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[This article has been inspired by Sean Lawrence Robert’s ‘’Pumping Iron in Dharavi: An Ethnographic Account of Bodybuilding Culture in Mumbai’s Slum-City’ and all quotes, data and references have been sourced from the findings of his thesis. We were floored by the discovery of this flourishing sporting subculture, and this is our attempt at shedding light on a lifestyle in the city that has been largely undocumented in mainstream media.]
In an unassuming laneway called ‘60 Feet Road’ off Dharavi Main Road, Flex Gym is the hub for the ‘elite sporting subculture’ of bodybuilding in the area – a sport that one might not initially expect to see in what is considered to be one of Asia’s largest slum areas, but which has developed a loyal following over the years. Opening its shutters in 2007, an oversized yellow sign hanging above the glass door at the entrance declares, ‘Flex Gym: Where the Champions are Born’, along with another less likely one that suggests 11 - 3PM are reserved for ‘only ladies’, although it is a firmly male-only facility. The owner of the gym, Shawn, is ‘considered by many to be the patriarch of Dharavi’s bodybuilding community’ and was also the overall winner of the respected Mumbai Shree bodybuilding competition, becoming the first bodybuilder from Dharavi to be crowned ‘Mr Bombay’.
Considered one of the city’s elite bodybuilders, Shawn has competed in several other Mumbai-based bodybuilding competitions over the years and, assisted by two full-time employees, Manish and Anand, is single-handedly responsible for creating a space that helps sustain the curious subculture in the community that he was born and raised in. “I could have gone somewhere else to do this, but this [Dharavi] is and always will be my home!” Shawn, who was introduced to the sport by his older brother, shares. “It is impossible to run in Dharavi – it is too busy and too crazy! The thing is I do not have a place to put even one cardio machine. Without it [a treadmill] the gym is not complete. It is expensive but that is a secondary issue.” His apartment is a five-minute walk from the gym, and a regular day will have him opening the gym at 5 AM most mornings for the first of his two daily workouts. Post these, he commutes to the neighbouring Sion area for a run, like most of the bodybuilders who train at Flex Gym.
Following his second workout in the evening, Shawn turns his attention to ‘gym members interested in learning more about weight-training principles’ and is quite passionate about helping other bodybuilders interested in the sport advance their training. His bodybuilding competition trophies sit proudly on display on a shelf behind him as he discusses a range of topics from competition posing technique, to diet and supplementation advice at his desk, often engaging in one-on-one sessions with aspiring bodybuilders. According to Shawn, many of the bodybuilders at Flex Gym aren’t highly educated, and often lack a basic understanding of the principles of nutrition. Since diet is a key aspect of bodybuilding, Shawn has taken matters into his own hands by constructing a meal-by-meal guide by amalgamating Western bodybuilding principles and adapting it to an Indian context for the Indian bodybuilders.
The meal plan charts out the foods ubiquitous in the Indian diet that bodybuilders would do well to avoid, such as ghee, oil and paneer and Shawn also goes on to suggest protein alternative - such as rajma, pulses and dals - for vegetarian bodybuilders. While their reasons for abstaining from meat range from religious reasons to their inability to afford it, Shawn opinionated that the vegetarian diet is incompatible with competitive bodybuilding. “Most of the bodybuilders in India are non-vegetarian, because basically there is a lot of protein in eggs, chicken, fish, and beef,” he explains. “Even if one is Hindu, one does not have the option if they wish to be a competitive bodybuilder – they eat meat and they sacrifice for the sport. Vegetarian bodybuilders do exist, but non-vegetarians have more options.”
As for his own diet, Shawn is already on a strict training diet that has him ensuring he consumes almost 3000 calories over six to seven meals a day. “I eat 40 eggs a day, but only egg whites! In the afternoon my meal is plain chicken breast pieces, and in the evening I stick to fish or maybe chicken again. I also take six to eight scoops of branded isolate protein powder a day, but this is very expensive here.” Shawn’s aim with Flex Gym in a noble one, and cognizant of the fact that ‘bodybuilding is, the most expensive sport’ and that his gym is located in one of India’s largest slum settlements, he tries his best to make the gym a place that is both affordable and accessible to his community. ‘In his own assessment, to become a champion bodybuilder one must also be a champion of the sport.’
Flex Gym is, in fact, the only gym in the vicinity that considers itself a ‘hardcore, bodybuilding facility’ and has become ‘the cultural epicentre for many of Mumbai’s biggest and most competitively successful bodybuilders’. The loot speaks for itself: over the past five years alone, local Dharavi bodybuilders training at the facility have brought home three state bodybuilding championship titles and four city bodybuilding championship titles. Open Monday through Saturday, Flex gym is at its busiest between 5 - 7 PM when approximately 40 members can generally found in the premises lifting weights, and ‘it is at this time that the majority of the more ‘hardcore’ bodybuilders choose to work out’.
