Writing about the Kaavya Viswanathan scandal in 2006, I made this admittedly prejudiced observation: ‘I cannot care as much about moderately well-written teen stories as I do about fiction that is genuinely original. Genuine acts of plagiarism force us to see things we would rather not see, like the despair and hubris of a talented mind spiralling into its own darkness. In the brand-new world of publishing as it stands today, even plagiarism has become a simulacrum, a pale imitation of the real thing.’
Four years after the Kaavya Viswanathan case broke, another teenager was accused of plagiarism. Helene Hegemann is the seventeen-year-old author of Axolotl Roadkill, and her book seemed to incorporate scenes, lines and descriptive passages from the works of several other authors—most notably a German artist called Airen. But Hegemann never denied incorporating work from other authors into her novel; her defence is that attribution is unimportant, because she’s remixed the material in a way that makes it her own. She and several commentators in Germany didn’t see this as a case of plagiarism so much as a case of lack of attribution: Hegemann said recently that she should have acknowledged her sources.
Hegemann’s generation, brought up in the mashup culture, will inevitably challenge the sanctity of authorship. If literature can have several versions and multiple authors, just as a Web page is a constantly updating version of itself, then the yardstick will shift to the quality of the mashup, as you evaluate the author as remix artist. Airen, the author of the stolen work, was reported to be less than indignant about the theft and more concerned with attribution—and perhaps that’s where the legal issues will eventually rest.
It’s an intriguing and disturbing shift: a generation used to viewing the written word as so much raw material already has trouble understanding the need for attribution. Hegemann understands this better than most of us in the over-thirty generation: this isn’t about the death of authorship, but about the death of originality.
These stories, Hegemann’s and Viswanathan’s, have happy endings. The next one is not like them at all.
3
Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen
The New York Times’ 1994 review of Crane’s Morning, by Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen, ended with a brief excerpt from the book, a scene between husband and wife who share ‘a life of parallel solitudes, acrimony and utter lack of communication’. The excerpt closes with the suicide of the wife, within hearing of the husband: ‘He was staring miserably down the stairwell when the shot rang out, metallic and ominous.’
In the 1990s, Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen had begun making a name for herself as a writer. Her first book had been published by P. Lal’s Writer’s Workshop, an independent imprint whose main business was the encouragement of unknown writers. But Aikath-Gyaltsen, born into a family of land-owners in Bihar, now ensconced in her second marriage in the often lonely and isolated world of a tea-planter’s wife, had larger ambitions. She enlisted Khushwant Singh as her patron; he introduced her to Penguin India’s David Davidar, and her first book, Daughters of the House, came out to approving reviews. Penguin India signed her up for a ten-book deal; Aikath-Gyaltsen, who often boasted that she could write a book in six months, settled down to work.
Crane’s Morning was received with restrained enthusiasm—it was the kind of second novel that confirms an author’s reputation without breaking new ground. Reviewers admired the style of the book, though some commented that it had an old-fashioned air about it, and with the distinction of a brief review in the NYT, Aikath-Gyaltsen seemed to be ready to take her place in the ranks of India’s rising writers. The 1990s was a decade of great and not-always-wise literary ambition—it may have been the first decade when it had become almost as important to be acknowledged as a writer as it was to write well. Khushwant Singh’s home in Sujan Singh Park, the approach strewn with a sleepy advance guard of striped cats and kittens, was a shrine for the ambitious: a pilgrimage here to seek his blessings and advice was seen as essential by some, and Singh took an avuncular interest in the careers of his protégés, many of them attractive, determined and sometimes pushy women. Aikath-Gyaltsen shared her writing with him bit by bit, chapter by chapter, as she worked.
The NYT review (‘Moonlight in a Net’) came out in February 1994. In March, a woman in Ontario sent a letter to Aikath-Gyaltsen’s publishers. Crane’s Morning, said the woman, was plagiarized from The Rosemary Tree, a 1956 novel by Elizabeth Goudge. The accusation was repeated by a librarian in Concord, New Haven; when they compared the two books, Aikath-Gyaltsen’s publishers had to concede that it was true. From its opening paragraph to its closing sentences, there was no question that Crane’s Morning had been plagiarized.
