Many years ago, as I faced the keyboard, I remembered that distant afternoon when a journalist near Ayemenem carefully destroyed Arundhati Roy's plagiarism....
OK, back in 2001, I read this piece in the southern Indian Express, which effectively demolishes Ms Roy's claims of originality. I found the old post, that I thought I'd share. It also has a couple other things I spotted as problematic. My concern with her - when GOST came out, was a simple one. The influences - of Faulkner, Lee, Marquez, etc were all over the place. And yet, when asked, she claimed not to have read any of them. She is the same age as me, and has had a similar sort of upbringing as most of us have. The PLU upbringing. To say, in your mid-30s, that you haven't read those writers, is, then, either a lie, or shows exceptionally shallow reading habits, and neither of which makes me admire her. That, and her childish counter-attacks on BG Verghese and Ramchandra Guha (who challenged her on dams) and her deliberate ignoring of Gail Omvedt's criticism of her work, meant I lost interest even more. Enough of preamble: here's that post: From: "Salil Tripathi" <salil61-AT-hotmail.com> Subject: More on Ms Roy Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 09:14:20 +0000 Since the canonization of Arundhati Roy continues, and her views on everything are being given prime space, I thought it would be appropriate to share with the list the following piece of literary detective work by an Indian journalist from Cochin, not far from Ayemenem. (Incidentally, Liam and Margaret, I do intend to respond to your questions and comments; I have just returned after indulging in the bourgeoise pastime of vacation. But a reply shall be forthcoming this weekend. And Sangita, I have more questions regarding your reply on Naipaul -- thanks for taking the trouble of responding; you were the only one to do so!). I have not read To Kill A Mocking Bird, only seen the film; but the points the journalist is raising are interesting, primarily because Roy's reputation as a social commentator often rests on her reputation being a Booker Prize winner. And because the views she expresses are popular with people of a particular political persuasion, and, like Naomi Klein, Noreena Hertz and Jose Bove, she is becoming part of the anti-globalization pantheon, it is relevant to explore where she comes from. She does not get space in The Guardian and the Nation only because of her views; many on this list have similar views. She gets the space because of her Booker and the celebrity that has followed. Is that celebrity, then, deserved? I believe that's a pertinent question; for she is not known for the two films she made (one forgettable, one witty). One more comment: when she was asked about her influences, she had said none; she denied that Faulkner, Marquez or Rushdie had had any influence on her writing. She said she had never read Rushdie (yet the first chapter is about pickles, now we Indians do like our pickles, but surely that's one metaphor used too often? Rushdie's pickles were in Midnight's Children, in 1981; Roy's GOST appeared in 1997.... and how about this? While the sentence structure is different, the telescoping of three tenses in one, the rhythm and cadence of the following two are too similar to my ear -- and I noticed this in 1997, when I read GOST, and wrote about it then. This is from pg 72 of GOST: "Years later, on a crisp fall morning in upstate New York, on a Sunday train from Grand Central to Croton Harmon, it suddenly came back to Rahel. That expression on Ammu's face. Like a rogue piece in a puzzle; like a question mark that drifted through the pages of a book and never settled at the end of a sentence." And here's pg 1 of OHYOS (One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez): "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." Salil ---------- >From the Indian Express, Cochin edition By Minu Ittyipe While reading the 1997 Booker prize novel The God of Small Things there is a sense of déjà vu so strong – lines and images hit you from all directions. Maybe its because Roy's put down scenes from movies, TV shows, lines from poetry etc. But the story line in one book To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee clearly stands out from the rest of the clutter and bears a remarkable resemblance to that of Arundhati Roy's GOST. Is it possible two authors of different periods in two different places can pen similar books and express the same ideas using much the same words (sometimes) but in a different context? Let's take a look at both the books: To Kill A Mockingbird is set in the mid 1930's in the state of Alabama, USA, in a small town called Maycomb. The story revolves around two children, Jem and Scout Finch, brought up by a single parent, their father, Atticus, who is a lawyer. Dill, their friend, comes visiting. The story is set at a time when Black