In the first part of this three-part post, Aakanksha discussed the standard, overbroad prayers in almost every personality rights suit, and the August 2026 orders that have begun to dismantle them. In this second part, she examines the reasons for the concentration of these suits in the DHC and engages with the Court’s three questions in Aaradhya Bachchan. Dr. Aakanksha Kumar (She/Her) is an independent researcher and academic. Since 2019, she has designed and taught a self-created elective course across law schools titled Comparative Celebrity Laws: Personality, Publicity and Free Speech – currently being administered at NLSIU, Bengaluru.
[Part II] The Road Not Taken (Down): Delhi HC Starts Sorting the Personality Rights “Salad Platter”
By Dr. Aakanksha Kumar
“Amoebic Proportions”: The Problem with Personality Rights Litigation “Boom” in India
Reportedly, while hearing the Aradhya Bachchan matter, Justice Bhambhani remarked from the bench that the concept of personality rights was acquiring amoebic proportions. Stacey Dogan’s decade-old account of bullying and opportunism in Trademark and Right of Publicity cases in the US is particularly useful when adapted cautiously to the Indian right of publicity context. The Indian problem is not simply that rights-holders may overclaim. It is that the legal architecture itself has, in the recent past, obscured the boundary between a legitimate publicity claim and neighbouring interests.
Admittedly, ALL individuals have a direct economic interest, sometimes complemented by dignity or moral concerns, in exploiting identity as far as possible, however, the rhetoric of the right gives them a sense of entitlement to the value of their fame. The same uncertainty that leaves creators unable to gauge their risk gives claimants a real prospect of success. The result, I argue, has become a system in which the (more often than, not, celebrity) plaintiffs can plead broadly, courts respond flexibly in their favour, and the defendants have to confront the consequences of an injunction without the underlying claims having been properly identified, segregated and proved.
If we are to accept the overbroad enunciation that the operative legal category is “personality rights”, rather than a clearly delimited publicity tort within the larger personality rights umbrella, the claimant has several possible doctrinal routes available at once. An unauthorised use of identity may therefore, be characterised as publicity misappropriation, passing off misrepresentation, trademark infringement, copyright infringement, privacy invasion/ intrusion/disclosure, reputational harm, dilution, or some combination of these. This is problematic because the legal consequences are not interchangeable: each doctrine protects a different interest, has different constitutive elements, and implicates different defences and remedies.
Yet Indian litigation has frequently proceeded by placing these claims together under the broad vocabulary of “personality/publicity rights”. The concept is not amoebic by nature. It has been made amoebic by pleading that asks for everything and orders that decline to say what was granted and why. There is also an unmistakable pattern that can now be seen, especially with these filings before the DHC. Over the past three years especially [matters regularly discussed on the blog here], these suits have arrived in maximum cases, in Delhi. The suit is often valued just past the threshold that opens the High Court’s original side, framed to attract the commercial and IP machinery rather than the ordinary civil route; and on offer is urgency as a route past pre-institution mediation and same-week listing. Eventually, what a (more often than not, a celebrity) plaintiff walks away with is usually a favourable dynamic injunction, reaching URLs never placed before the court and identified afterwards by the plaintiff itself.
As is common with IP matters, there’s no trial; mediations are referred and pending, written statements awaited, interim applications within these suits re-notified and re-notified again, and in fact, in the Vivek Oberoi matter counsel was discharged for want of instructions [Refer paras 4 and 5] and, even after an amicus was appointed, nobody has appeared for the plaintiff at all [Order of August 17, 2026]- the original order, of course, stands. Arguably then, an injunction like such, that is not tested, works like a valued possession, and a body of law assembled entirely from possessions of that kind is not settled, it is merely unopposed.
Even in the Khushi Kapoor order, in reaching its conclusions, the Court made a sweeping observation [at para 44] that where personality rights are shown to exist, it is settled law that the holder can obtain an injunction against unauthorised use or exploitation. Such use of a famous person’s attributes, the Court added, causes commercial harm and also affects the right to privacy or personality and to live with dignity. Further, on a stock photography platform hosting the Plaintiff’s images as licensable digital assets, the Court found unauthorised commercial exploitation of her likeness and personality attributes, alongside a violation of copyright of the plaintiff. These matters thus seem to be employing a strategy of “throwing everything at the wall, seeing what sticks” as practice, which wasn’t being called in as overreach.
Some judges are beginning to do otherwise. Prayers in Raghav Chadha were restricted to defamation alone [Justice Prasad’s order of 1 July 2026], and Justice Bhambhani has appointed amici in two matters now – Advocate Rohan Alva in Vivek Oberoi [discussed here] and Advocate Gautam Bhatia in Janhvi Kapoor. In proceedings that are otherwise wholly one-sided, both appointments shall hopefully bring inputs to assist the court in carefully treading the road less travelled.
