Table Of Content

i Essays in Celebrity Culture ii iii Essays in Celebrity Culture Stars and Styles Pramod K. Nayar iv Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com This edition first published in UK and USA 2021 by ANTHEM PRESS 75– 76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA Copyright © Pramod K. Nayar 2021 The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2021935802 ISBN- 13: 978- 1- 78527- 786- 3 (Hbk) ISBN- 10: 1- 78527- 786- 3 (Hbk) Cover image: AlexanderLipko/Shutterstock.com This title is also available as an e- book. v CONTENTS Preface vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Stars, Styles, Society and Spectacle 1 Part 1. Bollywood and Celebrity 1. Victims, Bollywood and the Construction of a Cele- Meme 15 2. Brand Bollywood Care: Celebrity, Charity and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism 33 3. Celebrity, Charisma, and Post- truth Relations: Agnogenesis, Affect, and Bollywood 51 Part 2. Celebrity and Lifewriting 4. What the Stars Tell: Celebrity Lifewriting in India 67 5. Biopics 75 6. Bollywood Stars and Cancer Memoirs 83 Part 3. Celebrity, Culture and Politics 7. Indian Writing in English as Celebrity 93 8. Watery Friction: The River Narmada, Celebrity, and New Grammars of Protest 107 9. Mobility and Insurgent Celebrityhood: The Case of Arundhati Roy 131 vi vi CONTENTS 10. Desecration and the Politics of ‘Image Pollution’: Ambedkar Statues and the ‘Sculptural Encounter’ in India 145 11. Authors, Self- Fashioning and Online Cultural Production in the Age of Hindu Celevision 157 Index 175 vii PREFACE Celebrity Studies has been a part of my academic work consistently, and one essay a year has been an average. The current volume’s intentional and con- textual diversity and variety stems from the fact that these essays were written for specific contexts, adhering to the demands made by anthologies, journals and special issues. Hopefully, these same features will reveal numerous shades (more than fifty) of the celebrity. The essays brought together here represent work that has appeared in the last decade, and since my first foray into the field, in the form of Seeing Stars: Spectacle, Society and Celebrity Culture (2009). They appear here unrevised and unedited from their original published version. Hyderabad, India December 2020 viii nixewgenprepdf ACKNOWLEDGMENTS These essays first appeared in anthologies and journals. I am very grateful to editors of volumes for inviting me to contribute and the referees for their pres- cient and probing comments and suggestions, which made the essays much better than they would otherwise have been. Victims, Bollywood and the Construction of a Cele- Meme. In Anthony Elliott (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Celebrity Studies. Routledge, 2018. Brand Bollywood Care: Celebrity, Charity and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism. In David Marshall and Sean Redmond (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Celebrity. Wiley- Blackwell, 2016. Celebrity, Charisma and Post- truth Relations: Agnogenesis, Affect and Bollywood. In J. P. Zúquete (ed.), Routledge International Handbook of Charisma. Routledge, 2021, 408– 17 What the Stars Tell: Celebrity Lifewriting in India, 2017–2 018. Biography 42.1 (2019): 62– 68. Biopics: The Year in India. Biography 40.4 (2017): 604– 10. Bollywood Stars and Cancer Memoirs. Biography 43.1 (2020): 86–93. Indian Writing in English as Celebrity. In Om Dwivedi and Lisa Lau (eds), Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market. Palgrave- Macmillan, 2015. Watery Friction: The River Narmada, Celebrity, and New Grammars of Protest. Celebrity Studies 4.3 (2013): 292– 310. Mobility and Insurgent Celebrityhood: The Case of Arundhati Roy. Open Cultural Studies 1.1 (2017): 46– 54. Desecration and the Politics of ‘Image Pollution’: Ambedkar Statues and the ‘Sculptural Encounter’ in India. Celebrity Studies 11.1 (2020): 116– 24. Authors, Self-F ashioning and Online Cultural Production in the Age of Hindu Celevision. In Xenia Zeiler (ed.), Digital Hinduism. Routledge, 2019. x