Abstract
I begin with a quotation:
Shah Rukh Khan is the face of a glittering new India. He is a modern-day god. On streets in India, his posters are sold alongside those of religious deities. Shrines have been erected in his name. For Indians and the varied non-Indian lovers of popular Hindi cinema, Shah Rukh is bigger than Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt combined. Over fifteen years and fifty films, he has straddled Bollywood like a colossus. In the paan-stained studios of Mumbai, Shah Rukh’s story, how a middle-class Muslim boy from Delhi became one of the biggest movie stars in the biggest film industry in the world, is legend. So when he flicks away cigarette butts people pick them up as souvenirs. The media, in tones that aren’t ironical or mocking, refer to him as King Khan. (Chopra, 2007)
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© 2013 Sumita S. Chakravarty
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Chakravarty, S.S. (2013). Con-figurations: The Body as World in Bollywood Stardom. In: Sen, M., Basu, A. (eds) Figurations in Indian Film. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137349781_10
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