Prateek Tanmay
4 min readHyderabadJun 22, 2026 06:03 PM IST
With Maa Inti Bangaaram doing strong business at the box office, Samantha Ruth Prabhu and director Nandini Reddy are once again being talked about as a pair worth watching. It is, in fact, their third film together, after Oh! Baby in 2019 became one of the most loved Telugu hits of recent years. What gets mentioned far less often is how their partnership actually began, with a film, Jabardasth, that turned into one of Telugu cinema’s stranger cautionary tales, one that released in theatres and then was legally barred from ever reaching audiences again in any other format.
Announced in 2011 as Nandini Reddy’s second feature, coming right after her acclaimed directorial debut Ala Modalaindi, a low budget romantic comedy starring Nani and Nithya Menen. Riding that goodwill, Nandini moved on to Jabardasth under producer Bellamkonda Suresh, casting Siddharth, Samantha Ruth Prabhu and Nithya Menen in the lead roles. The story followed two friends, played by Siddharth and Samantha, who start a wedding planning business together, only for the partnership to get complicated once one of them develops feelings the other does not initially return. Reddy co-wrote the screenplay with Kona Venkat, with music by S Thaman, and the project went through a roughly four month delay in pre-production due to scheduling issues with its lead actors before finally going on floors.
However, the trouble started even before the film released. The premise sat close enough to Band Baaja Baaraat, the 2010 Hindi hit produced by Yash Raj Films and directed by Maneesh Sharma, which starred Ranveer Singh and Anushka Sharma in roles built around a near identical wedding planning business and had launched both actors into stardom. According to reports from the period, Yash Raj Films flagged its concerns with the Jabardasth team well in advance, asking them to drop the project, but the makers pressed ahead regardless. Nandini Reddy publicly denied the resemblance at the time, saying the film had drawn instead from the broader idea of a wedding planner rather than from any one specific film.
Also Read: Maa Inti Bangaaram Box Office collection day 3: Samantha’s film crosses Rs 41 crore
Jabardasth hit theatres in 2013, after the makers had already sold its satellite and audio rights for a combined Rs 5.25 crore, with Aditya Music picking up the soundtrack. The film underperformed at the box office and drew mixed reviews, with several critics noting its similarity with Band Baaja Baaraat outright. The real consequences arrived afterward, when Yash Raj Films took the matter to the Delhi High Court, arguing that as many as nineteen scenes had been lifted almost directly from Band Baaja Baaraat. The court agreed, ruling that Jabardasth amounted to copyright infringement rather than something merely inspired by another work, and ordered that the film could not be released in any format beyond the theatrical run it had already had.
That ruling closed off DVDs, VCDs, Blu-ray discs and television broadcasts entirely, and also stopped a planned Tamil dubbed version, titled Dum Dum Pee Pee, that director Lingusamy had lined up.
The fallout did not end there. The producer had already sold the film’s television rights to a channel before the ruling came through, and once the channel could no longer legally air it, a dispute over that payment dragged on for years, reportedly resulting in an arrest warrant against the producer in 2019 over unpaid dues. Yash Raj Films, for its part, went on to make its own Tamil version of Band Baaja Baaraat a year later, titled Aaha Kalyanam, starring Nani and Vaani Kapoor, which did reasonably well at the box office.
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For Samantha Ruth Prabhu and Nandini Reddy, Jabardasth marked a rocky, legally fraught start rather than the beginning of an easy working relationship, and it would be six years before the two worked together again. That second collaboration, Oh! Baby, in 2019, went on to become a genuine commercial success and one of Samantha’s most fondly remembered films. With Maa Inti Bangaaram now their third outing together and performing well in its own right, the gap between where this pairing started and where it stands today makes for an unlikely footnote in both their careers.
