Drafting Credit: Divya Telang, Research Associate
Image credits: via Nano Banana
Development of Personality Rights in India
The evolution of personality rights in India is based majorly on case precedents and judicial interpretations. For anyone seeking to argue that their name, image, or likeness was being exploited without permission, there was no obvious solution. Indian courts improvised, through passing off actions, copyright in creative works, defamation, and injunctions in equity. These tools offered some relief in some cases. But the fit was imperfect.
1. The Early Judgements
To understand how personality rights developed in India, let’s start with what the Supreme Court said privacy was not. In 1954, an eight-judge bench in M.P. Sharma v. Satish Chandra, a case concerning the search and seizure of documents in a fraud investigation spoke about privacy.1 The Court’s reasoning on privacy was categorical: the Constitution’s framers had deliberately chosen not to include a privacy guarantee analogous to the American Fourth Amendment. There was, accordingly, no constitutional basis for such a right, and the Court would not create one through interpretation.
Eight years later, in Kharak Singh v. State of U.P.,2 a man who had been discharged for lack of evidence in a dacoity case challenged his subsequent placement under police surveillance, night visits, movement-tracking, constable reports. A majority of the six-judge bench upheld most of the surveillance measures. Its reasoning was blunt. The right of privacy, it held, was not a guaranteed right under the Indian Constitution. The surveillance measures at issue were, at most, an inconvenience, not an infringement of any protected right.
2. The First Crack: An Unlikely Opening
This was a dispute involving a convicted serial killer and a Tamil magazine. Auto Shankar had been found guilty of murdering six people and was on death row when he wrote his autobiography. He wanted it published by the editor of Nakkheeran, a widely-read Tamil magazine. When the Tamil Nadu government moved to suppress the publication, the editor, R. Rajagopal, went to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court departed from its earlier position to hold that a right to privacy existed within Article 21.3 The Court described it as “the right to be let alone”, consciously echoing the Warren and Brandeis framing from a century earlier.
3. Phoolan Devi Case: Fame Does Not Forfeit Privacy
Phoolan Devi, a dacoit and political figure sought an injunction against the release of Bandit Queen, a film based on her life. The director’s position was that someone who had lived so publicly, whose story was so thoroughly part of the public record, could not claim the ordinary protections of a private person. The Delhi High Court declined to accept that argument. It held that privacy’s protection of the personal sphere, one’s intimate experiences did not evaporate simply because the person was famous. A public figure retains a private person’s rights over what the Court called “the personal intimacies of the home, family, marriage, motherhood, procreation, and child rearing”.4
What the judgment also explained was that unauthorised depiction of a person’s identity carried a dimension that ordinary privacy law was not designed to address: a commercial dimension. The film stood to profit from Phoolan Devi’s story. That profit motive, made the harm not just emotional.
4. Institutions cannot have Personality Rights
The International Cricket Council (“ICC”) sought to use its commercial relationship with the Cricket World Cup as the basis for publicity rights claims extending the protection, in effect, to the organisation and the event itself, rather than to the individual players.
But the right of publicity, the court said, “has evolved from the right of privacy and can inhere only in an individual or in any indicia of an individual’s personality like his name, personality trait, signature, voice, etc”. So, allowing a corporation to claim those rights will sever the right from the individual it was designed to protect and would violate Articles 19 and 21 of the Constitution. It concluded simply: “No persona can be monopolized”.5
Recently, the Delhi High Court reiterated this point in Aditya Birla Sun Life AMC Ltd. v. John Doe & Ors.6 The company wanted the misuse of its CEO’s photograph in a fraudulent WhatsApp investment scheme treated as a personality rights violation. The Court disagreed and saw the wrong more as a criminal impersonation as the photograph was not being used to commercially exploit the executive’s identity or likeness for endorsement, but to impersonate him in order to defraud investors. The Court observed that this is a different wrong, with different remedies. Thus, personality rights are not a catch-all for every misuse of a person’s image.
5. Further Interpretations by High Courts
Between 2003 and 2015, a series of High Court judgments added meaning to the doctrine. The important ones are mentioned below:
Titan Industries Ltd. v. Ramkumar Jewellers:7 A jeweller reproduced an advertisement featuring Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bachchan for Titan’s Tanishq brand on his own hoardings, without any authorisation. The Court granted relief, and in doing so laid out the standard two-part test for a publicity rights claim: first, that the plaintiff holds a genuine, enforceable right in the relevant aspect of their identity (validity); and second, that they are actually recognisable in the impugned material (identifiability). Without both, no claim could succeed.
Shivaji Rao Gaikwad v. Varsha Productions:8 A film titled Main Hoon Rajinikanth was challenged by the actor whose name it appropriated. The Madras High Court granted interim relief, articulating a principle that where a name is so exclusively identified with a single person that it can refer to no one else, using it without permission constitutes an infringement of that person’s publicity rights. No proof of consumer confusion, as in passing off, was required. Identifiability alone was sufficient.
By the mid-2010s, the outline of Indian personality rights law was reasonably clear. It applied to individuals, it required identifiability, it distinguished public roles from private lives.
6. The Ground Shifts
In K.S. Puttaswamy, the Court established the right to privacy as a fundamental right, protected as an inherent part of Articles 14, 19, and 21 of the Constitution.
