Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Star Switching Power in Networked Bollywood
- 1 Of Vagabonds and Wayfarers: Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand, and Hindi Cinema’s Family-Led Film Clusters
- 2 King of Kings: Amitabh Bachchan and the Emergence of Bollywood’s Corporate Networks
- 3 Global Dreamz: Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan Usher Global Bollywood into the New Millennium
- 4 Global Beauty Queens: Aishwarya Rai, Priyanka Chopra, and Female Star Switching Power
- 5 Bards of Change: How Streaming Platforms and State–Industry Alliance Are Reconfiguring Star Power in Networked Bollywood
- Notes
- Index
4 - Global Beauty Queens: Aishwarya Rai, Priyanka Chopra, and Female Star Switching Power
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 January 2024
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Star Switching Power in Networked Bollywood
- 1 Of Vagabonds and Wayfarers: Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand, and Hindi Cinema’s Family-Led Film Clusters
- 2 King of Kings: Amitabh Bachchan and the Emergence of Bollywood’s Corporate Networks
- 3 Global Dreamz: Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan Usher Global Bollywood into the New Millennium
- 4 Global Beauty Queens: Aishwarya Rai, Priyanka Chopra, and Female Star Switching Power
- 5 Bards of Change: How Streaming Platforms and State–Industry Alliance Are Reconfiguring Star Power in Networked Bollywood
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Winning Miss World in 1994 opened up new worlds for Aishwarya Rai, and her meteoric rise from beauty queen to celluloid goddess was swift and assured. After Bollywood, Hollywood beckons. The celestial beauty of Miss World 1994, Indian actress Aishwarya Rai, is about to light up Western screens. She is poised to star in her first English-language movie, Bride and Prejudice. Already, she has received four offers from Hollywood, ‘but I couldn’t fit them into my schedule’, declares Rai.… She is now a veteran of more than 20 movies. Her latest blockbuster was Devdas, a lush cinematic spectacle starring Shah Rukh Khan and Madhuri Dixit. The first Bollywood production to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival last year, it kick-started a Bollywood craze in Europe.
Aishwarya Rai, India’s triumphant Miss World, was now Bollywood’s reigning queen and global crossover star. Time magazine listed her among the world’s most influential people and noted that Rai gets the
sort of web adulation that even Britney Spears might envy. [There are] ‘17,000 sites in her honor’ including poetry sites, a Hindu shrine, even a site dedicated just to her eyes. Her hope, she says, is to lead an Indian invasion, to ‘catalyze’ Bollywood’s crossover to the West, and ‘open the doors for everybody else’.
This was the early 2000s, and Bollywood’s global momentum was cresting. With the success of Aamir Khan and SRK via films like Lagaan and Devdas, Bollywood cinema was prominently visible around the world. While the discourse of Bollywood’s global success was generally male-dominated, the ethereal presence of Rai’s culturally transcendent beauty, ergo the possibility of her becoming Bollywood’s first crossover star, dominated the discourse about industry globalization. The beauty pageant network, fuelled by Rai and Sushmita Sen, winners of the Miss World and Miss Universe crowns, respectively, in 1994, followed by Amitabh Bachchan’s attempt to integrate the beauty pageant industry into the globalizing Indian entertainment sector, was now firmly entrenched in the Bollywood network. The beauty pageant industry and Hindi cinema were organic partners for one another, as both were similarly constituted by global flows of capital, industrial and institutional collaborations, and national cultural influence that were deeply ensconced in debates about gender and national and cultural identity.
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- Networked BollywoodHow Star Power Globalized Hindi Cinema, pp. 171 - 208Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024