On January 21, hours before Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Rajkummar Rao-starrer The White Tiger was to drop online, producers Sonia Mudbhatkal and John Hart had filed a copyright infringement suit in the Delhi High Court against the film’s producer Mukul Deora, his chartered accountant Sharad Seksaria and Netflix. They claimed they held the adaptation rights to Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel. Now, the producer duo have gone to the Enforcement Directorate, alleging that Deora used a cheque from a now-defunct Swiss bank, BSI, for “suspicious transactions for the project”.

In their email to the ED, Hart and Mudbhatkal lodged a formal request for an investigation into the transactions. They also alleged that Netflix was in the know of Deora’s “various shell companies.” Deora told mid-day there was no wrongdoing.

For the uninitiated, Hart — who has previously produced Revolutionary Road (2008) and Boys Don’t Cry (1999) — had bought the adaptation rights of the award-winning book on March 4, 2009, from Adiga. In July 2010, Mudbhatkal joined him to produce its screen adaptation and brought Deora on board as a passive financier in October 2010. According to Hart and Mudbhatkal suit, Deora and she were to set up Smiling Tree Media Ventures on 50-50 equity deal terms. However, in the years that followed, they claim in their suit that Deora set up a web of companies — from Continuum Media in India to Transatlantic Media and Particle Media in Ireland — to subvert the rights of the original copyright owners.

According to their complaint to the ED, Deora, in 2013, used the now-defunct Swiss bank in around transaction wherein he wired $1.199 million from BSI bank in Hong Kong to his New York law firm Pryor Cashman’s escrow on behalf of Particle Media. In their complaint to the ED, they also referred to the Delhi High Court injunction judgment where Deora’s lawyer Sandeep Sethi is said to have admitted that Particle Media — which on paper belongs to Hong Kong resident Raj Lakhani — is, in fact, linked to Deora. Mudbhatkal also claimed possession of documentary evidence to prove the same, including the BSI bank account cheque used for the transaction from Hong Kong.

In a separate mail drafted to Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar, the producer duo claimed that as per the US copyright registration, the film rights have been registered in the name of Hart’s entity, Smuggler LLC. They also noted that Netflix tried to register the “dramatic work based on the book by Adiga” in October 2019 after Hart and Mudbhatkal had sent the streaming giant a legal notice, objecting to Deora’s representation that he is the sole owner of rights and producer of The White Tiger.

Hart told mid-day, “What matters is the truth: protecting people from having their life’s work stolen away from them, and equally important, holding content financiers and distributors accountable for following IP. Particularly, when the ownership of the IP has been challenged as it was in this case. Without proper due diligence, no artist is safe from their work being stolen and violated”.

Deora told mid-day, “I have full faith in the judiciary of India. On January 21, the Delhi HC rejected the demand by the plaintiffs and refused to stay the release of The White Tiger. I understand that the court observed that it was not possible, based on the material on record before it, to come to any prima facie conclusion that, by producing or releasing the film, the defendants indulge in illegal copyright infringement or transgressed the right of the plaintiff. The matter is currently subjudice.”

The next hearing at the Delhi HC is scheduled on March 22.

It was a Chachi 420 situation, Adarsh Gourav, 26, recalls of the time he’d checked himself into a high-end hotel in Saket in South Delhi. In the morning, he’d step out wearing clothes similar to his character Balram Halwai from The White Tiger. At night, he’d go out shopping/socialising to the mall nearby, as Gourav.

Sensing something fishy, sundry hotel staff would follow him to his room, from a distance. “To fuel the suspense,” Gourav had instructed that no housekeeping staff be allowed in.

The night before he checked out, the hotel staff entered his space and were quite “scared” to see chart papers and pictures of Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Rajkummar Rao, Mahesh Manjrekar lying all over.

They were convinced he was a contract killer: “I was just fooling around with them,” Gourav says, revealing a naturally cheeky personality that merges so seamlessly, as he slips into Balram in Ramin Bahrani’s film as well.

But what was he really up to, during the day, anyway? Working at a ‘redi’ — a roadside tea/pakoda type stall in the neighbourhood. To get a hang of a person from the underclass, engaged in a menial job — in the existing world that he wants to desperately exit from.

