Muscular India: Masculinity Mobility & The New Middle Class

Muscular India: Masculinity Mobility & The New Middle Class PDF Author: Michiel Baas
Publisher: Context
ISBN: 9395073624
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
About the Book MICHIEL BAAS BRINGS ALIVE A WORLD OF MEN SCULPTING BODIES, REDEFINING MASCULINITIES AND CONFRONTING THEIR VULNERABILITIES IN THE GYMS OF URBAN INDIA. The gyms of urban 'new India' are intriguing spaces. While they cater largely to well-off clients, these shiny, modern institutions also hold the promise of upward mobility for the personal trainers who work there. By improving their English, 'upgrading' their dressing style and developing a deeper understanding of the lives of their upmarket customers, they strategise to climb the middle-class ladder. Their lean, muscular bodies—which Bollywood has set the tone for are crucial to this. Diverging from an older masculine ideal represented by pehlwani wrestlers, these bodies not only communicate (sexual) attractiveness, but also professionalism, control and even cosmopolitanism. With the gym aspiring to be a safe space for women, trainers must also find a way to break with the toxic masculinity that dominates life outside. Yet, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Class barriers are less permeable than they appear. The use of bodily capital to breach them is more fraught with danger than one might anticipate. And the profession is riddled with pitfalls and contradictions. Michiel Baas has spent a decade studying gyms, trainers and bodybuilders, and finds in them a new way to investigate India. He walks us through the homes and workspaces of these men - yes, they are almost all men - to bodybuilding competitions and also into their most intimate worlds of ambitions, desires and struggles. An unusual study of an unusual subject, Baas unveils a fascinating world, hidden in plain sight.

Muscular India: Masculinity Mobility & The New Middle Class

Muscular India: Masculinity Mobility & The New Middle Class PDF Author: Michiel Baas
Publisher: Context
ISBN: 9395073624
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
About the Book MICHIEL BAAS BRINGS ALIVE A WORLD OF MEN SCULPTING BODIES, REDEFINING MASCULINITIES AND CONFRONTING THEIR VULNERABILITIES IN THE GYMS OF URBAN INDIA. The gyms of urban 'new India' are intriguing spaces. While they cater largely to well-off clients, these shiny, modern institutions also hold the promise of upward mobility for the personal trainers who work there. By improving their English, 'upgrading' their dressing style and developing a deeper understanding of the lives of their upmarket customers, they strategise to climb the middle-class ladder. Their lean, muscular bodies—which Bollywood has set the tone for are crucial to this. Diverging from an older masculine ideal represented by pehlwani wrestlers, these bodies not only communicate (sexual) attractiveness, but also professionalism, control and even cosmopolitanism. With the gym aspiring to be a safe space for women, trainers must also find a way to break with the toxic masculinity that dominates life outside. Yet, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Class barriers are less permeable than they appear. The use of bodily capital to breach them is more fraught with danger than one might anticipate. And the profession is riddled with pitfalls and contradictions. Michiel Baas has spent a decade studying gyms, trainers and bodybuilders, and finds in them a new way to investigate India. He walks us through the homes and workspaces of these men - yes, they are almost all men - to bodybuilding competitions and also into their most intimate worlds of ambitions, desires and struggles. An unusual study of an unusual subject, Baas unveils a fascinating world, hidden in plain sight.

Muscular Nationalism

Muscular Nationalism PDF Author: Sikata Banerjee
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814789773
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Concerned chiefly with views and events of the 19th and 20th centuries. Discusses deviations from a putative ideal of femininity characterised by chastity and inactivity.

Make Me a Man!

Make Me a Man! PDF Author: Sikata Banerjee
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 079148369X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Looks at the ideals of masculine Hinduism—and the corresponding feminine ideals—that have built the Indian nation, and explores their consequences.

