Between 2007 and 2015 Darsheel Safary enjoyed an – inevitably – brief tenure as the most popular and successful child star working in Bollywood, the commercial entertainment industry based in Mumbai, India. By comparison with other contemporary Bollywood stars, Safary is perhaps relatively unknown in the West, yet he has endured the same degree of fame and attention in India as Macaulay Culkin did in the United States in the early 1990s. In popular Hindi cinema, children appear fairly frequently as the protagonists’ younger relations or companions, and over the decades there have been many child actors who became popular stars, such as Raju Shreshtha in the 1970s, Jugal Hansraj in the 1980s, and Sana Saeed in the 1990s. But it has traditionally been very rare for children to have leading roles in films aimed at family audiences, and even rarer for children to feature in the kinds of vehicles associated with popular superstars. Yet Safary has managed to be the lead actor in all of his Bollywood films, even when appearing alongside established megastars such as Aamir Khan. This chapter will consider Safary's film career and popular image in order to examine the child star's significance for the Bollywood industry and Indian society in the context of recent transformations associated with globalisation. For a short spell, Safary, who was born in 1996, appeared to embody India's accelerated imbrication in global capitalism following the country's economic liberalisation in the early 1990s, and to personify an ideological projection into the present of a future India that had fully endorsed and embraced consumerism and commodity culture. I will be discussing the media's coverage of Safary's professional career and personal life, before focusing on the two most recently released of his films in order to address the relationship between his screen roles and his public image and to determine his position in a globalised and transnational Indian cultural economy.

Sumita S. Chakravarty notes that ‘[in] the expanding field of Indian film studies, stars are a taken-for- granted aspect of Bollywood, but compared with other aspects of the institution and its products, they have been given less attention’ (2013: 180).