Sen, Sanjay Srivastava, Luisa Steur,
Chitra Venkataramani, Meredith Weiss and many others.
However, none of the research would have been made possible
without a number of exceptionally brilliant friends. From the first time we
met, film-maker and author Ashish Sawhny became a close friend and
courteously opened his Bandra West apartment for my regular visits to
Mumbai. Over time, I also collaborated with NTU scholar and
anthropologist Julien Cayla, which led to an insightful comparison
between fitness trainers and coffee baristas as new service professionals
in urban India. Sudeep Sen—at whose house I stayed with while in Delhi
in 2013–14—proved to be invaluable for the way the project took shape.
In later years, staying with John Conolly and Atanu Majindar at their GK-I
apartment similarly offered the opportunity to reacquaint with old friends
while also discussing research findings at length. It often goes unsaid but
it is undeniable that long-term ethnographic fieldwork, such as lies at the
heart of this book, depends on such kindness. Similarly, Delhi-friends
Mishty Varma (and her delightfully barefooted husband Suchetha), as well
as Jaya Bhattacharji Rose, Shovon Choudury and Vikram Chauhan all
shared important insights and offered important suggestions over the
years.
Conversations in ‘the South’ similarly helped the book take shape. I
am deeply grateful of Dirk Gastman for his uncanny habit of revealing
rather inherent truths about India, a country which he as a ‘Belgian man’
has now called home for forty years. Surendran and Rajesh Calambakam
have always cheerfully opened their Bangalore home to me and provided
me with invaluable insight into the way the city operates. Akash Kapur,
Tishani Doshi and Carlo Pizzati’s encouragement was also of influence
here, reminding me of the possibilities of the material on hand, and what
could be accomplished by it. Finally, there is Chitra Venkataramani,
Meenakshi Shedde, Arshia Sattar and Rupleena Bose who over the years
not only remained important sources of information, but also suggested
intriguing new ways of approaching the material.
This book is dedicated to my partner, friend for life and love of my
life, Rithesh Calambakam. I can only wish that every researcher has a
partner like this; one who is unwavering in his opinion of this being a
silly hobby, at most something that keeps me off the street and at worst
something that is pretentious and self-important. It keeps me sane and
healthy. There is simply no person I love more.