Muscular India

Muscular India PDF Author: Michiel Baas
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789389648218
Category : Body image
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"The gyms of urban 'new India' are intriguing spaces. While they cater largely to well-off clients, these shiny, modern institutions are also vehicles of upward mobility for the trainers and specialists who work there. As they learn English, 'upgrade' their dressing style and try to develop a deeper understanding of the lives of their upmarket customers., they break with an older kind of masculinity represented by the pehlwans in their akharas. Equally, the gym aspires to be a safe space for women--a break from the toxic masculinity they must deal with outside its walls. Yet, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Class barriers are less permeable than they appear. The use of bodily capital to breach them is more fraught with danger than one might anticipate. And the profession is riddled with pitfalls and contradictions. Michiel Baas has spent a decade studying gyms, trainers and bodybuilders, and finds in them a new way to investigate India. He walks us through the homes and workspaces of these men--yes, they are almost all men--to bodybuilding competitions and also into their most intimate worlds of ambitions, desires and struggles. An unusual study of an unusual subject, Baas unveils a fascinating world, hidden in plain sight."--

India's Immortal Comic Books

India's Immortal Comic Books PDF Author: Karline McLain
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253220521
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Combining entertainment and education, India's most beloved comic book series, Amar Chitra Katha, or "Immortal Picture Stories," is also an important cultural institution that has helped define, for several generations of readers, what it means to be Hindu and Indian. Karline McLain worked in the ACK production offices and had many conversations with Anant Pai, founder and publisher, and with artists, writers, and readers about why the comics are so popular and what messages they convey. In this intriguing study, she explores the making of the comic books and the kinds of editorial and ideological choices that go into their production.

Gender, Nation and Popular Film in India

Gender, Nation and Popular Film in India PDF Author: Sikata Banerjee
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317226127
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
Interpretations of manhood have unfolded in India within a middle class cultural milieu shaped by an assertive self-confidence fuelled by liberalisation, a process by which India has been integrated into the global political economy and the prominence of Hindutva or Hindu nationalist politics. This book unpacks a particular gendered vision of nation in the modern Indian context by drawing on popular films. This muscular nationalism is an intersection of a specific vision of masculinity with the political doctrine of nationalism. The idea of nation is animated by an idea of manhood associated with martial prowess, muscular strength and toughness, but coupled with the image and construct of virtuous woman – a gendered binary of martial man and chaste woman. The author skilfully and convincingly draws together issues of political economy, including globalization and neoliberalism with majoritarian politics and popular culture, thus showing how disparate strands intersect and build on each other. Using interpretive methodologies and popular media, the book presents new interpretations of Bollywood films through the lenses of gender, masculinity and nationalism. It will be of interest to scholars of South Asian politics and culture, in particular Indian nationalism, popular culture, media and gender studies.

The Postcolonial Sporting Body

The Postcolonial Sporting Body PDF Author: Veena Mani
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 1804557846
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The Postcolonial Sporting Body considers the future not only of sport, but of global politics and identity in a world striving towards greater equity and decolonisation.

The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India's Young

The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India's Young PDF Author: Somini Sengupta
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393292878
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
“[A] sharply observed study . . . richly detailed portraits.”—Economist Somini Sengupta emigrated from Calcutta to California as a young child in 1975. Returning thirty years later as the bureau chief for The New York Times, she found a vastly different country: one defined as much by aspiration and possibility—at least by the illusion of possibility—as it is by the structures of sex and caste. The End of Karma is an exploration of this new India through the lens of young people from different worlds: a woman who becomes a Maoist rebel; a brother charged for the murder of his sister, who had married the “wrong” man; a woman who opposes her family and hopes to become a police officer. Driven by aspiration—and thwarted at every step by state and society—they are making new demands on India’s democracy for equality of opportunity, dignity for girls, and civil liberties. Sengupta spotlights these stories of ordinary men and women, weaving together a groundbreaking portrait of a country in turmoil.

Encoding Race, Encoding Class

Encoding Race, Encoding Class PDF Author: Sareeta Amrute
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374277
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
In Encoding Race, Encoding Class Sareeta Amrute explores the work and private lives of highly skilled Indian IT coders in Berlin to reveal the oft-obscured realities of the embodied, raced, and classed nature of cognitive labor. In addition to conducting fieldwork and interviews in IT offices as well as analyzing political cartoons, advertisements, and reports on white-collar work, Amrute spent time with a core of twenty programmers before, during, and after their shifts. She shows how they occupy a contradictory position, as they are racialized in Germany as temporary and migrant grunt workers, yet their middle-class aspirations reflect efforts to build a new, global, and economically dominant India. The ways they accept and resist the premises and conditions of their work offer new potentials for alternative visions of living and working in neoliberal economies. Demonstrating how these coders' cognitive labor realigns and reimagines race and class, Amrute conceptualizes personhood and migration within global capitalism in new ways.

Confronting the Body

Confronting the Body PDF Author: James H. Mills
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1843310333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
A key South Asian Studies title that brings together some of the best new writing on physicality in colonial India.