The Ideal Male Body: Bodybuilding, Fitness, and

Urban Space
Michiel Baas

Author’s Note: For the sake of brevity and clarity, the chronologies of some episodes have
been altered and/or condensed. All names have been changed to protect the identities of
informants and the organizations they are associated with.

This article was published in Queer Potli: Memories, Imaginations and Re-Imaginations in
Urban Queer Spaces in India, edited by Pawan Dhall and published by Queer Ink (Mumbai
2016). The e-version of this book can be obtained here: http://queer-ink.com/product/queer-
potli/ Please note that since this edited volume was only published as an e-book no page
numbers are available.

The New Indian Male

In recent years, the number of gyms that have opened up their doors in urban India has, what
can only be described in rather plebeian terms, exploded. In tandem, bodybuilding as a
competitive sport has witnessed a surge of new contenders eager to take the stage and show
their built bodies. The Indian male now has a body that has become the object of the gaze as
well, something that was previously something only Indian women experienced. Midriff
rotundity, until recently signifying middle class prosperity and masculine prowess, has now
become synonymous with the flatulent warning of early-stage diabetes, the dangers of over-
consumption, and something that stands in the way of a healthy sex life. Physically
protruding, a neatly ironed button-down shirt carefully pulled over it, tufts of chest hair
lusciously sprouting up—this yesteryear’s image of the ‘healthy potbelly’ now conjures the
image of a balloon, filled with the masculine hot air of an era gone by. The New Indian Male
sports well-defined abs and biceps round as cricket balls, covered by a thick vein,
scrumptiously at rest like a carelessly abandoned water hose on a well-kept lawn. A quick
glance in the rear should reveal hoof-shaped triceps gently nudging the rim of one’s shirt
sleeves up; the back shaped like an inverted pyramid, vectorially pointing down to a perfectly
shaped ass. Such a body, largely informed by globalized notions of what are thought of as the
perfect dimensions and measurements, comes with an almost cannibalistic lingo of edibility.

For nine months, I wandered and navigated the corridors, nooks and crannies of the (new)
Indian male body. My question was an ostensibly simple one: What meaning do people
ascribe to this new, lean, muscular body? How do people reflect on the highly stylized and
idealized male bodies that seem such a central ingredient in Bollywood movies these days?
What about the Men’s Health cover models whose confident gaze one encounters at virtually
every newspaper and magazine stand? Where do such bodies exist, where are they made, and
how do they relate to each other? Every morning, I would work out in a small neighbourhood
gym in South Delhi, getting to know the trainers and clients, while afternoons I would travel
all over the city, meeting and interviewing trainers, bodybuilders, and others involved in the
fitness industry. What follows is a highly reflective account of this research and my own
engagement with the ostensible male body.

A Small Neighbourhood Gym in South Delhi

The smell in the gym is queer, or the gym smells queers. It’s something I can’t decide on
while I am instructed to take the inclined position on the bench and handed two 15 kg
dumbbells. I arrived early this morning and the citrusy aroma of the cleaning liquid still
lingers in the air. In the corner rests an old red bucket with a dull grey mop that has seen
better days, emitting a mouldy odour, whiffs of which reach my nose at irregular intervals.
Meanwhile, the cleaning guy manages the rather small car park in front of the gym upholding
the gym’s somewhat overbearing promise of valet parking. Every time the door opens, the
sound of busy traffic from the Outer Ring Road dribbles in, mixed with the heavy fumes and
dust that somehow seems to forebode the arrival of an early summer. It’s mid-March and
Arvind, the owner of this small neighbourhood gym in South Delhi, has refused to switch on
the air-conditioner just yet though the sight of profusely sweating clients has noticeably
increased in the last few days and so has the sharp, dour stench of t-shirts that should have
gone with the laundry yesterday.

The door opens and in walks Ratish, 22 years old, six foot three with a chest that other gym
members talk about in terms of awe. He greets several of the trainers, jovially shaking their
hands while dumping his gym bag on one of the benches next to me and unzipping it. The
smell of his still-damp gym shoes, which he probably used for his cardio session the previous
evening, escapes.