It took Gourav a few days to find this pakoda job, because he’d introduce himself as Balram to his potential masters. And they’d want to see his identity card before hiring.

A Good Samaritan did have him on board, which is how he got “Rs 100 a day, to clean utensils by the gutter, with bandicoots running all over. I was just thinking, what am I doing here? I needed to get the hell out,” Gourav laughs.

Which is essentially Balram’s life in his village, before he becomes the driver in the city - both in Aravind Adiga’s Booker-winning angry novel, set in Delhi in the late noughties, and the Iranian-American Bahrani’s realistic adaptation, that dropped globally on Netflix on January 22.

Gourav also spent a couple of weeks in a village called Charkhari Basti in Jharkhand (where Balram is roughly from), befriending a family — living among them anonymously, to simultaneously relive his character’s backstory: “My biggest high of being an actor is the preparation time. That’s where I have real fun. I got three and half months for Balram!”

Gourav is himself from Jamshedpur, the steel township in Jharkhand that, in terms of childhood years, he also shares with Priyanka Chopra, his co-actor and co-producer on The White Tiger. In eighth grade, he moved to Mumbai with his parents, given his father’s transferable job.

One of the reasons for this move, he reveals, was his talent for Hindustani classical music. He’s a trained vocalist. His family felt the city would offer him better opportunities to pursue music as a formal career.

It was during his performance at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in Mumbai that someone from the audience checked if he might be interested in acting. As a teenager, he was “thrilled” at the prospect of being on TV. The gentleman asked him to meet with his portfolio. He came over with passport-sized photos to the casting office, as if applying for an Aadhar card.

“They were, like, what are we going to do with this? And so I went to Studio 19 in Juhu, paid Rs 3,000 to get my portfolio shot.” This helped Gourav land his first role on screen, as the younger version of Shah Rukh Khan, in Karan Johar’s My Name is Khan (2010).

On each day of his three-day shoot, different members of his family would troop in to the set to gawk, awe-struck by how movies are made — “Karan Johar looks taller in real life” — knowing that this was a one-off opportunity for young Gourav.

Only in 2013, did he take up acting seriously as a profession, circling around Mumbai’s audition sub-culture — testing for parts in ads and films, doing roles of varying lengths. After several fallow months in 2019, by the time Gourav was finalised for his dream lead debut, with The White Tiger, his co-star Rajkummar Rao knew of him as a talent of sorts from roles in Mom (2017), Rukh (2017) and SRK Jr.

“His commitment inspired me a lot,” Rao says, delving on how much of the gritty movie is an outcome of both of them jamming, and the director Bahrani, “taking his actors to a point that they start living in the moment.”

The White Tiger opened to rave reviews (especially for Gourav), first in the US, where it had a limited theatrical release, with multiple allusions made to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019) and Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008). This serves as good omen for an Oscar consideration.

“I’d be lying if I told you we hadn’t thought of that [global stage with an Academy nom],” says producer Mukul Deora, who’s had the rights to Adiga’s book for a decade. Adiga’s 2008 book in turn is dedicated to Bahrani himself. They were close friends and room-mates at Columbia University. Between Bahrani, who’s read multiple drafts of the novel, and I — we’ve been with The White Tiger for quarter of a century,” Deora says.

To quote a dialogue from the film, The White Tiger is basically about how “there are only two castes in India - upper and lower. For the poor, only two ways to get to the top - crime and politics.” As true for Slumdog.

Although if and when Tiger > Slumdog, it’s because Gourav > Dev Patel. Infinitely so. Because Gourav is basically Balram, as he realised off-screen in Delhi, when a mini-truck driver, randomly outside the same Saket hotel, asked him to lift construction material from the boot once, for “Rs 20 chai pani!”

Having cracked one half of the syllabus (the backstory), the toughest nut, according to Gourav, was playing the Bangalore version of his character, who becomes rich and successful!

“I literally played it by the book. In the evenings, at the hotel, I would read multiple textbooks on body language - posture, how to sit, appear confident, be alpha in a room.” Guessing Balram from The White Tiger also would’ve gone through the same unlearning.