Lawsuit filed in Delhi High Court.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Siddharth Kara, a researcher at Harvard’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, has filed a lawsuit against Bollywood producer/director Anurag Kashyap over the latter’s film entitled Sold.
The movie, which has been touring festival circuits in both India and abroad over the last year, deals with the controversial topic of sex slavery, and details a girl’s struggle to escape from her captors in Nepal after being kidnapped and sold into the sex trade. Kara alleges that Kashyap, the film’s producer, stole the film’s central idea from him, and has filed for copyright infringement and defamation.
The case against Kashyap was filed last week in the Delhi High Court, with Kara saying that Kashyap specifically copied the film’s story and thematic material from Kara’s book, entitled “Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery.” The lawsuit lists Kashyap and several other people involved with Sold, including co-producers Guneet Monga and Jane Charles, director Jeffrey D. Brown, and star Nandita Das.
Kashyap has fired back, telling The Hindustan Times that Kara is “delusional” and chastising the Harvard scholar for thinking that he is the only person in the world working to spread awareness of sex trafficking.
“I guess Dr. Kara has probably written only one thing in life and he thinks no one else in the world would be working on the subject of human trafficking. He is just desperate to find some connection to all films based on the subject,” Kashyap was quoted as saying.
Currently, Kara is an adjunct lecturer of Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is also a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, and has made a career out of highlighting slavery in the modern world.
He has traveled to more than 25 countries, spread across six continents, since first visiting a Bosnian refugee camp in 1995, while he was a student at Duke University. Kara earned his B.A. from that university, followed by an M.B.A. from Columbia University and a J.D. from England.
Kashyap, who burst into Bollywood’s A-list with the two-part film Gangs of Wasseypur, is currently putting the finishing touches on his next directorial venture, Bombay Velvet, which stars Ranbir Kapoor and Anushka Sharma.