Hindi cinema, also known as Bollywood, the world's largest producer of films, is a prime example of a celebrity ecology, which includes media construction, consumer, spectacle and power (Nayar 2009) that nurtures interesting, challenging and, expectedly, even revanchist views of gender, caste, nation and the individual.

Bollywood and its cognate industries – publicity, poster-designers, fashion shows, advertising – is a fertile ground for the study of Indian forms of celebrification. The stars move into politics, are worshipped as gods and demigods, generate a wholly different order of buzz, in India and globally, with their humanitarian activism, all of which offer us complex discourses and representational strategies for celebrity studies. I shall touch briefly upon some of the ways in which Bollywood stars contribute to a deeper understanding of celebrity studies in India.

Bollywood stars display what S. V. Srinivas in his study of the South Indian, specifically Telugu, star, Chiranjeevi, termed ‘cinematic populism’ (2009). Cinematic populism merges off-screen and online roles. This is particularly true of the first generation of actors-turned-politicians. Many of the actors in the 1950–1970 period, especially in the film industries of Southern India, were well known for their portrayal of gods on screen (Nayar 2009: 94–95). The visual rhetoric of the deity and the film hero relies upon a frontality. This viewing of the divine face is called darshan in Hindi and the frontal portrayal of the Indian film heroes has reinforced this quasidivine association of the film hero/ine. The deity and the film hero/ine, and particularly the hero, gaze out at the audience/viewer, thereby meeting the viewer's gaze in a darshanic visual linkage, both on screen and in advertising posters and notices, as commentators have noted (Prasad 1998: 74–78; Dwyer and Patel 2002: 33). This frontal viewing often transforms the viewed object into a desirable object, with the darshanic, which has specifically religious connotations of the visual, blurring into the nazar, or the gaze of romance (Taylor 2003). The fan clubs around these stars, especially in the case of Southern Indian stars like Rajnikanth (Tamil films), in their iconography (in terms of film star portraits, cut-outs and material culture practices) merge religious devotion with film consumption (Rogers 2011).