The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has provisionally attached properties of film director S Shankar in a case related to allegations of plagiarism in his film Enthiran. According to a brief statement released by the ED on February 20, three immovable properties with a total value of Rs.10.11 crore registered to Shankar’s name, have been provisionally attached under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).
The ED took cognisance of a civil suit filed in the Madras High Court (HC) against Shankar, Sun Pictures Private Limited chairman Kalanithi Maran, and Sun Pictures itself. Ararur Tamilnadan, an author, initiated the copyright suit claiming that the plot of the hugely successful Rajinikanth-starrer Enthiran (2010) had been copied from a story he had published in 1996, titled Jugiba. At the time, Tamilnadan had sought damages of Rs 1 crore. The author claimed that his storyline – A scientist creates a robot who then falls in love with the scientist’s partner and eventually dismantles itself after finding out that it cannot live with its love interest – is the same as the premise of Shankar’s Enthiran.
The Madras HC in 2023 had ruled in favour of Shankar and dismissed the civil suit due to a lack of independent witnesses to support Tamilnadan’s case. Although alleged letters posted to Ararur by readers of Jugiba were submitted in court as evidence, the court noted that the letters were all posed by the same courier service and that they had successive serial numbers on them, making it appear “unnatural to the court”.