One of Britain's most hallowed schools of learning - the University of Edinburgh that boasts of having over 18 Nobel laureates, is planning to confer an honorary doctorate on the badshah of Bollywood Shahrukh Khan.

Khan who has appeared in more than 80 Bollywood films and has more than 15 million Twitter followers will deliver a lecture at the University on October 15.

The move comes just over a year after the University conferred an honorary degree of the doctor of science to the former president of India and Dr A P J Abdul Kalam.

The University - the sixth-oldest university in the English speaking world has made India a priority country and designated October 2 as the India day making it the first country which is celebrated in the campus.

University of Edinburgh also recently formed the India Centre.

Professor Sir Timothy O Shea, principal and vice chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, which boasts of alumni like Charles Darwin, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, philosopher David Hume, physicist James Clerk Maxwell and inventor Graham Bell

said "The historical ties between India and Scotland are very old and so is the link between Indian scholars and Edinburgh University. One of our oldest alumnus is Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray, known as the father of Indian chemistry and founder of Bengal Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals in 1893. By having a special India day, we showed how important the country is for us".

Edinburgh University receives approximately 47,000 applications every year, making it the third most popular university in the UK by volume of applicants.

The University has been linked with India for nearly 250 years. Professor William Robertson, Edinburgh's Principal from 1762 to 1793 and a noted enlightenment thinker, wrote one of the earliest European texts to focus on India - An Historical Disquisition concerning the Knowledge which the ancients had of India.

Edinburgh's first Indian student graduated in 1876 and by the 1920s its Indian student population was greater than that of any other UK University.