Satyamev Jayate: Return of the Star as a Sacrificial Figure

This paper attempts to make sense of Satyamev Jayate, a popular Indian television show hosted by film star Aamir Khan, in terms of its politics, Khan's stardom and the attempt to reframe the social on television. Grappling with the broad contours of the cultural economy of justice on national television in India, I suggest that the star descends upon television as an avatar promising empathy to a variety of victims of social injustice. In so doing, Khan converts crime news into emotional truths. The show has not only generated public debate, it also invites the public to return to a performative innocence. As television becomes the site of articulating moral authority, ritual participation and demanding social change, the political is re-assembled through Khan's stardom. The paper also enquires how and why the show compels narrative ingenuity towards what Aditya Nigam calls the ‘implosion of the political’—the erasure of the public from the street and its re-inscription in the studio. Equally notable here is the role film-stardom plays in rendering moral authority through the trope of the sacrificial.