‘Doing chest today, mate?’ he asks happily, browsing his phone for messages, the other hand
rummaging for something in his bag.

The weights I use amuse him but he will never say so. He has the kind of body that
communicates control and strength, though I know his personal story is not quite that. With a
loud plop, he takes off the lid of a canister of Volitra and starts spraying his legs with it.
Ratish used to be ‘grossly overweight’ as he describes it himself, severely obese even, and
running still takes a toll on his legs.

‘How was your weekend, buddy?’ I ask him, as I am about to start my third set. Arjun, the
trainer who is keeping a check on whether I am doing my exercises correctly, hands me the
17.5 dumbbells. He encourages me to do it slowly, to let the weights come down gradually
and then push them up again, ‘but not too fast’, he utters somewhat hesitantly as if he is not
sure he can interfere in the conversation he feels is about to start between Ratish and me.

‘Too much to drink, man’, Ratish returns the canister to his bag and puts on his weight-lifting
gloves. I notice Arjun tries to follow the conversation but he also wants me to do my next set
of exercises, indicating it will be the bench press. Ratish walks to the water cooler and fills
his bottle, which he then shakes vigorously. He has been increasing the intake of proteins for
the past few months with the goal of getting bigger. Lately, I would often find him in front of
the mirror, flexing his biceps and triceps and inspecting the size of his chest. He wants to
have ‘monster arms’, he says, ‘and a huge chest’. But most of all, he wants to get rid of the
extra skin on his stomach, a leftover from the time he was obese. ‘No matter how much
stretching I will do, it will never go away’, he grumbled a couple of weeks earlier. He went to
see a cosmetic surgeon in North Delhi but was put off by the recovery time of at least three to
four weeks. ‘No gym for that long man’, he shook his head. ‘That’s too long.’

My hands are not in the right place on the bar and Arjun adjusts them accordingly, gently
tapping them to where he wants me to keep them. He has put a 10 kg weight on each side,
probably not enough, but he seems to suggest that we will do a different routine this morning.
Instead of the usual 12–15, he wants me to start with 30 or ‘go to fail’. His English is limited
and the added handicap of being shy means that he rarely says more than the absolute
necessary. I lift up the bar and start doing my reps, which I hear him quietly count along. I
detect a hint of Lifebuoy soap and something else I can’t place when he bends forward to
help put the bar back in place. He is wearing a nondescript training suit; his jacket zipped up
all the way to his neck. He is a short guy, barely five feet, his small head covered with a
dusting of black hair. While he adds 5 kg to each side of the bar, I contemplate on how
economic his movements are. There is a certain kind of effortlessness about him that I find
strangely hypnotic. I imagine he finds me clumsy, something the mirror also seems to
underline. My body is almost twice the size of his; my own reason for going to the gym is not
so much muscle building as much as it is to keep my weight in check. However, this time I
also make the almost daily trip to the gym for another reason: I am here to do ethnographic
research.

Queer Contradictions: The Desired Body

Standing in front of the mirror, doing biceps, my attention would not only be focused on
doing the movements correctly, I would also simultaneously reflect on how others might
perceive me in relation to their own bodies. In this context, the queerness of my own body
would invariably intersect and interact with my research questions. On the one hand, I could
not deny that as a gay man I found the lean, muscular bodies of some of my informants
attractive, and on the other hand, the places and spaces in which they were produced or
showcased often did not allow for much reflection on their (sexual) attractiveness at all. In
fact, sexuality was conspicuously absent in the way informants talked about their bodies. The
paradox of this, which seeped through the cracks and folds of this peculiar duality, would
often come to the fore while discussing my research with friends who identified themselves
as gay or queer. Stories of having had a particular trainer in the spa of a certain upmarket
gym would be abound, and in a jokingly, though also somewhat interrogative matter, my own
investment in the project would be questioned. Hadn’t I rather opportunistically located my
fieldwork in a candy store with the owner absent and the dark chocolate up for grabs?

