For the Hindi film cineaste, the star often functions as the focal point of his/her filmic experience, dominating almost all realms of the cinematic idiom, from its economic structuring to its textual and narrative conventions. However, despite their significant cultural and cinematic currency, the Hindi film star has rarely been the subject of scholarly research. By focusing on discourses of contemporary Bollywood stardom, and examining them in the context of an increasingly globalizing India and its changing media landscape, my dissertation attempts to address this crucial gap, thus making an intervention not only in the existing scholarship on popular Indian cinema and South Asia, but also, the discipline of star studies. Employing a case studies approach, I examine the star texts of four contemporary Bollywood stars - Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai, and Shilpa Shetty - emphasizing the Bollywood star's role in mediating and articulating crucial issues central to the Indian national imaginary. My detailed discussion of Bachchan, Khan, Rai, and Shetty underline how discourses of Hindi film stardom intersect with questions of national identity, class, gender, diasporic citizenship, and transnational cultural economics. Amitabh Bachchan's transformation from "Angry Young Man" to "Benevolent Patriarch" speaks to the nation's own transition from a socialist ethos to a consumerist ontology; Shah Rukh Khan's star text highlights millennial India's negotiation of both diasporic and minority (Muslim) citizenship; Aishwarya Rai's signification of the "New Indian Woman" underlines discourses of contemporary Indian womanhood; and Shilpa Shetty's triumph in an international reality show and the subsequent remaking of her star image foregrounds both changing dynamics of Hindi film stardom and its emergent global/transnational cultural currency. As I demonstrate, the contemporary Bollywood star is now not only conceived in global/transnational terms, but also, as a transmedia celebrity and brand, effortlessly straddling multiple venues and platforms. While mapping discourses of contemporary Bollywood stardom to the nation, I also emphasize the need to read the Hindi film star beyond the realms of the national construct and the cinematic idiom, bringing into context popular Hindi cinema's global dissemination and consumption, and its increasingly synergistic relationship with other media industries and sites.