Indian club swinging in nineteenth and twentieth-century India and England
Journal: Apollo (University of Cambridge)
Year: 2016

Indian clubs are bottle-shaped weighted clubs swung in the hand for gymnastic exercise. Despite their obscure status in modern culture, the clubs were one of the most recognizable items of fitness equipment in nineteenth and early-twentieth century India and England. Originating in India, the clubs’ nineteenth and early twentieth-century history is one of remarkable complexity. Adopted by civil and military colonisers in India in the early nineteenth-century, club swinging became a means of main