Spending whole days in gyms, I had come to associate these places with a queer concoction
of smell and soundscapes; there was always the clink and cloink of metal on metal, the rough
grunting and deep breathing, the busy shaking of water bottles, and most of all, the counting,
instructions, and encouragement of trainers. Yet, for my friends, these sights and sounds
made for alarming red dots on an imaginary map of sexual debauchery, facilitating the
spinning of grotesque tales of sexual conquests like it concerned sticky sugar candy—lip-
smackingly to be had, finger-lickingly good. Sex was everywhere—in the polite but timid
smile of a doorman, the quick glance of a fellow passenger on the train, and in the light touch
of the instructor adjusting one’s posture during an exercise. How I could reconcile these
contradictory experiences and impressions was something I would often ponder upon. It
seemed a particularly queer conundrum that I was faced with.

Being on the move, making use of the Delhi metro, Mumbai’s local trains, Bangalore’s
auto’s, or Patna’s tempus, mobility as a variable and factor would gradually seep into the
research, making me aware of how bodies are in flux, in the process of becoming, on the
road, and as such under construction, like the city itself, and in a way as India was becoming.
The body would often be envisioned as a machine, an engine that needed fuel, of which the
parts were expected to function in concerto. Or it would take the shape of a beast, one that
needed to be railed in, tamed, punished, and whipped into shape. Biceps, triceps, or legs were
to be killed on individual days making for killer workouts, the trainers’ instructions lashes,
and the session to be finished off with cardio to burn off that final remaining fat. This
moulding, sculpting, and building resonated with the city itself, which seemed perpetually in
a process of change and under construction. While the city was comprised of bodies—an
ever-growing number of male bodies particularly—arriving, working, and living in this ever-
changing city, the poised, carefully sculpted, and neatly photo-shopped bodies that adorned
billboards contrasted with this in terms of the way they seemed finished, having reached an
end-stage. This was the desired body, but what was this desire about? Was it merely sexual,
to be consumed, the compulsory bare-chested scene in an average Bollywood movie, the
advertisement for underwear in a glossies, a one-night stand quickly arranged through some
dating site, or was there more to it?

Gradually moving away from the question of what it takes to sculpt a body, I started
scrutinizing how bodies are imagined and fantasized about. As I focused my research on gym
instructors (patrolling the gym floor, instructing and correcting clients working on their
bodies), personal trainers (heavily invested in the transformation of their clients’ bodies yet
continuously working on their own as well), and bodybuilders (for whom the body by
definition was never finished, never complete, always falling short ‘in comparison’), I came
to consider the body not just physically in motion but also very much metaphorically. As
such, I came to treat the (male) body as queer in terms of its manifoldness and multi-
sitedness, perpetually embodying a state of in-betweenness, and thus in a state of becoming,
in flux, underway, on the road, never quite reaching an end-destination but instead moving
from one staging post to the next.

On the Road: How to Paint a Bodybuilder?

I arrive when the hall is already packed. The setting is an

Arya Samaj Mandir just beyond Green Park’s main bazaar,
the occasion Mr Delhi 2014. As usual, the audience is
almost exclusively male, many of who are cheering loudly for what is likely to be the 55 kg
weight category. Fifteen gold-painted boys nervously flexing their leg muscles are
encouraged to give it their all by a sonorous voice droning instructions through a microphone.
It is the weight category Arjun recently competed in as well, I realize. He had posted several
pictures of the competition on Facebook. Dressed
in Jockey underwear and covered in tanning lotion
from neck to toe, it had looked like a giant had
dipped him in gold paint holding his head between
his index finger and thumb. Not having applied
any tanning lotion on his face, his face had taken
on a ghoulish hue under the harsh stage light, his
skull jutting through paper-thin skin, the result of
extreme dieting.

