Amitabh Bachchan’s revived star text in Bollywood cinema

Abstract

The Indian popular film industry, known internationally as Bollywood, is home to big superstars who embody active masculine corporealities that define their larger-than-life star identities onscreen. Here, stars live in the realm of imagination, where their star text is constructed, historicized, and reproduced for a long time, thus extending the image of the star to multiple contexts that signify different aspects of stardom. The transformations a star has to undergo are crucial in deciding their fate. A star’s identity that was established in a particular era is often threatened when circumstances change. In order to survive in a new era, stars adopt new vehicles to renegotiate themselves by either abandoning their past glory or carrying a different version of it to the present. Among the many Indian superstars, Amitabh Bachchan can be identified as a classic example of a surviving star.

With a career that spans more than five decades and two hundred movies, Amitabh Bachchan is considered one of the greatest actors in Indian cinema and a popular cultural icon. Famously endowed with titles such as “Star of the Millennium,” “Big B,” and “One-Man Industry,” Bachchan’s exceptional celebrity status as an actor, a producer, and a former politician in India is unparalleled, even expanding its impact to global levels and becoming a recognizable cinematic identity from the Asian diaspora. From the 1970s–1980s golden era that established him as the Indian “Angry Young Man” superstar persona to the short and failed political career surrounded by controversies and allegations of corruption, Bachchan’s on- and offscreen performances have been an important subject for both public debates and critical discourses. After a semiretirement from acting, Bachchan revived his career in the 2000s, when he started to appear in films that reflect the identity of an “aging star.”