Plagiarism is Perennial

Stealing one's knowledge works by the other is common around the world. There are many world renowned personalities who were accused of plagiarism.

The Times of India writes (7 August 2009)


A poem purportedly written by a teenage Bob Dylan and up for auction at Christie's is actually a song written by late Canadian country singerHank Snow, the auction house has said. So, this means that even the great Bob Dylan has been accused of plagiarism! But who doesn't plagiarise? Even Martin Luther King, Jr derived his PhD thesis on theology from other sources, in what appears to have been only an example of a lifetime habit of borrowing without proper attribution.

Shakespeare is believed by some to have got Christopher Marlowe killed to steal all of Marlowe's works and pass them off as his own, though many scholars dismiss that as a conspiracy theory. Rabindranath Tagore was so enamoured of Hafiz Shirazi's mystic poetry in Persian that he translated a few of them into English. Shakeel Badayuni usurped a primary schoolteacher's song, 'zindagi ke safar mein akele the hum', sung by Mohammad Rafi. That unfortunate man later committed suicide. The list is endless.

There seems to be nothing original and if anything appears to be so, it's probably just plagiarism that is as yet undetected. It sounds so much better when referred to as getting inspiration rather than stealing. So, many artists will brazenly say that their works are 'inspired' by so and so, whereas all these works are really inferior copies of the originals. We live in a world of flagrant imitation, where nothing is genuine. What we erroneously think to be genuine is probably a faint echo of something seen or heard in a distant past.

So, the most charitable interpretation of plagiarism is that it is a deep-rooted unconscious desire to emulate someone else. We're all copies of our predecessors in some ways, after all. I remember, when Steven Spielberg was accused by journalist Agnon Frazer of lifting the concept of his path-breaking movie ET from Satyajit Ray's unpublished works, Spielberg calmly asked Frazer, ''Didn't Ray also get the idea from Evelyn Jennings?'' Incidentally, Jennings was the first science fiction writer who thought of ET way back in 1933. Our great Ray was just 12 years old at that time. The irony is that the possibility of Jennings getting the idea of ET from someone else cannot be ruled out either. So, who's original? Isn't that the million-dollar question?