Part of the Khabar Lahariya long-form series “Sound Fury & 4G” ♦
Kiran Dua wears sparkly red bangles over her workout gloves, and a bindi and earrings over her polyester sports-shirt. Her arms bulge as she easily chest presses two dumbbells. “Give me heavier weights,” she says, “I’ll lift those too.” The 41-year-old housewife is a regular at Neo Gym, which claims to have trained over 700 women and girls since it opened in the small town of Banda, Uttar Pradesh.
Later, Dua hangs out in a nearby park with Usma Verma—a teacher who tosses a set of dumbbells above her head as if they were feathers and is proud of her fitness at age 55; and Priyanka Singh, a 26-year-old English MA in a tomato-red shirt. WIth them is a woman who convinced her sister, Suman Singh, to join the gym to improve her marriage prospects.
Dua began taking walks in the park on doctor’s orders, to reduce the stress on her knees and ankles from weight gain. Ashish Shukla, manager of Neo Gym, saw her walking and persuaded her to join a year and a half ago. Since then, Dua has lost nearly 15kg and her leg pains have vastly improved. She’s also found a community of women like her, who work out during the morning and evening women’s timings at Neo. The “changing environment” of small towns, according to Shukla, is responsible for an increase in obesity in young girls. But beyond just weight loss, Dua and her friends have a range of reasons for working out. In the years they have been going to the gym, they’ve achieved some of their health goals, and discovered new ones.
No country for fit women
Kiran Dua is just one of many millions of Indians—in particular, women—who suffer from conditions and diseases related to a lack of physical activity. According to a 2018 World Health Organization (WHO) study, India leads South Asia in terms of inactive adults, with 43.9 percent of women (and 24.7 percent of men) not getting the requisite exercise to avoid cardiovascular ailments and diabetes.
Studies about physical fitness vary in their findings, and most poll only urban Indians, but the overall picture they paint is dire. In 2019, an Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) diabetes study found that only three percent of women met the minimum requirement of daily physical activity. A doctor interviewed by the Hindustan Times about the study noted that while awareness about health and fitness had helped curb diabetes in urban areas in the past decade, incidences of the disease were still increasing among the urban poor and rural rich.
In line with this observation, last year the ICMR found that a surprising 15 percent of women in rural areas were overweight or obese (compared to 44 percent in urban areas, where women have more sedentary lives). This is complicated by the fact, according to the same report, that nearly 20 percent of Indians are also undernourished. Especially for poorer women in rural areas, nutritional indicators lag, while access to awareness and guided physical fitness programs is limited.
At the same time, fitness culture is spreading rapidly across the country, through neighbourhood basement gyms, parks equipped with exercise areas, companies selling nutritional supplements, bodybuilding competitions, certification programs and more. According to one estimate, the Indian fitness market is currently worth $2.6 billion and projected to nearly double to $6 billion in the next four years. The government, too, has gotten in on the game, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi launching a “Fit India Movement” last August.
There are concerns about whether such initiatives can successfully encourage Indians living outside the big metros, particularly women in smaller towns, where fitness culture is even more deeply entwined with ideas of masculinity and self-actualization as a man through the pursuit of physical perfection. What place do women have among the potential Mr. Bundelkhands and boys bulking up in the hopes of a career in the army or police?
Yet, fueled by YouTube, Whatsapp, and in the case of Muzaffarnagar, even a nagar panchayat that built a women’s gym, the fitness trend is catching on with this constituency as well–with the caveat that most of the women we spoke to were from relatively privileged backgrounds, reflecting the importance of education, awareness, and the ability to pay typical monthly fees of Rs. 250-500. These women, like Kiran Dua, in places like Benaras, Banda, and elsewhere around Bundelkhand, have complex motivations for gymming and derive complex benefits from it. Beyond obvious physical benefits, working out can be empowering, even while certain gender roles are reinforced.
Going to the gym?
