Salman Khan- The Man, The Actor, The Legend

About the Book A name that's synonymous with packed theatres shouting his name and crowds of young men cheering for him, Salman Khan has been reigning in the popular imagination for three decades now. However, superstardom came with its share of troubles. Salman has found himself in the news once too often, almost as though he were controversy's favorite child. Endlessly discussed as well as criticized, he is an object of adulation, fantasy and reverence in the cultural space. Tabloid pieces, stories and gossip all tend to collapse him into a formula, making him lose his exclusivity when, in actuality, he is one of a kind.

Salman Khan: The Man, The Actor, The Legend offers new perspectives on cinema and the peculiar glow of this star's superstardom in a consumerist society. It cuts through the many layers of his personality, the gossip and he rumors to focus on the star's aesthetic formulation on what exactly it is bout film and television, the star system and the capitalistic society that make him such a huge icon. It looks into Salman Khan, the phenomenon, in-depth, considering there have been fewer enquiries dedicated to charting his stardom than some of his contemporaries.

A fascinating account of one of Bollywood’s towering figures, this is a candid portrait of Salman Khan-the man and the superstar-and what makes this legend thrive across generations.

About the Author Devapriya Sanyal has a degree in English Literature from Lady Brabourne College, Kolkata, after which she attended Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, where she obtained her PhD in the cinema of Satyajit Ray. She teaches English literature to undergraduates at the University of Delhi.

Introduction The Pleasures of Cinema

Films are the stuff of dreams, or so said Hugo Munsterberg, a famous German-American psychologist and one of the earliest theoreticians of cinema. He further went on to say that one almost goes into a sort of trance along with hundreds of others, viewing the same film, as it is a collective experience, a retreat from reality, for a span of about two or three hours. Films tell stories, mounted on a huge screen mostly, and they choose to do so through either black and white images or colored ones. The actors portray a range of characters defining or rather redefining a gamut of human emotions, all within the span of about two hours, sometimes a little more or a little less.

From the very outset, several scholars and critics have tried to make sense of the medium of cinema. Comparisons have been made between films and literature, with literature being considered as the superior of the two arts.

In fact, for a long time, cinema was not even considered an art. Gradually, however, it has proved to be an extremely influential and powerful medium; often, it reflects reality and sometimes life begins to mirror cinema. Cinema, much like music, exists in time, said Satyajit Ray, one of India's most exemplary film directors. The two can even be considered as sister arts.

**Contents and Sample Pages**