Abstract
Popular Hindi cinema is a cinema of excess, one of corporeal and affective excess. The star body in the contemporary Bombay film industry is a spectacle, an “attraction” or akarshan,1 which is yet another competing element, along with song picturizations, item numbers, stunts, dialogue, and special effects. The hypermasculinity of Hrithik Roshan—a popular and highly visible male star in the Bombay film industry, who has not been the subject of much academic study—embodies the industry’s continuing preoccupation with the gratuitous display of the muscular male body, which arguably began with the wrestling films of Dara Singh in the early 1960s2 and has continued through the decades by the musclemen of Bombay cinema such as Sanjay Dutt, Sunny Deol, Akshay Kumar, and Salman Khan.
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