Indian Film Stars

Indian Film Stars offers original insights and important reappraisals of film stardom in India from the early talkie era of the 1930s to the contemporary period of global blockbusters. The collection represents a substantial intervention to our understanding of the development of film star cultures in India during the 20th and 21st centuries. The contributors seek to inspire and inform further inquiries into the histories of film stardom¿the industrial construction and promotion of star personalities, the actual labouring and imagined lifestyles of professional stars, the stars¿ relationship to specific aesthetic cinematic conventions (such as frontality and song-dance) and production technologies (such as the play-back system and post-synchronization), and audiences¿ investment in and devotion to specific star bodies¿across the country¿s multiple centres of film production and across the overlapping (and increasingly international) zones of the films¿ distribution and re