Bachchan's professional reincarnation, from a fading film star to a transmedia celebrity, and the subsequent reinvention of his star image, from a socialist icon to a capitalist endorser, embodied the new ideology of consumerism. For millennial India, grappling with the contentious issues of tradition and modernity in a rapidly globalizing milieu, the show's ‘aspirational consumerism’ offered its viewers a new value system – an espousal that was further reaffirmed by its host, Bollywood legend, Amitabh Bachchan. The phenomenal success of Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC), the Indian franchise of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, underlines not only the successful adaptation of a global format show, but also its role in reinforcing and reiterating the nation's transition from a socialist ethos to a consumerist ontology. Commodities as factors of production are as effective as indices of differentiation as they are in the more familiar domain of consumption. This leads to professional differentiation in the field that can be tied to proficiency in consumption practices.
Dress designers’ fluency with brands and fashion solidifies their professional standing but costume production is a field of social practice that includes many actors that do not share the same dispositions toward consumption as designers. Selecting and inserting these clothes into film costume production draws on some of the same discriminations that producers employ in their guise as consumers. Since the shift toward neo-liberal economic policies in India in the early 1990s, commoditized, branded clothing has multiplied in the marketplace, and is increasingly featured in films.
Equally notable here is the role film-stardom plays in rendering moral authority through the trope of the sacrificial.Īs scholarly interest in consumption has risen, little attention has been paid to productive consumption, or the acquisition and use of commodities within production processes. The paper also enquires how and why the show compels narrative ingenuity towards what Aditya Nigam calls the ‘implosion of the political’-the erasure of the public from the street and its re-inscription in the studio. As television becomes the site of articulating moral authority, ritual participation and demanding social change, the political is re-assembled through Khan’s stardom. The show has not only generated public debate, it also invites the public to return to a performative innocence. In so doing, Khan converts crime news into emotional truths. Grappling with the broad contours of the cultural economy of justice on national television in India, I suggest that the star descends upon television as an avatar promising empathy to a variety of victims of social injustice. This paper attempts to make sense of Satyamev Jayate, a popular Indian television show hosted by film star Aamir Khan, in terms of its politics, Khan’s stardom and the attempt to reframe the social on television.
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