Chennai: The Vanniyar Sangam president, Pu. Tha. Arulmozhi sent a legal notice to the producers and director of the recently released movie ‘Jai Bhim’ along with Amazon, which operates the OTT platform Prime Video, for allegedly depicting the Vanniyar community in a ‘wrongful’ manner. The Sangham claims Rs 5 crore in damages and a public apology, in the notice issued to 2D Entertainment, Suriya Sivakumar and his wife Jyothika, director-screenwriter T.J. Gnanavel and Amazon, the streaming platform.
According to the notice issued, the movie is claimed to be centred on a real-life incident, and its storyline draws upon a decision made by the Madras High Court. It holds the names of the people who were involved in the incidents shown in the film, like Rajakannu, Advocate Chandru and the police officer Perumalsamy. However, as per the legal notice, the name of the sub-inspector of police involved in the custodial death of an undertrial was ‘deliberately; changed from Anthonysamy to Gurumurthy, and he’s repeatedly referred to as ‘Guru’.
The notice points out that in one of the movie scenes, the ‘Agni Kundam’ (fire burning from a holy vessel) symbol of the Vanniyar Sangam is shown in a calendar behind the SI, who commits the atrocity. The notice claims that the makers of the movie had ‘deliberately’ got a calendar made for the year 1995 with the symbol of ‘Agni Kundam’. They added that this had been done with the ‘mala fide intention of defaming members of the Vanniyar Sangam and damaging the image and reputation of the entire Vanniyar community’.
According to the Vanniyar Sangam, altering the villain’s name to Gurumurthy, that resembles one of its forefront leaders, and projecting him to be from the community by showing its symbol of ‘Agni Kundam’ inferred that the members of the community are prone to committing wrongs and doing illegal actions.
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‘My client states that by various symbolic representations in your movie, you have wantonly, wilfully and intentionally portrayed the character of the sub-Inspector of police, who is guilty of committing a custodial death in the film and also in the real-life story, belongs to Vanniyar community, whereas the said sub-Inspector does not belong to Vanniyar community. It cannot be considered as a casual, innocent, inadvertent mistake and natural sequence in the movie’, the legal notice reads. It adds that the scene was included only ‘with a view to malign the image of the Vanniyar community people in the society and with a view to defame the entire community as a whole’, the notice read.
Apart from demanding Rs 5 crore in damages, the Vanniyar Sangam had also demanded for the removal of the ‘defamatory scenes’, references to the Vanniyar community and its symbol, the ‘Agni Kundam’, from the movie. It has further sought an unconditional apology from the movie’s producers and writer for tarnishing the reputation of Vanniyars.
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Previously, PMK leader and Rajya Sabha MP Anbumani Ramadoss had written to Suriya citing the objectionable portions in the movie, accusing that they deliberately targeted the Vanniyar community. Responding to the charge, Suriya informed that the ‘Jai Bhim’ unit had put out a disclaimer right at the beginning of the movie, notifying that this was a story that had only been inspired by a real incident, and that the characters, names and events were completely fictional.
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