Fitness for upward mobility

A workout for your brain, Muscular India exhorts readers to confront the myth of progress and the malaise of middle-class India

You can find wisdom in the most unusual places, even “between India’s increasingly muscular legs”. Michiel Baas, in his book, Muscular India: Masculinity, Mobility, and the New Middle Class, uses the muscular bodies of fitness trainers as a prism to analyse middle class belonging and masculinity in a rapidly changing Indian society.

Baas’ book builds on a decade-long research engagement with male fitness trainers from lower-middle-class backgrounds, focusing on how the trainers use their bodies as capital to climb internal middle-class hierarchies — “characterized by a (newer, vernacular) lower middle class and (older, English speaking upper middle class)”. He attempts