Some thoughts on the three questions in Aradhya Bachchan
As mentioned in Part I, the High Court posed three questions in the Aradhya Bachchan case. The first question concerns a famous last name, engaging attributed fame and celebrification (Chris Rojek). In trademark terms, this maps onto secondary meaning and acquired distinctiveness, as standalone surnames are not eligible to be trademarks for being descriptive; however, cultural meaning-making (David Tan) and celebrity semiotics (Grame Turner) can additionally denote that the surname has entered the cultural vocabulary, denoting not just Amitabh Bachchan but an archetype. “Bachchan” has shifted from proper noun to cultural adjective and cinematic shorthand.
For example, when Alia Bhatt’s character in Jigra (Dir. Vasan Bala, 2024) says “Ab toh Bachchan hi banna hai” (Transl. “Now I’ll have to become Bachchan – there’s no one else to become”), she is invoking neither the legendary actor nor the literary legacy of Harivansh Rai “Bachchan”, but a monomythic archetype: the lone individual taking on a corrupt, impenetrable system. It also decouples the archetype from the hyper-masculinity it was built on, transplanting it onto a young woman rescuing her brother from a foreign carceral system. The official English subtitles on Netflix’s YouTube channel for this scene cement this further, as the line is rendered “No, its time to play the hero.” (see below for the screenshot). That is genericisation in action without any “source identification” function.
Reference may also be made to the observations in the Sexy Barbie girl case, [Mattel v Aman Bijal], which cited the Aqua and Walking Mountain US Circuit court decisions to discuss Barbie as a cultural symbol and the way semiotics evolve, including the court’s note that Barbie is itself a diminutive of a common Western given name and that the use of the name in a song had to be viewed in that light.
Arguably, the secondary meaning in “Bachchan” is thus too vast to be contained if we are discussing linguistic, artistic, and cultural frameworks. The consuming public has participated in meaning-making for “Bachchan” – the archetype, the trope, and the adjective. However, in the right of publicity context, the legal monopoly Amitabh Bachchan enjoys remains intact pursuant to the November 2022 order. Therefore, an ideal situation would be one that allows the public to consume and subvert the myth of Bachchan in artistic expression, transformative free speech events, as well as non-source-identifier fan uses, while only protecting the unauthorised commercial misappropriation of the identity of the commodified interest of the individuals in the Bachchan celebrity family.
On the second question of fake news, the relevant starting point is the obiter in Auto Shankar. The Supreme Court located the right to privacy in tort law alongside its constitutional dimension, and held that the tort limb is violated where a person’s name or likeness is used without consent, for advertising or non-advertising purposes, or where their life story is published without consent, whether laudatory or otherwise. [para 9]
The available causes of action are then the privacy tort, malicious or injurious falsehood [as discussed by the BomHC in Manisha Koirala], defamation, and impersonation and identity theft under the IT Act. A property interest in persona arises only where the same “fake” content additionally commercially misappropriates it – as a right of publicity claim, or as persona passing off [BomHC in Sonu Nigam], or both.
The third question asks if defamation can be conflated with intellectual property claims and get collapsed into the same injunction remedy. The straightforward answer is no; the more thoughtful answer is that “it depends”. Huw Beverley-Smith et al. in their book, Privacy, Property and Personality (paywalled), set out the competing bases for persona protection, especially recognising that commercial exploitation of aspects of personality does not fit easily into the established categories of tort law or property law. There are two approaches – the privacy or human dignity perspectives, and the unfair competition or intellectual property perspectives (commercial interests, framed as misrepresentation versus misappropriation).
To clarify further, non-commercial interests in persona, comprise reputation (defamation tort); privacy (personal privacy tort, covering invasion and distress, and unlawful disclosure); breach of confidence; and other torts such as malicious falsehood, which is akin to the false light publicity tort forming part of the larger dignitary privacy tort in US law. Commercial interests in persona get covered by copyright protections (in some jurisdictions, in face and appearance); performance rights, and copyright (co-)authorship in “portrayals”; statutory trade mark claims; common law passing off of commodified persona, and misappropriation of economic associative value of commodified persona (the tort right of publicity and/or the statutory right of publicity as it exists in several states in the US).
When I insist on the ‘personality rights salad platter’ being a larger umbrella claim for different rights in commodified persona, I include commercial harm that is co-extensive with a reputational harm cause of action, rather than reputational harm simpliciter. Two interests are in play – the commercial proprietary and the dignitary – and dignitary harm alone should not attract a commercial claim. Recent orders from the Madras HC in T Rangaraj and DHC in Raghav Chadha, serve as appropriate restrictive illustrations where causes with commercial misappropriation ABSENT were not entertained as a “personality rights” claim. The oral observations of Justice Jyoti Singh in Acharya Balakrishna, discussed on the blog here [and my thoughts on the new URLs added to the matter in August 2026 as told to MediaNama here], also point to how public figures, especially politicians, attract brickbats, and being displeased, shouldn’t entitle one to a personality rights-style overbroad remedy. Justice Bhambhani, himself in the Janvhi Kapoor order a day prior, observed that he was not inclined to grant blanket orders in the name of personality rights, and that celebrities should not be able to invoke such rights to conceal wrongdoing.
Part II closes here, discussing how dignitary harm alone doesn’t sustain a commercial claim. Part III turns to the converse difficulty, which is harder: uses that are unauthorised commercial ‘takings’ and yet, should not be actionable.
