Bollywood’s fight to make Sobhraj film doomed to fail

KATHMANDU - Bollywood’s fight to make a film on yesteryear’s crime maestro Charles Sobhraj is doomed to fail with his lawyers ready to drag the filmmakers to court if they make a film on him without his permission.

Sobhraj’s lawyers and associates in Paris, who monitor the news worldwide daily for any reference to him, have now taken note of a report that appeared in the Indian daily Mid-Day Thursday.

The report claims upcoming Bollywood director Prawaal Raman plans to go ahead “full-throttle” with his shelved “bio-pic” of Charles Sobhraj, in which action hero Sanjay Dutt and top model Lisa Ray will play the 70s negative hero and his main love interest.

“My biopic is very much Sobhraj’s story but done in a cinematic way,” Raman was quoted as saying in the report. “I even got sued by him for this.”

Sobhraj’s lawyers however say they never sued Raman. All they did was send a letter, pointing out that it was an actionable offence to make a film on a person who was alive without his permission.

The letter also said Sobhraj was willing to negotiate with Raman over the film but would take him to court if he went ahead with his project without Sobhraj’s permission.

The letter was sufficient to make the director backtrack.

Raman subsequently claimed Sobhraj was trying to blackmail him and that his film, then tentatively called “Charles and I”, had nothing to do with Sobhraj, the man pursued by

the police of nearly a dozen countries in the 1970s.

A second Bollywood company that recently announced its plan to make a film on Sobhraj is also due for a rude jolt when or if it sends an emissary to Nepal to meet Sobhraj, who is being held in Kathmandu’s Central Jail for a murder committed more than three decades ago.

Bollywood actor Neil Nitin Mukesh recently claimed Percept Pictures would make a film based on the 65-year-old enigmatic Sobhraj’s past and he would seek to meet him in the prison to learn about his “mannerisms”.

However, Nepal’s prison authorities have said it would be against Nepal’s prison regulations and neither Mukesh nor anyone else planning to make a film on Sobhraj would be allowed to meet him inside the prison.

Sobhraj, who plans to tell the story on celluloid himself after he is released, rues the fact that current Bollywood directors and actors lack the depth and credibility of the men who had in the past planned to make films on him.

The closest Bollywood came to making a film on him was when cinematographer Sohrab Irani contacted Sobhraj, who was then living in Paris after his release from India’s Tihar Jail. The two signed a contract, authorising the film.

Aamir Khan, an actor that the fastidious Sobhraj respected and accepted, was to have played him.

“Aamir was a serious actor and he flew to London so that we could meet,” Sobhraj had told IANS in the past. “He proposed that he and I should spend some time together, about three months, so that he could get into my character’s skin. I proposed a farm.”

Sobhraj says they met three times and he even gave the star and his first wife a lift in his BMW.

However, Aamir had to drop out, to their mutual regret, as a director he had signed an earlier contract with refused to delay his film.

Then another Bollywood actor, Jackie Shroff, stepped into Aamir’s shoes and once again, Sobhraj met the star in London to discuss the role.

However, the project was delayed and this time, finally, Sobhraj himself refused to extend the agreement.

This, his lawyers say, was the only bona fide and legitimate biopic that Bollywood had tried to make on him.