Abstract
In three recent films, Shah Rukh Khan, the leading star of contemporary Bombay cinema, appears preoccupied with the star–fan relationship, presenting the star and his fans as mirrors of each other’s anxieties and desires. This mirroring, I suggest, rehearses the shifts in time-consciousness that has accompanied India’s neoliberal turn. At one level, these films lament the passing away of one of the key pleasures of Bombay cinema fandom, that is, the collective celebration of a joyful indifference to time’s passing. At another level, they portray the anxieties of an aging star who has, with a certain desperation, been turning himself into a brand. These explorations of time-consciousness are symptomatic of the internal disorientations of a class that benefitted the most from the neoliberal turn—that is, the urban—middle class, which now experiences time as an antagonist in whose claws each moment is an opportunity to be won or lost against competitive others.
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Kapur, J. (2018). A Star Is Branded and the Fan Is Dead: Neoliberal Time-Consciousness and the Strange Obsession of Shah Rukh Khan with His Fans. In: Magnan-Park, A., Marchetti, G., Tan, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95822-1_31
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