Eleven years after the death of smuggler, poacher and kidnapper Veerappan, filmmakers still find it difficult to bring aspects of his colourful life and controversial death to the screen.
Ram Gopal Verma’s Killing Veerappan finally opens on January 1 after a two-month delay caused by various petitions challenging the movie’s version of events. The drama, which has been made in Kannada and Telugu and dubbed in Tamil, revisits Operation Cocoon, the manhunt that eventually led to Veerappan’s death in the jungles of Karnataka.
One of the petitions was filed by one Paneerselvi, a resident of Salem in Tamil Nadu, who claims that the film portrays the state’s politicians in a poor light. Paneerselvi also demanded to know why the Central Board of Film Certification had issued a UA certificate to the movie. The Madras High Court has dismissed this petition.
Earlier in November, Veerappan’s famously litigatious widow, Muthulakshmi, got s stay on a scheduled November 13 release from Bengaluru’s City Civil Court. Muthulakshmi claimed that the movie misrepresented her and invaded her family’s privacy, and that Varma and his producers had violated a contract that promised her that the movie would be made only in Hindi. Muthulakshmi appears to have withdrawn her petition after accepting an out-of-court settlement with Killing Veerappan’s producers.
Muthulakshmi is a formidable legal adversary: in 2013, she won compensation to the tune of Rs 25 lakhs from the producers of the Tamil biopic Vanna Yudham (Battle of the Forest). The producer removed a line from the credits that claimed that Vanna Yudham, which starred Kishore in the bandit’s role, was based on a true story.
Another petition about an alleged breach of contract filed by producer A Raja has also been dismissed by the Karnataka High Court.
Veerappan’s Robin Hood image endures despite his numerous crimes, including ivory poaching, sandalwood smuggling, murders, and kidnapping celebrities for ransom. One of Veerappan’s most famous targets was the Kannada superstar Rajkumar, who was held hostage for 108 days in 2000. Rajkumar’s son, Shivraj Kumar, plays the police officer who masterminds Operation Cocoon in Killing Veerappan, while National School of Drama graduate Sandeep Bharadwaj plays the bandit with the mutton chops moustache.
Varma has previously explored the Veerappan myth in the movie Jungle (2000), in which Sushant Singh’s forest brigand kidnaps Urmila Matondkar’s character. Veerappan also inspired the lead character from Mani Ratnam’s Ravaanan (2010), who is named Veera and played by Vikram.