Mr. Khan, 49, one of India’s biggest movie stars, had been driving drunk on a September night in 2002 when he ran over five homeless men sleeping on a footpath along a street in Mumbai and then fled, the prosecution said.
One of the victims died, and the others were injured.
The Mumbai court that delivered the judgment on Wednesday convicted Mr. Khan of culpable homicide, as well as various charges under the Motor Vehicles Act, according to a lawyer for the prosecution.
The Indian news media reported on Wednesday that Mr. Khan had been granted bail for two days, and news services said he would seek a longer bail later this week.
Mr. Khan’s case came to symbolize what some here see as a culture of impunity for celebrities and powerful people, and some hailed the decision as a victory of the common man over the wealthy.
“In my opinion, the truth has prevailed,” said Arvind Inamdar, a former senior police official in Maharashtra State, in an interview with the Indian news channel NDTV.
“Celebrities should not have a different status from the common man,” he said.
The case has drawn attention not just for involving one of India’s most famous actors, but for the delays not uncommon in India’s often clogged courts.
In a televised interview on NDTV, Majeed Memon, a member of Parliament and prominent lawyer, questioned why criminal trials were taking so long. “This would demonstrate that justice delayed is justice denied,” he said.
This is not the first case of a Bollywood actor being convicted of a crime: Sanjay Dutt, of a famous film family, is serving a sentence for possessing arms provided to him by men subsequently convicted in the 1993 Mumbai bombings.
Nor is it the first criminal case for Mr. Khan. He is also facing trial in the shooting of antelopes, known as blackbucks, in 1998 in the desert state of Rajasthan. That case is continuing, and Mr. Khan has maintained his innocence.
Mr. Khan has also defended himself in the hit-and-run case, saying that he was neither drunk nor driving the car, but that his driver was behind the wheel, according to The Press Trust of India.
Mr. Khan’s friends in Bollywood reacted in solidarity with the actor on Twitter on Wednesday, calling him “the nicest human being in this business,” one of the “finest people” in the industry and “a good man.”
But some of those reactions also appeared to blame the victims. Abhijeet Bhattacharya, who sings for lip-syncing actors in Bollywood films, defended Mr. Khan and wrote on Twitter that “if a dog sleeps on the road, he will die a dog’s death.”
“Roads are meant for cars and dogs not for people sleeping on them. @BeingSalmanKhan is not at fault at all...” he wrote.
After criticism online and in the news media, Mr. Bhattacharya apologized for his remarks on social media, writing, “I am extremely apologetic for the words I used in my tweets.” He added that he was “not at all supportive of drunken driving.”
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