Today, almost every Bollywood leading man swaggers and flaunts beefcake on-screen. Personal trainers to the stars have become minor celebrities in Mumbai, featured in movie magazines. And the abdominal muscles — known as the six-pack — have become a source of bragging rights for the biggest stars. The megastar Shahrukh Khan recently boasted that he was training to achieve an eight-pack for an upcoming film.

“There’s no other film industry in the world where people are talking about how many packs they have, or their abs,” said Anuparma Chopra, a Bollywood commentator and talk show host.

This rising machismo is not limited to the big screen in India. Scholars note that the body images of some Hindu deities, especially the god of Ram, have undergone a reimagining during the past two decades. Before, Ram was often depicted on ubiquitous wall calendars as lithe and slender, but by the 1990s calendar artists were usually depicting him as a muscular deity. Many calendar artists told scholars that they altered the image to succeed in a changed marketplace.

In a socially conservative country, Bollywood stars often try to push boundaries in the name of self-promotion, as the news media seizes on every little barrier broken. The buffed-up actor John Abraham posed for his film Dostana by suggestively pulling down his skimpy bathing suit. The somewhat less buffed-up actor Tusshar Kapoor then spoofed that photo in May to promote his own comedy, gleefully proclaiming his excitement about his hint of backside in a May 16 headline in The Bombay Times, an entertainment insert to the Mumbai edition of The Times of India.

For Shanoo Sharma, one of the most powerful casting directors in Bollywood, the focus on displaying beefcake has created a problem: nearly every casting call is laden with muscled up twentysomethings. Yet many roles call for a different physique. “We don’t necessarily look out for someone who is buffed and who looks like Salman Khan,” she said.