Aikath-Gyaltsen was not there to respond to the charges. On 3 October 1993, she had written a letter to her mentor, Khushwant Singh. ‘I am still in a very bad frame of mind . . . Afraid to live, afraid to die. But you are right. Only I can help myself.’ According to the Washington Post, she was found unconscious later that day by a niece, lying on the floor, froth coming out of her mouth. She died on 4 October; it was widely suspected, but never proved, that she had tried to poison herself.
*
In my somewhat ramshackle and rambling library of personal books, I have a copy of Crane’s Morning and The Rosemary Tree. When the plagiarism accusations were first levelled against Gyaltsen, few Indians knew of Elizabeth Goudge, and few in the UK or the US remembered her work. Goudge, who died in 1984, was best remembered as the author of the children’s classic The Little White Horse; her novels had enjoyed a brief vogue in the 1940s and 1950s, and I dimly remembered seeing copies of Green Dolphin Country and The White Witch in hill-station libraries. They were the kind of books you’d find in a small Simla or Mussoorie hotel, tucked away behind reminiscences by old India hands and Raj-era cookbooks.
The Delhi Gymkhana Club library, unsurprisingly, yielded a copy of The Rosemary Tree. (The DGC library was a treasure house of forgotten authors, one of the last places in Delhi that stocked copies of Aubrey Menen alongside the Mills & Boons and James Hadley Chase.) It had last been borrowed in 1972, and when I asked the librarian if I could buy it from the library, he looked at its water-stained cover, the dust on the spine, and said I could have it for free.
The Rosemary Tree was set in a Devonshire village; Crane’s Morning was set in the north-east of India. And from the opening sentences, it was clear that the two books were one and the same.
Chapter One, The Rosemary Tree, Goudge: ‘Harriet at her window watched the gulls with delight. It meant bad weather at sea when they came up-river, and she had known when she woke this morning in the waiting stillness, and had seen the misted sky, that the long spell of fine weather was going to break in a gale.’
Chapter One, Crane’s Morning, Aikath-Gyaltsen: ‘Old Vidya sat at her window and watched the cranes with delight. It meant bad weather on this plateau when they came from the east and she had known, when she woke this morning and had seen the misted sky, that the long spell of fine weather was going to break in a rainstorm.’
I had wanted only to compare the two books, to have an assurance that this was, indeed, plagiarism and not accidental resemblance. Sometimes, without writers meaning to steal, there will be a resonance from one book to another; more gravely, sometimes an otherwise original book will echo a line or a paragraph from another work. Those are borderline cases, troubling but not always plagiarism. As I read both books, though, it was appallingly obvious that this was not a case of ‘inspiration’; this was as clear-cut as plagiarism would ever get.
The Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen case is little more than a literary curiosity, her story a tragic but slight footnote in the history of Indian writing in English. She had not written enough before her death at the age of forty-one, nor was Goudge a remarkable enough writer for the plagiarism to carry epic weight. But the experience of reading those two books, side by side, has never left me. Every paragraph in Crane’s Morning echoed, faithfully, its predecessor in The Rosemary Tree. The plot of one book was tra
nsferred with absolute fidelity to the other—Aikath-Gyaltsen omitted, for obvious reasons, a sub-plot involving one character’s musings on the Anglican church, but otherwise there was little difference between one book and the other, in terms of structure, theme, characters, dialogue.
When I met Khushwant Singh for a brief, journalist’s interview in March 1994, I asked him a very naïve question: could he forgive Aikath-Gyaltsen? He said forgiveness was beyond him, that he felt sorry for her, but he didn’t understand why she had done it. For him and for those at Penguin India, the sense of betrayal ran deep—they had been at the receiving end of Aikath-Gyaltsen’s conversations about how her book was progressing, writerly discussions about the development of various characters. They had been made party to her deception, for months.