Getting to the gym in the first place requires leapfrogging over certain mental and practical hurdles. A recent study found that women claim work and family responsibilities as major reasons why they don’t have time for their own physical fitness. At the Hulk Gym and Girls Fitness Center in Lalitpur, we found only hulks and no women when we visited in 2017. The owner, Munna Lal, told us that “women aren’t able to come according to our timings—and men and women can’t work out together. We tell them to come after the boys have left.” It was heartening that there were potential women members in a place like Lalitpur, which scores low on gender and development indicators even for Bundelkhand, but men were clearly the more privileged clientele, availing of the preferred timings.
Kavita Devi Bundelkhandi, Khabar Lahariya’s chief editor and a gym enthusiast for the past year, faced a problem around timings when she joined a gym in Banda last year. Weight gain made her feel irritable and lazy, interfering with her work and putting her in danger of thyroid and fatty liver issues. Gym-going friends in Delhi encouraged her to try it, and when Natraj Fitness opened in her mohalla, she took the plunge.
Because of her job, Kavita couldn’t come during the quiet hours reserved for women, and at first, the owner wasn’t able to understand her lack of discomfort at the thought of working out during “gent’s hour”. She had carved out a space alongside male journalists at press conferences and police stations, and she convinced the management that the gym wouldn’t be very different—she didn’t have a problem if they didn’t. They made an exception. And when she returned to Banda and to her workouts after meeting and one-upping Shah Rukh Khan on TV, the gym’s muscle bros welcomed her like a local celebrity, complete with jaimalas.
But for many women without Kavita’s confidence and stature, just talking about bodies and weight is a touchy issue. Several women at the gyms we visited didn’t want to describe their fitness journeys, or share before-after photos, as they felt it was too personal a subject.
Those who did speak with us often spoke about weight loss, but usually in conjunction with other motivations. Priyanka Singh, has been going to Neo Gym for about two years and has lost around 12kg. She credits working out with feeling less heavy, gaining stamina, and the reduction of various aches and pains. Dr. Rupali Yadav, a member of Phavda Gym in Benaras points out that weight, or perceived weight, can have a detrimental effect on mental health as well. According to a 2018 WHO study, India is the world’s most depressed country, and the pressure to look good doesn’t help. “These days, the aesthetic in society for women is the ‘zero figure’. Even if they gain a little bit, they feel ‘I’ve gotten so fat…’” She believes a regular fitness routine can help deal with such negative self-perceptions.
Usma Verma, the teacher who works out at Neo, pointed us to a related pressure for women joining local gyms. “These days, girls and boys only marry after seeing each other. So if a boy has this objection—the girl is a bit fat, the boy is slim and trim, and they’re not making a good match—then they say, if the girl was a little slim, then it would be fine. The girl’s family thinks to themselves, he’s a good boy, from a good family, so why not make a little effort.”
Shukla tells us “we get quite a few members who are young girls with body fat, finding it hard to get married. They don’t get alliance offers. In many such cases, we have helped them reduce twenty or thirty kilos in three months. They then got married into good families.”
Suman Singh, 28, joined Neo because her sister suggested it might help with marriage prospects. “Life has lots of obstacles,” she told us. “Like you’re going somewhere and you want to look good, wear good clothes, a nice dress, but you can’t—going out makes you feel bad and you think if only I were thinner, fitter, I would look good.” Singh participated in a “90 day transformation” and lost a significant amount of weight. She’s since gotten engaged as well.
“I feel fresh, active, and better about myself. My shaadi, my beauty, it’s all happening because of my fitness and the gym.”
A woman at Kavita’s gym came with the same goal in mind. She told Kavita she wasn’t finding anyone to marry because her weight had increased so much. Her relatives and her friends would say “You’re too fat to get married, so reduce your weight.” With this kind of pressure, it’s not surprising the woman didn’t want any mention of her name and story published.
At Phavda Gym in Banaras, the focus is less on health or having an attractive marriage profile, but on women’s safety. Owner Mahendra Kumar Pathak tells us “We train women to be fit and protect themselves in society, with kickboxing, judo…” Of course, there’s also Zumba—women tend to prefer cardio-oriented regimes thanks to the old stigma of “bulking up” by weight training. “First of all, we want women to recognize their strength, their stamina,” says Pathak. Over a hundred women come to his gym—though none of the women we interviewed discussed self-protection as a specific goal.