A matchstick thin girl dressed in the tiniest black

dress with long black hair and impossibly red
lipstick takes on the role of announcer and calls for
the next weight category to get ready while the
judges decide on the winner of the 55 kg category.
She is probably the only female in the hall, but her
presence seems of little interest to the many guys
who have climbed onto their chairs in order to
catch a glimpse of the happenings on stage. Of the
15 contestants, 8 have been asked to move to the
back row while the remaining 7 are asked to go through the mandatory poses one more time.
Meanwhile, on a balcony that functions as a backstage area, a number of bodybuilders in the
70 and 75 kg categories are in the process of getting ready. A large, hairy man with the
physique of a pehlwan-wrestler is giving instructions to two smaller boys who are studying
the contents of a small black jar of tanning cream of the brand Dream Ten. They will be
applying the fatty substance, which promises bronze skin, to their friend Ajay’s body, who
has meanwhile stripped down to his underwear and is doing some biceps to make sure they
look their best when he is on stage. Once his friends are finished dotting Ajay’s body with the
lotion, each friend starts with a different body part and,
using the palms of their hands, spread the substance
with a swirling motion until it covers his body entirely.

Ajay is in the 70 kg category, and his call will be up

within an hour or so. Each category takes roughly 30–
45 minutes depending on the dignitaries—mainly local
businessmen and politicians who ‘want to show off
with the boys’, as it was frequently described—to be
properly recognized and garlanded. It gives Ajay’s
friends time to do their job properly, making sure their
friend’s body takes on the kind of bronze hue that will
 make him look like an Oscar statue once the
spotlights hit him. On the other side of the
balcony, another competitor is nearly done,
and several of his friends are busy fanning
their friend with towels to cool down his body
and to stop him from perspiring. With the sun
slowly creeping onto the balcony, his pectoral
muscles now radiate gold but the pearl-sized
drops of sweat trickling down produce a
distracting line-pattern of discoloration. He
strikes a pose, but it is clear to his coach that
the work is not done yet and his friends get the
firm instruction to make better work,
especially of his armpits and sides.

In the street downstairs, it’s a coming and

going of cars and motorcycles. Groups of
friends can be seen clustering about, often
wearing training suits with a particular gym’s
logo and name on the back. Every now and
then, one of them strips down to his underwear
and friends come to action under the careful
watch of the trainer. The sequence is almost
always the same; first the contender will use
whatever is available—bricks, a rope, or
towel—to do a quick workout, a process which by itself is often already captured in detail on
friends’ cell phones; this is then followed by a number of trial poses under the watchful eye
of the trainer; after which, the paint job begins. It’s a spectacle to be observed, one that is not
merely confined to the stage but also spills out onto the street. Certificate of participation in
hand, medal dangling on their chests, some with a trophy held up proudly, all emerge at some
point more or less victoriously outside where they are greeted by friends and bystanders who
are eager to pose with them while having their pictures taken. I was there with my camera,
registering, focusing, zooming in and out, and attempting to capture what was on display. But
what precisely was on display here? What was I looking at? What was it telling me?

Capturing the Body—On Display

Back in the gym, the owner (Arvind) flips through the pictures on my camera with a semi-
interested smile. He has trained several bodybuilders himself and is not impressed with what
he is seeing. He leans back in his chair and stares contemplatively at the ceiling saying,
‘These boys, what to make of them, man?’ His gaze returns to me and he asks, ‘What do you
think of them?’ I have no idea, I tell him. Through the window of his office, I observe Arjun
with a customer.

‘Arjun also recently competed’, I say somewhat matter-of-factly.

Arvind frowns. ‘Tell me, what would be the point for a boy like Arjun to compete? What
would he get out of it?’ Arvind knows I don’t know. It is something we have talked about
before.

‘See’, says Arvind, pensively scrolling through some webpage on his cell phone, ‘there’s
nothing in it for Arjun.’ We are interrupted by a regular customer whom he acknowledges
with a quick nod and the instruction that he should start with cardio. Returning to me, he
says, ‘You must know Arjun is too small, he will never get big.’ We both look at Arjun who
is adjusting the weights on one of the machines. ‘It’s not just that he is short, for a guy like
him to put on mass he will have to invest in his body. He doesn’t have that kind of money.’
For Arjun’s body to become competitive, he would have to grow considerably, something
that would require the right combination of proteins, vitamin supplements, and above all
steroids and growth hormones. This could cost 20,000–70,000 rupees per month. Knowing
that Arjun makes about 8,000 in his current role as a floor trainer, this indeed seems unlikely.

