Aishwarya Rai, India’s triumphant Miss World, was now Bollywood’s reigning queen and global crossover star. Time magazine listed her among the world’s most influential people and noted that Rai gets the

This was the early 2000s, and Bollywood’s global momentum was cresting. With the success of Aamir Khan and SRK via films like Lagaan and Devdas, Bollywood cinema was prominently visible around the world. While the discourse of Bollywood’s global success was generally male-dominated, the ethereal presence of Rai’s culturally transcendent beauty, ergo the possibility of her becoming Bollywood’s first crossover star, dominated the discourse about industry globalization. The beauty pageant network, fuelled by Rai and Sushmita Sen, winners of the Miss World and Miss Universe crowns, respectively, in 1994, followed by Amitabh Bachchan’s attempt to integrate the beauty pageant industry into the globalizing Indian entertainment sector, was now firmly entrenched in the Bollywood network. The beauty pageant industry and Hindi cinema were organic partners for one another, as both were similarly constituted by global flows of capital, industrial and institutional collaborations, and national cultural influence that were deeply ensconced in debates about gender and national and cultural identity.