A woman’s worth
Ideas about fitness for women sometimes depart from and sometimes are closely tied to stereotypical ideas about the family and home life. Shukla told us that “In small towns, physical fitness for women is limited to them doing household chores. I wanted to change that definition and so began training batches of girls in Banda.”
The idea that physical labour in the home counteracts the need to burn calories is prevalent. Perhaps it is true, as Kavita says, that “Women who work in the village don’t need to go to the gym. The gym is more important for women who sit in one place and work, from morning to evening—most of the people who come to the gym are in this situation. But women in the village are already fit, they work all day.” Yet even for women working outside the home, the family and gym life become intertwined in ways that aren’t as common for men. Priyanka Singh tellingly says that one of the benefits of getting fit is being less tired—“the household work gets easily done.”
In terms of diet, women are often held responsible for the health of the whole family. Shukla says, “A man can only keep himself healthy, but women have the quality of caring and nurturing an entire household, and keeping a check over what everyone eats. If she knows the right value of nutrition and fitness she can keep her entire family healthy.”
Kiran Dua went a step beyond regulating her family’s diet by persuading her husband and children to join Neo Gym through her own example. “They saw me and were impressed with the results. My kids had also put on a lot of weight.” After joining the gym, “My daughter lost a lot of weight and my son gained a lot of muscle.” She suggests that with the prevalence of obesity-related health issues, girls should be given gym gear rather than make-up around the time of marriage. “A girl makes her home,” she says. “If she goes fit from home, she’ll keep her kids fit and her husband fit too.” In Dua’s story, the benefits of her daughter becoming fit through a new kind of physical awareness and practice, mix with conventional desires for her future family life.
Fitness and public space
While certain gender stereotypes persist, the majority of women we spoke to found gyms to be an empowering public space, where they could devote time to themselves and form bonds they might not otherwise make.
There’s always some initial trepidation. In the early days, Kavita used to feel a bit uneasy because there were so many men and children. “I’d feel a bit at sea among all those kids, but then I’d push myself so no one would know that I was scared. Also, my trainer is very good—he’d put me right in front where there are big mirrors, so slowly I told myself, I have to participate.”
A woman who came to her gym told Kavita that she couldn’t stand to watch herself in the mirror because she hated the way her breasts jiggled while running on the treadmill. Until narrating this episode to a friend in Delhi, Kavita didn’t consider that this woman could have benefited from a sports bra, having never even considered one herself.
Now, the two hours Kavita spends in the gym are rare me-time. “For years I haven’t been able to give myself any time. So it feels like I’m completely free to think about myself, my health, and to see myself reflected there in the mirrors,” she says. “I’m able to think more positively, and I feel like my body glows.”
Possibly thanks to the segregated timings, gyms are largely seen as safe spaces wear women can move freely without worrying about being watched, judged, or harassed. Nidhi Goyal, a member of Flex Gym Fitness in Karwi, said she appreciated above all the “peaceful environment of the gym and the lack of tension while exercising.”
Between sets of exercises or turns on the treadmill, friendships form too. In Banda, Ashish Shukla says “Girls are very supportive. They even start managing themselves, and attend to each others’ queries.” Usma Verma called the gym, “ a family. There is so much security for women here, and it’s the safest place for ladies. It doesn’t feel like we’re going to someone else’s place. This is the biggest achievement for Banda that here, because of this gym, ladies have become health-conscious.”
This is a relatively recent phenomenon. Most of the women we met have been gymming for about one or two years; at a few gyms we visited before 2019, we met fewer such pioneers of the sports bra or workout gloves. Perhaps there’s an aspirational quality to this kind of free and easy public space in small-town India as well. “Because gyms are opening up in small towns like our little Banda,” Verma says, “local ladies also feel that we live in some big city.”