The impossibility of bodybuilding economics become all the more clear when I meet
Kishore, a part-time personal trainer, later that week in North Delhi. When he enters the
Starbucks where we have planned to have a coffee, heads turn. He is wearing a white polo,
which highlights his bulging biceps and dinner plate sized pectoral muscles, while his tight
jeans clearly reveal powerful leg muscles. He has spent the morning in the gym and is
currently on a break which he normally uses to sleep to be fit enough for his evening work-
out.

I ask him what his goals are.

‘To become bigger’, he says shyly.

For his upcoming competition, he will have to grow in size if he wants to be competitive in
his weight category of 85+ kg.

‘What are you currently on?’ I inquire rather bluntly.

‘Steroids mainly. I have been taking them for three years now.’ Despite his shyness, he is
remarkably candid about this, ‘I have not had any side effects so far.’ He gets the steroids
through his trainer.

Through personal training, he is able to make about 20,000 per month. It is not enough
though. ‘It pays for my proteins and supplements.’ His family pays for the rest. He has done
some modelling in the past but was put off with requests for sexual favours. ‘I am not a gay’,
he says. ‘Some go for that’, he says, meaning other models, ‘but it’s not for me.’

Kishore frequently posts pictures on his Facebook page, invariably receiving likes from 200–
300 friends. He can no longer accept new friendship requests as he already has the maximum
number of 5,000 friends. Browsing through recent comments posted under one of the pictures
in which he has 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 snake their way down to
his crotch, the comments vary from simple pictorial thumbs-ups to far more sexually laced
ones. ‘I don’t really read those, I don’t really have time for that’, he says, though he will
sometimes hit the like indiscriminately.

When he says goodbye, I trail the gaze of others, both men and women, as he exits through
the door, climbs onto his motorcycle and puts on his helmet. Even when he hits the road
towards Pitampura, it is clear how massive his back is and how densely muscled his arms are.

The Queerness of It All

The vignettes I presented above are snippets, not unlike the drizzle that falls down when you
break a cigar in half; providing a description of that cigar as a whole, with its obvious phallic
dimensions, would require a much longer text. Instead, I have chosen impressions which do
not necessarily stand for the whole but perhaps facilitate a discussion on what that whole
might be. It is here that a queer gaze proves particularly fruitful, in what can be learned from
the way these observations took shape. Part of the city, in motion and in conversation with
the movements of the city, we observe, examine, our gaze lingers, rests, and continues its
way. The way people invest in their bodies is a product of this. Talking about these bodies
and the way they are built, broken down and even demolished produces a lingo of
construction that mingles and merges with the hammering and drilling of building sites in the
background. Yet simply thinking about these bodies as a product of a rapidly changing India
misses something important—they are also repositories of people’s imaginations and
fantasies. As such, they connect the dots in urban narratives of admiration, desire, and
sexuality.

Back in the gym, these ponderings and ruminations would seem much more grotesque than
the bodies that were on display. Biceps would be flexed, triceps inspected—the mirror
everywhere—yet none of it would have a voiceover analysing, dissecting, and commenting
on why this was actually happening. In fact, talking was often discouraged—something
trainers keenly pointed out: 60 seconds rest between exercises was max. It also characterized
a more general way of engaging with the body. In terms of its physical dimensions,
conversations could go on for hours, but what this masculine body was supposed to stand for
would be taken as a given, a masculinity worth at most 60 seconds of thought. As with the
city itself, asking questions that would attempt to penetrate the thick muscles and oiled skin
would bounce and slide off—as if to linger, pause, and explore would reveal the queerness of
it all.

Photographs: Michiel Baas