Aikath-Gyaltsen handwrote her books, and this is the image that stayed with me, of a woman opening another writer’s novel, and transferring it meticulously onto blank sheets of paper. It was, in its way, a perfect transliteration—it is not easy, as those opening paragraphs indicate—to transfer a Devonshire novel into India, and Aikath-Gyaltsen did a thorough job of changing the landscape. It cannot have escaped her, as she went over Goudge’s book paragraph by paragraph, that she was stealing another writer’s work, as she changed gulls to cranes and found plausible reasons to explain why a convict called Vikram might quote Tennyson. Primroses become marigolds, bad marriages stay more or less the same, the mansions of an Indian village called Mohurpukur stand in for the country houses of England. As she wrote, she must have known what she was doing.
In the wake of the ugliness of the plagiarism scandal and her early death, many readers went through Goudge’s remaining works to see if Aikath-Gyaltsen’s first novel, the accomplished and haunting Daughters of the House, had also been plagiarized. If it was, too, stolen goods, it did not become apparent then and hasn’t in the intervening years. It is entirely possible that Daughters of the House was a work of original talent, that Aikath-Gyaltsen, looking outwards to a promising literary career, wrote it herself.
Plagiarism is, in many ways, the most baffling and inexplicable of literary crimes: with the risk of discovery so great and so continuously present, why would anyone be a plagiarist? The usual reasons were proffered in the case of Crane’s Morning: Aikath-Gyaltsen had writer’s block and a deadline hanging over her head, she had the laziness that dogs all writers and she thought she could get away with it, she was desperate for fame and acclaim and didn’t want to have to wait till her own talent came back.
But when I think of the months she spent, in her house in the hills, handwriting page after page of a book not her own, it brings up a deep and terrible sadness. It is hard to condemn Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen, despite the way she betrayed those who had believed in her and trusted her. She must have read the reviews of Goudge’s book, the line in the New York Times review that praised the writer’s ‘richly lyrical style full of humour and insight’. She must have known that the praise was not for her sentences, the sentences she had so carefully transcribed but not written herself.
(Based on columns written in 1994, 1999 and 2006.)
SEVEN
Expression
1
Hold Your Tongue
This is what it came down to, the Voice of Enraged India raised against the unspeakable filth of Westernized India: a small group of about twenty to thirty women, one man appointing himself as one of their leaders, clustered in front of the Delhi Art Gallery in Hauz Khas.
They were members of the Durga Vahini, a Hindutva right-wing group, there to protest an exhibition of paintings, ‘The Naked and the Nude’. I was there to see the exhibition; over the last two years, one of the small compensatory joys of living in the city had seen the DAG exhibitions, on landscapes, printmaking, modernism, shifting lessons in art history. Their shows—on Chittoprosad, on four centuries of prints—had become a visual memory for me, an alternate history of modern India squabbling with itself, fascinated by influences from Europe, intent on recovering and playing with its own traditions, rich in colour and line, endlessly curious.
Some of us—a friend, Mitali Saran, and me among them—thought we should try to strike up a conversation. It seemed rude to be attending the same show, even if with different aims, and not to talk about why they saw obscenity where we saw art.
‘Do you know what paintings they have inside? They are showing paintings of Damini, the rape victim!’ one woman told us. ‘How can you support this?’
‘Damini’ was one of the nicknames the papers had given Jyoti Singh, a physiotherapy student who had died of the terrible injuries inflicted on her after being gangraped, in December 2010. Delhi had been out on the streets protesting for months afterwards, demanding an end to the violence that was claiming the lives of woman after woman.
That was a lie, I said. I had seen the paintings, and there were none of the rape victim. They had been told lies, and I asked where they had heard this from.
‘Are you from the gallery?’ she demanded. No, I said, I was a writer. I was curious about why they wanted to shut the gallery down. If they were assured that there were no paintings of rape victims, could the rest of us be allowed to see the show? Behind me, a woman was whispering to a friend in Hindi. She was saying, I only came out for Damini, because they shouldn’t have done this to her, if her paintings are not there, why are we here?
