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To unravel the extent to which Shakespeare is accorded cultural capital in India, two examples from popular culture will be examined - one from an Air India advertisement and another from a Hollywood film in the making that casts ? Bollywood ? star Hrithik Roshan as an Indian king in Rajasthan, looking to avenge the murder of his father. The Air India advertisement, found in a 1975 American magazine, features Shakespeare with a beautiful Indian woman clad in a sari. Focused from shoulders up, the black and white image reproduces a typical studio shot of a married couple. The top of the ad reads, "We go out of our way to please you. We also go to London every day." This is followed by the contact reference to Air India. Presented in the image of a couple, the ad naturalizes the union of the colonized Indian woman and Shakespeare (the most authoritative representative of the culture of the colonizer) and thrusts them into the global realm of tourism, art, and commerce to symbolize the union of East and West, with Shakespeare representing the means of transcending the distance between India and England. To make it more enticing, the slogan that follows the main caption of the ad is also somewhat sexualized: "We (Air India) work all day to make your night with us a dream." The advertisement creates a spectacle that reproduces Shakespeare in the image of the authoritative imperial traveler to the exotic and mysterious land, India, represented through the image of the exotic Indian woman. In so doing, the advertisement at once obscures the gendered, racial, and colonial dynamics that complicate such an image and legitimizes the discourse around Shakespeare as a harbinger of cultural authority . My second example is a Hollywood film in the making that plans to cast Indian Bollywood star Hrithik Roshan in the role of a Rajput prince who avenges his father's murder in a "chilling thriller." To generate publicity for the film, the filmmakers proposed to market Roshan as an "Indian Hamlet." While the producer believes that Hrithik is the ideal candidate for the role and places him "somewhere between Tom Cruise and Antonio Banderas ," he recognizes that Hrithik is a new name in Hollywood. Therefore, he says, "we will have to sell him through the two known names--Hamlet and Shakespeare". In doing so, the Hollywood producer assumes the far-reaching influence of and appreciation for Shakespeare. At the same time, as a film that will be shot in India with some scenes in England, it conjures up the image of exoticism that continues to seize the West's imagination. Such images not only keep alive Shakespeare?s insidious influence in India, they further perpetuate the discourse about the bard's cultural superiority, which continues through government-sponsored agencies, the continuing presence of Shakespeare studies in education, and through theatre groups and touring companies performing locally and visiting from abroad.