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This chapter explores the coverage of public figures. Celebrities — especially royalty and cinema stars — were hugely influential in giving definition to notions of glamour and sex appeal. Press reporting also helped to set the boundaries between what was deemed ‘public’ and ‘private’. Ideas about what sort of ‘private’ material was suitable for public consumption changed considerably. In the first half of the century, the sexual proclivities of prominent individuals were treated with considerable circumspection. By the 1950s, however, a market was developing for confessional features in which celebrities would discuss their sexual exploits. The extensive speculation about Princess Margaret's relationship with Peter Townsend provided a stark contrast with the press silence surrounding Edward VIII's relationship with Wallis Simpson. The Profumo scandal in 1963 demonstrated the spectacular stories that could be produced by more aggressive investigation. Despite calls for privacy legislation, governments were reluctant to challenge the ‘freedom of the press’.

This chapter addresses how, unlike Hollywood, which has seen the rise of high-concept cinema overshadow the power a film star once possessed at the box office, Indian cinema, especially mainstream Hindi films, continues to underline the significance of film stars and views them as paramount to the development and marketing of most feature films. The angry-young-man persona of Indian cinema's biggest film star, Amitabh Bachchan, forged in an era of widespread political disillusionment, found its greatest expression in the 1975 super-hit Deewaar (The Wall), directed by Yash Chopra. The chapter moves away from Indian art cinema to the attractions of the mainstream film Deewaar. It engages with a range of key areas, such as the wider political context of the 1975 Indian Emergency and the angry young man as a sociopolitical symbol. It also looks at representations encompassing matriarchy, religion and poverty; Amitabh Bachchan's star image; and the lasting legacy of Deewaar for today's cinema.

This chapter examines cinema’s workings as a public sphere and its self-reflexive engagement with the question of colonial modernity by looking at popular anxieties about cinema’s impact on young viewers, at fictional and autobiographical accounts of moviegoing, and at how the female star, playing the role of the “modern woman” on and off screen, came to function as a metonymy for popular Indian cinema in discourses of spectatorship in the 1920s–1940s. It shows how the female star not only embodied the glamour of modernity but also spoke to widespread anxieties about a youthful, vulnerable, and unthinking mass public being carried too far by the cinema’s currents of modernity.

The book’s conclusion brings together elements from throughout the book, the first substantial academic study of Tyrone Power, to cement why he is an important but considerably overlooked actor of Hollywood cinema’s classical era. It goes back to exploring the concept of male beauty as a social construct, as discussed in the introduction, and applies it specifically to Power’s stat image and where it appears most overt across his career and how this was reinforced by cinematic techniques such as bright lighting, extreme close-ups and costuming. It brings together the book’s main conclusions that Power often portrayed cocky youths in his early films, being highly animated in comedies and musicals of the 1930s, before becoming more solemn as he matured and acquired a more staid, masculine presence which was both a natural, biological process and part of the studio’s adjusting of his persona as he aged. It then ends by suggesting that although Power’s beauty was key to his becoming and remaining a star, it also detracted from his performance skills for far too long, with the book aiming to readdress and reconfigure Power’s status and prove that he was a great star, a great beauty and a great actor.

This section ties together Gupta’s life-long research and ideology to his vision for India. He discusses the concepts of space and non-space and posits the nation state as a cultural space. Gupta underlines the distinction between secularism and secularization and argues that in India, secularization is still at a very unfinished state. While we have a democratic system, citizenship and modernity have not progressed. The deification of politicians in Tamil Nadu is discussed. When politicians start patronizing religious functions and use religious symbols in public acts, secularization is compromised to indulge in the politics of majoritarinism and minoritism. India is progressive in intent but it is compromising in deed. The goals of citizenship move ahead, once a victory is achieved, new obstacles appear.