The space of the gym itself is relatively cramped, at 92 square metres, with the weight-training equipment positioned strategically to maximise the use of the limited area. Surprisingly modern and well-built, the strength training equipment includes the dumbbell rack on the left side of the room, loaded with 15 pairs ranging from 4.53-43.09 kg. A mirror runs along the rack and the wall on the left, ‘reflecting the weightlifters’ as they work out on the gym’s two incline benches.
A standard bench press and a decline bench press, for chest-training exercises, extend along the other side of the gym, and near the rear wall of the gym you will find an array of other weightlifting equipment, including a seated pec-deck machine for chest training, a preacher curl bench for bicep exercises, a roman chair for abs and triceps exercises, a lat pull-down machine for back training and ‘for leg training exercises, a lying hamstring curl machine, a seated leg extension machine, a seated calf raise machine and a leg press machine that can be loaded with barbell plates’. Two large posters of Western bodybuilding icons Jay Cutler and Ronnie Coleman gaze back at you from the right-hand side of the wall and the tunes of Western pop stars like Shakira, Sean Paul, and Justin Bieber, as well as popular tracks from recent Bollywood films fill the air, monitored by Shawn’s two full-time employees Manish and Anand, who have very hands-on roles in the gym. Besides spotting for bodybuilders, they also advise beginners regarding their weightlifting techniques, and the two can often be found carrying out weightlifting exercises themselves.
There is no denying that bodybuilding in Dharavi is initially perplexing and a little bit of a paradox at first mention, but considering the histories and traditions of bodybuilding culture in India, the rise of globalization, and the fact that today, it is among the most popular sporting subcultures in the city of Mumbai, the notion that a bodybuilding gym exists in the slum-city of Dharavi is far easier to understand. Modern bodybuilding culture in India can be traced back to the circus and its well-built, professional strongmen, who showcased their impressive physical strength and sculpted bodies in public shows and in 1905, German strongman Eugene Sandow, made waves with his visit to India. At the time, he was considered to be behind creating an interest amongst many Indians in ‘physical culture and the aesthetic qualities of the male physique’ (Schwarzenegger & Dobbins, 1987; Stokvis, 2006).
The tradition of weightlifting, though, can be traced back further to the pahalvans of India, ‘who weight trained with an assortment of stone-carved clubs, circular stone neck rings, and hollow stone cylinders’ although their influence on the country’s modern bodybuilding culture is considered to be relatively modest; if there is one less direct association modern Indian bodybuilders share with the pahalvans, it is probably their worship of the Hindu deity, Hanuman (Lutgendorf, 2002; Mujumdar, 1950). Venerated for his strength and muscularity, Hanuman is considered the epitome of the male physique by many of the Flex Gym bodybuilders, and ‘hyper-muscular, anthropomorphic representations of the monkey god’ can be seen in the form of stickers on the walls of Flex Gym, statues in the homes of the bodybuilders, and artistic renderings on the virtual ‘walls’ of the bodybuilders’ personal Facebook pages’. What is really fascinating is this admiration for the deity is not limited to Hindu bodybuilders alone, as many of Flex Gym’s Muslim and Christian bodybuilders also appeared to be in equal adoration of him.
It was probably the rise of globalisation and the dissemination of popular Western action films throughout the 1970s and 1980s, though, that has had the biggest direct impact on modern bodybuilding in India.
‘Bare-chested images of muscle-bound actors like Bruce Lee, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone could be seen on display in public spaces throughout India, and soon after, Indian actors Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan appeared in popular Bollywood films baring their torsos and flaunting their chiselled physiques.’ Flex Gym owner Shawn too recalls the 2007 release of the Bollywood film ‘Om Shanti Om’ which had Shah Rukh Khan showing off his ‘six-pack’ abs, following which membership to his gym gained considerable popularity as all the young men wanted to work out their abdominal muscles in an attempt to emulate the film star. There is a distinct difference, though, in the motivation behind modern Indian bodybuilding culture in general and the traction that the sport has gained in Dharavi: ‘the notion of transformation appears to be the most important, underlying motivational aspect specific to Dharavi’s bodybuilding subculture’.
Practising bodybuilding helped increase the awareness of the personal identities of many of the Flex Gym members, that, regardless of the living and working conditions in Dharavi, allow them to look at themselves first as bodybuilders who ‘have the physiques that match their own self-assessments’; a solution to the existential social problems perhaps of living in one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Many of the bodybuilders were also motivated to take up the sport ‘after observing the physical transformations that friends and community acquaintances had experienced through training at Flex Gym’.
Thus, the curious, seemingly unlikely subculture of bodybuilding flourishes in Dharavi, with motivators that are far more deep-rooted than one might realise.
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