The Hindi film industry, commonly called “Bollywood,” has since the 1990s, as Ravi Vasudevan points out, been “reframing … the nation-state”; “rather than the territorial nation … we witness the emergence of the global nation” (2008; see also Sinha and Kaur 2005; Bose 2006; Kavoori and Punathambekar 2008). This essay argues that one way Bollywood achieves this reframing of India as a global nation is through the creation of a globally viable, respectable and recognizable brand: celebrity care. Brand Bollywood Care (BBC for convenience) is a brand in and of itself. Retaining yet subtly erasing racial, national and geopolitical identifications by merging, in distinctive fashion, with transnational organizations like the United Nations or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, BBC is a marker of India's coming of global age by inserting its—India’s—most recognizable, that is, celebrity, faces into a global humanitarian project and semiotic universe filled with signs of benevolence. While this line of argument suggests a homogenization, even mimicry, of Western ideals and agendas of benevolence, charity work and development models, a certain amount of legitimacy accrues to BBC due to its vernacular origins and roots. I use the term “vernacular” fully alert to its racial and imperial roots, and to signal a binary with “global” here. The reiteration of the vernacular is not, let me hasten to add, an attempt to claim greater authenticity for the project of BBC. I wish, rather, to suggest that the legitimization integral to any charity work, in the case of BBC, is achieved by drawing attention to its local roots.

This essay is primarily concerned with the discursive constructions of celebrity humanitarianism, of BBC, my generic name for India's globalized film celebrity working for international goodwill, charitable causes, and the alleviation of at least some of the world's lingering malaises. Care and charity work are technologies of global citizenship for the Bollywood star. My contention here is that a global citizenship is available for Bollywood celebs, whose origins lie in a “developing nation,” through the discourses of care, compassion and charity operating at local levels but which resonate with similar discourses across the world. It is a citizenship that, as David Jefferess (2013) with a different emphasis and inflection argues, aspires to a postracial, culturally plural “signature” of modernity in the form of benevolence.