NEW DELHI — They called him the Pocket Hercules.

As a teenager he could bend steel bars in his bare hands, as well as with his teeth. At 39, after he had taken up bodybuilding, he won the Mr. Universe competition. And he managed all this despite being only 4 feet 11 inches, thus the nickname.

Manohar Aich died last Sunday in India at 103, remembered not only for his almost superhuman strength but also for a colorful life. As an airman in the colonial Royal Air Force, he was court-martialed for insubordination and imprisoned. He performed for more than a decade in a traveling circus, where he flexed muscles in time to music. And he ran a gym on the ground floor of the three-story building in which he lived, grooming some of India’s greatest bodybuilders.

Beyond all that, he was revered for leading a profoundly simple life, both physically and philosophically. He never drank or smoked, and he kept to a diet of rice, fish, vegetables, lentils, fruit and milk. Dismissive of high-tech exercise machines, he trained himself and others through thousands of repetitions of Indian-style push-ups and squats, known as dand and bethak.

His refrain, “as it is,” summed up his life philosophy, said Bishnu Aich, 68, the eldest of Mr. Aich’s four children, three of whom survive him.