Humbug litigation against Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Gangubai Kathiawadi, a nasty trend that must stop

The adopted son of the real Gangubai wants a stay order against Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s film. The reason being given: the film shows his mother as a sex worker, and which child would like his mother to be called a sex worker?  I agree. No offspring would want his or her mother to be a sex worker. Tragically a lot of women are sex workers and their children, though not pleased with the situation, are not mortified by the mother’s vocation either.

 The point here is not, to be a sex worker, or not to be.

This last-minute legal recourse is meant to paint film producers into a corner. Pay up some lakhs or face crores of losses if the film gets blocked.

While Sanjay Leela Bhansali refrained from commenting on the issue a source close to him had this to say: “Gangubai’s son objects to his mother is portrayed as a sex worker. But she did spend a large part of her life in Asia’s biggest red light area Kamathipura. What was she doing there?”

Alia Bhatt in and as Gangubai Kathiawadi

 Producer Pahlaj Nihalani who has been at the receiving end of numerous humbug litigations says the law needs to be amended to protect producers from last-minute harassment. “This is a classic example of nuisance litigation. Where was this gentleman all this time while they were completing the film? Why has he come forward when they are just weeks away from release? These kinds of cases are done only to harass filmmakers and bully them into an out-of-court settlement with attractive compensation money, on the eve of their film’s release.”

 In 2017, Nihalani faced huge financial losses when producer N R Pachisia filed an eleventh-hour case against Nihalani’s Julie 2 for copyright infringement. “What we gave him was even less than the lawyer’s fees. But what Pachisia took away was our faith in people from our fraternity. Pachisia knows what producers have to go through when their films are stalled legally or otherwise at the last moment. He still went ahead and filed a bogus case against our film claiming our Julie 2 infringed on the copyrights of the film Julie which Pachisia had produced in 2004. We kept shouting and swearing that our Julie 2 had nothing to do with the film that he had produced. We had to postpone the release thrice. We are now releasing on November 24. But we want action taken against all litigants who try to stop a film’s release at the last minute. This is done only to make quick money or to gain instant publicity.”

Nihalani feels the practice of last-minute litigations against the release of films must stop. “I think it's time such humbug litigation against the release of films is completely stopped. If anyone has a problem with a film, they must come forward with it earlier, not when the film is on release."

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He's been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.