Having it bothways: The janus-like career of Kareena Kapoor

Abstract

Since her debut in Refugee (Dutta in Refugee. HR Enterprises, 2000), Kareena Kapoor has balanced the roles of Bollywood heroine and independent actress willing to take risks. One can chart this trajectory throughout her career- from the bubbly Poo in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (Johar in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham. Dharma Productions, 2001), to the eponymous, cigarette-smoking prostitute in Chameli (Mishra in Chameli. Pritish Nandy Communications, 2004); or, more broadly, from award-winning performances in hat-kē (off-centre) features, to Westernized heroines in mainstream films. This range is crucial in coming to terms with Kapoor as an actress, one willing to take risks, even as such risk-taking has come to define her trajectory as a twenty-first century star. Similarly, while Kapoor is decidedly a global star of the contemporary era who has appeared on the covers of numerous international fashion magazines, with myriad fans who have created multiple online fan sites devoted to her, she herself is not active on social media, with neither a Twitter nor an Instagram account. (In explaining her absence from social media, Kapoor claims she is a “very private” person who generally prefers “old school” forms of communication rather than, e.g. tweeting. See (Zoom Planet Bollywood 2015)). To invoke Richard Dyer’s now canonical terms, these disparate elements of Kapoor’s stardom produce a high level of opposition or contradiction in her star text. As John Ellis has noted, “There is always a temptation to think of a ‘star image’ as some kind of fixed repertory of fixed meanings” (1982, 92). Yet Kapoor’s Janus-like career demonstrates that star texts are indeed paradoxical and “composed of elements which do not cohere” (Ellis in Visible Fictions: Cinema, television, video. Routledge, London, 1982, 93). Building on the scholarship of Dyer and Ellis, this chapter will examine the trajectory of Kapoor’s career as a way of understanding the oftentimes contradictory manner in which her globalized star image functions. In the process, earlier Hollywood-centric theories of stardom will be reconsidered in light of the particular dynamics of the Bollywood “ecumene” (Bhaumik 2007: 202). Ultimately, I will argue that, despite the apparent incoherence of her star image, Kapoor’s stardom thrives on precisely such paradoxical meanings.