The women at the back of the crowd looked worried. ‘Talk to them,’ they said, urging us to go the front and speak to some women who appeared to be leading the protests. A policewoman watched us, a senior officer. She assessed the situation and dismissed it, deciding that we were all harmless. The lady who’d said the paintings were of the Delhi rape victim changed her tactics. ‘You’re a woman,’ she said, ‘how can you support dirty pictures, where women are drawn naked, to be stared at by everyone? Would you bring your brother to see this? Your father?’
I ventured to suggest that both of them—one an art enthusiast, one a collector of art who would sometimes buy paintings and books in lieu of the household groceries, upsetting my mother—would love the show. ‘You would come here with your father?’ another woman said incredulously.
My father is one of my best friends, aside from being my parent. He’s been there for me through the small hurts and larger crises of my life, taught me how to play golf without accidentally hitting the peacocks on the Delhi greens, embarrassed me by showing up at my book talks or prize-giving ceremonies and telling my friends stories from my misspent youth. We talk and argue every day over films, books, art, life: he introduced me to the works of Toni Morrison, Czeslaw Milosz, Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, Norman Mailer, Somnath Hore, Picasso, Anjolie Ela Menon, before I turned eighteen. He would love the art on display, I said. There was silence.
I felt it was impolite to continue without introducing myself, but we ran into an unexpected obstacle—the women were uncomfortable about sharing their names. ‘Why do you need to know?’ one woman asked aggressively. Another whispered her name to me, but said, don’t write it, Didi, my family won’t like it. Do they know you’re here? I asked. Yes, yes, she said. I have permission to go out for all Durga Vahini work and mandir work. Yes, I said, it is a lovely day to be out. We exchanged conspiratorial smiles, and then a friend of hers grabbed her and took her away: why are you talking to that woman, don’t you know she’s on their side?
The arguments continued. They were easily summarized.
1. The naked figure was not part of Hindu tradition and our great heritage prevented us from dishonouring women this way.
The human body is neither obscene nor ugly, we suggested. Besides, we have a long history of nudity in art, from Gandharva and Chola statues to the Rani ki Vav in Gujarat, Khajuraho, and of course, the modern art on display here. The man stepped in front of the women. ‘You are teaching the wrong things,’ he said. ‘Our Hinduism does not allow it.’ I got angry. ‘My Hinduism is not your Hinduism,’ I said sharply. ‘You cannot steal my religion.�
�� Then I felt ashamed of myself, for having lost my temper so easily.
2. It did not matter whether nudes in art had once been part of Hindu tradition. It was not part of our lives now, and this exhibition denigrated women. Men would look at these paintings, and inflamed by lust, go out to rape women.
We rebutted this as gently as we could, but the divide between our worldviews was beginning to open up. The women were growing heated, and now they had begun to grab at us, holding our arms, clutching at my waist, so that they could make their arguments. ‘You should leave,’ the woman police officer said quietly to me. ‘They are getting angry.’ But we were finally talking. It seemed wrong to leave now.
Two women, younger than the rest, waved away the ideological arguments. Could I understand—could we understand—that they felt ashamed and threatened by the idea of nude paintings? What did I mean, when I said the female body was neither shameful nor to be feared? Was I not upset at the thought of men looking at naked women in the gallery, and then outside? Why, they asked again, did I think bodies were beautiful?
The man cut them off. That was not the point, he said flatly, and they stepped back. The point was that these disgusting, shameful works were being displayed in the open market. It was their duty to stop people from seeing them. But, I said, talking past him to the women, even though I thought there was no shame in the sight of the human body, and I did not think the female body was sinful in itself, I understood that they felt otherwise. We disagreed, and that was all right. So they should tell their families and friends not to see this show. Why stop us, who felt differently, why take away our right to see what we wanted to see?
The Girl Who Ate Books Page 31