Bengali Macho

A race of weaklings? Effeminate aesthetes more likely to be writing poetry than lifting weights? Sandip Roy delves into a surprising history of musclemen, barefoot footballers and Tagore the wrestler.

- Sandip Roy

I WAS IN SAN FRANCISCO WHEN Manohar Aich died in Kolkata this year.

It did not surprise me. After all, he was almost 104. But it saddened me because he had seemed indestructible somehow. All 4’11” of him.

When I met him he had already crossed 100. A bald toothless gnome of a man, he was sitting on the verandah of his house in the morning sun in a white dhoti and red sleeveless vest, the Anandabazar Patrika newspaper folded across his lap. He seemed neither pleased nor displeased to see me. He didn’t look like a man who had once slapped an Englishman and gone to jail for it. 

When I asked him something about that time he won the Mr Universe title, he said shortly, “What do I remember? That was a long time ago.”

He had won the title in 1952. It was not yet the age of the multi-gym, protein supplements and John Abraham. His victory garnered him no product deals, no mega endorsement contracts. He made a living as a circus strongman, his son told me. He would lift 600-pound weights and bend six-inch nails into the shapes of letters of the English alphabet. A disciple and fellow body-builder, Kshitish Chatterjee, told me he went to Aich’s house and saw his wife frying up naari-bhuri (offal) that she had gotten for two annas for him. That was all the high-protein diet he could afford. “We were natural bodybuilders,” said Chatterjee. “Our guru was Manohar Aich. Now the guru is the druggist.” 

“I never thought of gyms as a business,” said Manohar Aich. “I did it because I had the ichche (the desire).”