NEW DELHI — A few weeks ago I went to see a Hindi movie at my local cinema. It was an unremarkable potboiler, a story of thwarted lovers and triumphant love, punctuated with song-and-dance sequences, percussive fisticuffs and the rhythmic hips of a voluptuous heroine.

I struggled to stay in my seat as the plot wound its long way to a laborious resolution. Most reviews I’ve read gave the film, “Ek Paheli Leela,” zero to two stars out of five, and I can see why. But it has sparked all kinds of conversations, jokes and a small skirmish involving at least two prominent politicians on Twitter. That’s because it stars Sunny Leone, a.k.a. Karenjit Kaur Vohra, the Indian heroine and reality-show personality who is also a star of American porn of some repute.

Ms. Leone topped Google India’s list of most-searched personalities in 2014, outstripping, as it were, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the film star Salman Khan. It’s safe to presume that this ranking was enhanced by searches for adult content. But Ms. Leone, who describes herself as a “tech nerd,” also seems well in control of her metadata and her meta-narrative. While in interviews with Indian journalists the porn star expresses the demure hope that audiences will come to forget “those two words” that define her past, she has also astutely managed her back-catalog as an adult-video actor-director, with a proprietary website and a film-production company partnered with the American porn powerhouse Vivid Entertainment.

My own Internet research led me to a video, in Hindi, of another Bollywood starlet, Rakhi Sawant, sniping that India was performing a “social service” by paying Ms. Leone to wear clothes. Maybe she’s envious, because earlier this year even a culturally conservative Hindu friend of mine was insisting that her son’s wedding ceremony would include a joint family re-enactment of the famously sexy Sunny Leone song-and-dance sequence “Baby Doll,” from the 2014 film “Ragini MMS 2” — in which the actress plays a porn star called Sunny Leone who gets her first role in a mainstream Hindi film. I’ve also seen “Baby Doll” performed with some gusto at the anniversary party of a feminist human-rights organization in New Delhi.