Personality rights in India were not created by a legislature — they were built, case by case, by the Delhi High Court over roughly two decades. Understanding where the doctrine is headed means understanding how it got here.
The starting point is usually traced to ICC Development (International) Ltd. v. Arvee Enterprises (2003), where the Court first articulated that publicity rights “can inhere only in an individual” — not in an event or organisation — and attach to indicia of identity like name, image and voice. That principle was tested commercially in Titan Industries Ltd. v. Ramkumar Jewellers (2012), where the Bachchans' endorsement of a jewellery brand was misappropriated by a third-party jeweller. The Court granted a permanent injunction, treating the false impression of endorsement as both a passing-off and a personality-rights violation.
The next decade saw the doctrine applied to a widening range of misuse — from fraudulent lottery scams trading on Amitabh Bachchan's name and voice in Amitabh Bachchan v. Rajat Nagi & Ors. (2022), to the AI-specific rulings in the Anil Kapoor and Jackie Shroff matters discussed elsewhere on this site. Each step extended the same underlying idea — that a person's identity has commercial and dignitary value that a third party cannot appropriate without consent — to a new form of technology.
What has not changed is the constitutional foundation underneath all of it: Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), which established privacy as a fundamental right under Article 21. Every personality-rights ruling since draws, directly or indirectly, on that foundation. For a client considering how exposed their name, image or voice actually is, the practical lesson from two decades of case law is consistent: Indian courts have shown a repeated willingness to extend existing doctrine to new misuse, but relief still depends on moving quickly and demonstrating clear commercial or dignitary harm.
