Priya Prakash Varrier-starrer Oru Adaar Love will be released in Tamil, Telugu and Hindi apart from Malayalam on June 15, The News Minute reported. Varrier attracted public attention when a clip from a song in the film, Manikya Malaraya Poovi, went viral on social media. The clip featured Varrier as a school student winking at a classmate during a gathering. The filmmakers want to “cash in on Varrier’s popularity” by releasing the film in several languages, according to the report.
Meanwhile, two men from Hyderabad have filed a petition alleging that Varrier’s wink hurts the sentiments of the Muslim community. “The 30-second clip shows a schoolgirl and schoolboy exchanging smiles, eyebrows wiggles and winks from across the way,” the petition reads. “Winking itself is forbidden in Islam and in a case where the act of winking is superimposed with a sacred song, written in the praise of Prophet Mohammed and his first wife…the same act becomes an act of blasphemy.”
In February, a group of 14 men had filed a similar complaint against the song. Hyderabad-based Islamic seminary Jamia Nizamia had also issued a fatwa, demanding that the government remove the song from the film. In their plea, Varrier and the film’s makers had pointed out that the original song had been part of popular culture in Kerala since the 1970s, without any controversy. At the time, the Supreme Court had stayed all pending first information reports filed against the song and the movie.
Oru Adaar Love director Omar Lulu had earlier told Scroll.in that the song’s title, Manikya Malaraya Poovi, means “a pearl flower that is very precious”. The film features Roshan Abdul Rahoof, Noorin Shereef, Siyadh Shajahan, and Michelle Ann Daniel, apart from Varrier.
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