An actor accused of murder tries to stop a film he says is built out of his own trial, and the film releases anyway. A different actor, tied to a decades-old poaching case, tries to stop a teaser he says trades on his identity, and the teaser comes down within a day. Set those two outcomes side by side and the natural conclusion is that two High Courts, faced with the same kind of dispute, have landed in opposite places, one favouring the filmmaker, one favouring the actor. That reading is tempting. It is also misleading, because the two courts were not asked to settle the same question, and reading their orders as opposite answers to one question asks more of both judgments than either can carry.
What Darshan Asked For
Darshan is an accused in the Renukaswamy murder case, on trial before the Bengaluru sessions court, with hearings running day to day. When the producers of a Kannada film called BOSS released a teaser opening with the words "inspired by true events," Darshan and his wife sued for a permanent injunction against the film, cancellation of its CBFC certificate, and takedown directions against platforms and media houses carrying its promotional material. Alongside the suit, they sought an ad interim injunction under Order XXXIX Rules 1 and 2 CPC. The trial court granted that injunction in March 2026, before the producers had been heard, then reconsidered once they appeared and dismissed the application in June, vacating the order. Darshan appealed that dismissal under Order XLIII Rule 1(r). On 17 July 2026, Justice Pradeep Singh Yerur dismissed the appeal, and the film released on 6 August 2026.
What the Order Says, and What It Doesn't Quite Say
What was decided is narrower than the outcome suggests. This was an appeal against an interlocutory order, reviewed on the standard from Wander Ltd. v. Antox India, which asks whether the trial court's exercise of discretion was perverse or arbitrary, not whether the appellate court would have reached the same result independently. The order closes by recording that observations are restricted to the application under Order XXXIX and that no opinion is expressed on the merits of the suit, which remains pending. At the same time, the reasoning that precedes that closing works through Article 19(1)(a), the public domain principle from R. Rajagopal, the CBFC certificate, the film's disclaimer, and the pending prosecution, and arrives at conclusions on privacy and fair trial risk along the way. On privacy, it holds the film is not "absolutely" what Darshan is implicated in, and that because the underlying facts were already extensively reported, using them does not infringe his privacy. On fair trial, it holds that judges are not swayed by cinematic depiction when deciding cases on evidence and precedent.
None of this means the court overstepped what an interlocutory appeal allows. Assessing perversity requires examining the reasoning behind the order under challenge, and a court can legitimately weigh whether the trial judge balanced the competing interests correctly without finally deciding the suit. What is fair to say is that the reasoning contains substantive observations relevant to questions the suit will eventually have to decide, even though it stops short of deciding them. A reader who stops before the closing paragraph could mistake those observations for a broader determination on the merits. They are not that, and the distance between the two deserves noting.
What the Defendants Were Actually Arguing
The defendants' position deserves more weight than the outcome implies. Their case was that the protagonist is a fictional cricketer, that the film uses no name, family detail, or profession belonging to Darshan, that the character count and plot differ materially from the charge sheet, that a disclaimer was displayed, and that the underlying events had already been public for two years. The court, weighing the overall factual overlap it was shown against these differences, described it as consisting of minor similarities rather than wholesale reproduction of Darshan's case. That makes the harder question not whether the court let an obviously derivative film through, but how much overlap between a declared work of fiction and a pending prosecution should be enough to raise a live fair trial concern.
The Question the Order Leaves Sitting There
Within that reasoning sits an argument the order does not expressly take up. Darshan's counsel raised two distinct forms of prejudice: that the film could influence the judge hearing the case, and separately that it could influence prosecution witnesses who have not yet testified, by presenting Darshan as guilty before they give evidence. The court's answer on fair trial addresses the first concern, consistent with the line of authority beginning with Sahara India v. SEBI, which treats judges as professionally equipped to disregard extraneous material. The order does not, on its face, separately address the witness contention. That is not the same as saying the argument was rejected or rebutted. The point simply was not expressly taken up in the reasoning as it stands.
What the Delhi Court Was Actually Weighing
Kala Hiran arises from a different track entirely. Salman Khan's suit, filed in December 2025, seeks broad protection of his personality rights against unauthorised commercial use of his name, voice, image, and other attributes, and secured a wide injunction that month covering exploitation of his persona generally, independent of any single film. When a teaser for "Kala Hiran: The Battle for Legacy" released on 17 July 2026, Khan applied to restrain its dissemination within that existing suit. The formal order, reported at 2026 SCC OnLine Del 5801 and decided on 30 July 2026, records the court's finding that the teaser, despite using a fictional name, carried unmistakable references to Khan through the titles of his own earlier films and through references to the blackbuck case, and that this amounted, prima facie, to commercial exploitation of his persona without consent. The court granted an interim injunction with takedown directions. The order itself lists several pending interlocutory applications and directs the interim arrangement to continue until the next hearing in September. It is, on its own terms, a further step inside an existing personality rights framework, not a fresh weighing of fair trial risk against cinematic freedom.
This matters because the interest the order protects differs from the one BOSS engages. Its operative finding concerns commercial exploitation of identity and reputational harm, not prejudice to a pending criminal process. Reported submissions before the Delhi High Court note that Khan has been acquitted in some of the connected blackbuck proceedings and has a suspended sentence in another, a posture some distance from an undertrial facing daily hearings in a live murder trial. Whatever remains contested in the criminal appeals is a separate track from the personality rights suit, and the July teaser application is a narrower step still.
Where This Leaves Things
Four distinct interests tend to get folded into conversations like this: commercial appropriation of identity, fictionalisation of publicly known events, depiction close enough to be understood as a specific real person despite formal disclaimers, and prejudice to a proceeding that remains open, including witnesses yet to testify. This is a way of separating what each order was actually protecting, not a taxonomy Indian law has settled on, and a single film could well raise more than one of these interests at once. On that separation, Kala Hiran's finding sits mainly with commercial appropriation. BOSS sits mainly with identifiable depiction, and touches the fourth interest without developing it.
The two orders should not be read as contradictory authorities on a shared legal proposition about cinematic depiction of a person's criminal history. What survives the comparison is narrower: BOSS may well be defensible on the interlocutory standard it was decided under, while its reasoning still leaves a question about scripted dramatisation and witness prejudice insufficiently developed. Kala Hiran does not supply the missing answer, because its operative reasoning was never built to adjudicate that particular interest in the first place.
References
- Darshan Srinivas v. Siri Productions, Karnataka High Court, Order dated 17 July 2026.
- Wander Ltd. v. Antox India (P) Ltd., 1990 Supp SCC 727.
- R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu, (1994) 6 SCC 632.
- Sahara India Real Estate Corporation Ltd. v. Securities and Exchange Board of India, (2012) 10 SCC 603.
- Salman Khan v. Ashok Kumar, Delhi High Court, Order dated 30 July 2026, 2026 SCC OnLine Del 5801.
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