Why plagiarism charge against Chetan Bhagat for One Indian Girl is bogus
The newest controversy to hit Chetan Bhagat is the allegation of plagiarism for his book One Indian Girl. Bangalore author Anvita Bajpai has claimed Bhagat copied the story flow development, situations, scenes and names from her short story Drawing Parallels, which is part of her four-story anthology called Life, Odds and Ends. Bajpai says she passed her book to Bhagat to read in 2014 at a Bangalore Literature Festival.
However, if you go through the two books and read her allegations in the plaint filed before the Bangalore City Civil Court, as I did, you'll find the case to be absurd and even amusing.
Without giving too much away, both stories revolve around a young woman caught in a string of relationships. Both stories are about the search of love, coupled with heartbreaks and misunderstandings.
The allegation of plagiarism by Bajpai against Bhagat is essentially of non-textual but thematic infringement. This simply means, Bhagat is not accused of copying the actual words used to express his story (there are no similarities there), but is rather curiously accused of copying the concept, and the central theme of the story which is based on feminism and the internal conflicts of a modern middle-class woman transposed to her relationships with men.
None of these so-called themes have any similarity in their treatment in the two books; the two stories are very different. It therefore stands to reason that the plaint filed by Bajpai calls it an “intelligent copying” by Bhagat, hitherto an unknown concept in copyright law.
The one legal principle attempted to be applied is of access to the original work by the alleged infringer. If you have access to the work that you are accused of copying, then it helps to substantiate the allegation that you copied from it.
Although, Bajpai seems to forget that the allegation of access and copying would first require some similarities in the two works that are not merely attributable to abstract notions. Copying can also be presumed without the need to establish access, when there is verbatim reproduction in the infringing work or when there are instances of similarity that can be attributable to mindless copying, for example identical mistakes/typos in the two works.
This begs the question of similarity. The one basic precursor to an assessment on similarity is the sieving of banal elements. What cannot be a subject matter of copyright cannot be alleged to be infringed, that is, copied by another. Banal elements are not subject matter of copyright.
To call the hackneyed tropes a case of plagiarism by Bajpai is a bit much. In fact aren’t Bollywood films filled with such themes - think of Aitraaz, Dhadkan, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, et al.
Bajpai refers to two very specific instances to make her plagiarism case a foregone one, these being: (a) similarity in the use of names like Mark, Oxford, Kolkata, Goa and Facebook; and (b) the etymology of the name "Radhika" for Chetan Bhagat’s protagonist.
While the former needs no explanation - it is risible to even raise it - what is utterly absurd is her justification that Bhagat chose the name Radhika because Aliya (her protagonist) draws comparisons between her first boyfriend and Lord Krishna, indirectly rendering her protagonist to be a "Radha".
You don’t need a deep understanding of copyright law to discern that there are no similarities in the two "literary" works. The question to really ask while reading the works is whether the similarities alleged by Bajpai are capable of being original in their expression with equal proportions of creativity, skill and labour and if these alleged similarities help narrate the same story in the two books.
My answer to this is that I read two very different stories although both dealt with very typical circumstances. The point of contention is that both stories feature banal themes, even then the treatment of these themes in the narrative is completely different.
When it comes to simple ideas, copyright could possibly extend to the detail in which it is expressed. Copyright does not need literary merit in the expression and you may not have the flair to be a JK Rowling or a GRR Martin to weave stories that transport you to a parallel world while reading, but at the same time it cannot be abused to extend to these commonplace, unoriginal or general ideas of feminism and the perceived mindset of a social class as alleged by Bajpai. Copyright law is a complete misfit in this story.
If this were the case, it would sound the death knell for the art of storytelling and we would all be seeking to monopolise our “story-flow development”. And if it's true that there are only seven basic plots in fiction, as Christopher Booker once put it - overcoming the monster; rags to riches; the quest; voyage and return; comedy; tragedy; and rebirth - and unless someone invents the eighth - all our stories will flow in a similar manner.