For personality rights, the most important contribution came from Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul’s concurring opinion. Drawing on the American Haelan line of cases (See, Part I) and academic scholarship on the right of publicity, Justice Kaul wrote that every individual ought to be able to exercise control over how their identity and image are presented to the world, and that this control extended specifically to commercial use. Others should not be permitted to exploit a person’s name, image, or other attributes of personal identity for commercial purposes without that person’s consent.
Critically, Justice Kaul did not limit this right to the famous. It belonged, he held, to all persons. He also engaged directly with the tension between privacy and truth. The fact that information about a person is accurate does not automatically make its publication permissible. The public interest in knowing something, must be weighed against the individual’s interest in not having it known. However, Justice Kaul’s opinion was concurring and has a persuasive authority only.
7. The AI Wave: Same Rights, New Problems
From around 2022, a new category of cases began appearing in Indian courts at a pace that the existing doctrine was not designed to handle. Artificial Intelligence which is capable of producing deepfake videos and audio that replicates a real person’s face, voice, and manner with enough fidelity to deceive a casual viewer is just getting better and better. Celebrities found their likenesses appearing in fraudulent advertisements for lottery schemes, investment scams, and health products they had never endorsed. Voice clones were used to generate music. The courts responded with the tools they had.
In Amitabh Bachchan v. Rajat Nagi & Ors.,9 the Delhi High Court issued broad injunctive relief covering the actor’s name, image, voice, and AI-generated likeness across all platforms and formats. The order was structured as a John Doe/Ashok Kumar injunction, binding not just named defendants but any party, identified or anonymous, engaging in the same conduct.
The Anil Kapoor case,10 decided in 2023, went a step further. The Court’s injunction covered not only Kapoor’s physical appearance and voice but his catchphrase “Jhakaas” and his distinctive mannerisms that exist as elements of public performance rather than private identity, which AI could replicate to create false impressions of endorsement.
Similar relief was subsequently granted in cases brought by Akshay Kumar, Jackie Shroff, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Preeti Zinta, Ravi Kishan and many others.11
8. A Right Without a Statute: Where Things Stand
India’s personality rights doctrine rests on four overlapping supports:
- The constitutional Right to Privacy under Article 21,
- Passing off under Trade Marks Act, 1999, which addresses false endorsement,
- Performers and creators’ rights under the Copyright Act, 1957,
- Takedown requests under Information Technology Rules, 2021, and prevention of identity misuse and morphing under Information Technology Act, 2000, and
- The remedies under Tort law or Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita, 2023 for defamation or fraud.
Courts have used all, sometimes in combination, sometimes interchangeably.
The absence of a dedicated statute also creates problems. There is no statutory definition of what personality rights protect, so courts have defined them ad hoc. The courts have incorporated publicity rights within personality rights having no demarcation between them. They have grounded both the personal and commercial dimensions of identity protection in the constitutional right to life and personal liberty. There is no separate “right of publicity” the way several US states have. It all lives under the privacy umbrella. The position of ordinary, non-celebrity individuals who have in principle the same rights that Justice Kaul described in Puttaswamy, have to bear litigation costs, lack a strong commercial dimension, and have to navigate a complex legal framework, burdens that celebrities are better equipped to manage.
Part III of this series delves deeper into how AI violates rights of ordinary people, the approach of other countries like the U.S. and Denmark, and gives suggestions that can be adopted in the Indian Framework.
- M.P. Sharma v. Satish Chandra, AIR 1954 SC 300. ↩︎
- AIR 1963 SC 1295. ↩︎
- R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu, (1994) 6 SCC 632. ↩︎
- Phoolan Devi v. Shekhar Kapoor, (1995) 57 DLT 154. ↩︎
- ICC Development (International) Ltd. v. Arvee Enterprises, (2003) 26 PTC 245. ↩︎
- Aditya Birla Sun Life AMC Ltd. v. John Doe & Ors., CS (COMM) – 716/2026. ↩︎
- Titan Industries Ltd. v. Ramkumar Jewellers, (2012) 50 PTC 486. ↩︎
- Shivaji Rao Gaikwad v. Varsha Productions, (2015) 62 PTC 351. ↩︎
- 2022 SCCOnline Del 4110. ↩︎
- Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India & Ors., 2023 SCC OnLine Del 6914. ↩︎
- Akshay Hari Om Bhatia v. John Doe and Ors, 2025 SCC OnLine Bom 4044; Jaikishan Kakubhai Saraf v. Peppy Store, 2024 SCCOnline Del 3664; Aishwarya Rai Bachchan v. Aishwaryaworld.com, 2025 SCC OnLine Del 5943; Maryam Farooqui, From Dhawan to Shamani, AI sparks a surge in celebrity personality rights battles, Money Control (July 15, 2026), https://www.moneycontrol.com/artificial-intelligence/from-dhawan-to-shamani-ai-sparks-a-surge-in-celebrity-personality-rights-battles-article-13974481.html. Also see, Samarth Krishnan Luthra and Vasundhara Bakhru, Publicity Rights and the Right to Privacy in India, Vol. 31 (1) NLSI Rev. 125-148, (2019) https://repository.nls.ac.in/nlsir/vol31/iss1/6?utm_source=repository.nls.ac.in%2Fnlsir%2Fvol31%2Fiss1%2F6&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages. ↩︎
