SRK and Global Bollywood

Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, popularly known as SRK, is undoubtedly one of the trendsetters in the history of India cinema. This book locates SRK and his persona in the context of a globalizing Bollywood cinema, as part of a liberalized post-1990s urban Indian culture and economy. Whilst Amitabh Bachchan, most famously dubbed as the aangry young man of Indian cinemaa in the 1970s and 1980s, has perhaps been considered in media reports and the trade press as the most immediate predecessor in terms of contextualizing the fame of SRK (that is, as a precursor figure in terms of fame and wealth spanning the 1970s to the 1990s, pre-liberalization), the collection of essays here draw attention to the ways in which SRKas stardom signals more contemporary aspirations and acts as an emblem for adiasporica and transnational desires in late modern India.

Elke Mader,Professor, Social and Cultural Anthropology and a member of the research group aVisual Studies in Social Sciencesa, University of Vienna. Her publications include:Stars in Your Eyes. Ritual Encounters with Shah Rukh Khan in Europe (2011).

Rajinder Dudrah is Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. His books include, amongst others,Bollywood Travels: Culture, Diaspora and Border Crossings in Hindi Cinema (Routledge 2012);Bhangra: Birmingham and Beyond (Birmingham Library Services 2007); Bollywood:Sociology Goes to the Movies (Sage 2006); The Bollywood Reader (with Jigna Desai, Open University Press 2008); andTheorising World Cinema (with Lucia Nagib and Chris Perriam, 2011).

Bernhard Fuchs is Assistant Professor at the Department of European Ethnology, Vienna University. His main fields of research are media, migration and cultural transfer.