Michiel Baas is an anthropologist, writer and traveler. His research explores the intersections of fitness, bodybuilding, masculinity, class, and mobility. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in India and beyond, he examines how the body becomes a site where ambition, identity, and social change converge. He is the author of Muscular India: Masculinity, Mobility & the New Middle Class (2020), an acclaimed ethnography of India’s fitness culture and its broader social transformations. His next book, forthcoming with Allen Lane (Penguin), traces the global history and legacies of Dutch colonialism through a journey across four continents.