From Heroine to “Brand Shilpa”: Reality Television, Transnational Cultural Economics, and the Remaking of the Bollywood Star

Abstract

In January 2007, the Indian media was abuzz with the news of Bollywood stars Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai’s engagement, but soon the national obsession with these impending nuptials was undermined by another “breaking news”—the alleged racial abuse of Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty, who was in Britain participating in the reality show Celebrity Big Brother, at the hands of fellow contestants Jade Goody, Danielle Lloyd, and Jo O’Meara. Goody and her cohort’s racial and ethnocentric comments denigrating Shetty’s cooking, eating habits, and nationality not only incited viewers’ ire, but also landed the show in the midst of a political maelstrom. In spite of attempts by the show’s producer, Endemol, and its telecaster, Channel 4, to frame the “bickering” as “girly rivalry,”1 an inevitable clash of culture and class, the controversy soon escalated into a transnational crisis. Outraged at the “racial bullying,” South Asian Labor MP Keith Vaz tabled a motion in the House of Commons denouncing the show, while Prime Minister Tony Blair tried to reassure beleaguered British South Asians that Britain was still “a country of fairness and tolerance.”2 The reaction in India was no less volatile, with the country’s leading English daily labeling the show “Bigot Brother” and protestors burning effigies of Endemol and Channel 4. With Indian parliamentarians more concerned with Shetty’s predicament than discussing bilateral relations, the controversy even threatened to hijack Chancellor and Prime Minister-in-waiting Gordon Brown’s India visit.