Americans had very little rights and a negro, Tom Robinson, is accused of raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell, when in actuality she had thrown herself on him. Atticus takes up the case and what unfolds is a courtroom drama and a jury’s verdict that upholds the white man’s lies not the black man’s truth. Atticus says during the case, “She tempted a negro. She did something that in our society is unspeakable: she kissed a black man. Not an old uncle, but a strong young negro man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards.” A similar thread of thought runs GOST. Set in Kerala in a small village Ayemenem, the protagonists are the twins Estha and Rahel, brought up by a single parent, their mother Ammu. Sophie mol, their cousin, comes visiting. It was a time when the caste system was in place and Ammu, their mother, does the unthinkable. She beds a paravan, an untouchable in a land [to quote the text] “where love laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.” In both the novels, the victims of the unequal societies, Tom Robinson in To Kill A Mockingbird [TKMB] and Velutha in GOST pay with their lives. Besides the plot, the characters and lines, too, are similar. Take the opening paragraphs in TKMB. “He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out. I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson. If general Jackson hadn’t run the Creeks up the creek, Simon Finch would never have paddled up the Alabama and where would we be if he hadn’t?” Now take a look at similar lines in GOST. “Still, to say it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it. Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendancy, before Vasco da Gama arrived.” Some lines have words ditto. In TKMB: “Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps and by nightfall were like soft tea cakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.” Read GOST: “Terror, sweat and talcum powder blended into a mauve paste between Baby Kochamma's rings of neck fat.” Descriptions of the church in both books have a similar ring. TKMB: “Miraculously on pitch, a hundred voices sang out Zeebo’s words. Music again swelled around us.” GOST: “And once more the yellow church swelled like a throat of voices.” There are many more similarities in Kari Saipu's house and the Radley place in TKMB, the descriptions of the court house in TKMB and the police station in GOST. Now take a peek at the gifts given in both books. TKMB: “I pulled out two small images carved in soap. One was the figure of a boy, the other a wore a crude dress.” GOST: “Velutha had remarkable facility with his hands. He could carve perfect boats out of tapioca stems and figurines on cashewnuts.” Baby Kochamma, the twins’ grand aunt in GOST bears semblance to two characters in TKMB, that of Maudie Atkinson and her passion for gardening and the other of Aunt Alexandra who is caught up in her missionary teas and her rigid attitude. In TKMB, the Finch’s neighbour is Maudie Atkinson. “She was a widow, a chameleon lady who worked in her flowerbeds in an old straw hat and men’s coveralls.” Elsewhere, “Miss Maudie's sun hat settled on top of the heap I could not see her hedge clippers.” Now read GOST. “Baby Kochamma spent her afternoons in her garden. In sari and gumboots. She wielded an enormous pair of hedge shears in her bright orange gardening gloves.” In TKMB, Tom Robinson, who has been accused of raping a white woman, has only one arm. “His left arm was fully twelve inches shorter than his right, and hung dead at his side.” In GOST, incoherently, Roy writes about a one-armed man or god in Ammu's dreams. To quote Roy, “isolated things that didn’t mean anything.” And now the text: "Who was he, the one armed man? Who could he have been? The God of loss? The God of small things?” And finally take the case of Arthur Radley or Boo in TKMB who withdraws into his house after being pulled up by the law for disorderly conduct, assault and battery etc., and rarely stepped out again. Finally, when he steps out, notice how Dr. Reynolds never notices Arthur Radley in the room. "Everybody out, he said as he came in the door. Evenin’ Arthur, didn’t notice you the first time I was here.” Then again, Scout Finch says of Arthur “Having been so accustomed to his absence, I found it incredible that he had been sitting beside me all this time, present. He had not made a sound.” Now look what Roy did to Estha. She made him gravitate towards total silence in GOST. “Over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background of wherever he was – into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets – to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye. It usually took strangers a while to notice him even when they were in the same room with him. It took them even longer to notice that he never spoke. Some never noticed at all.” And finally the way Roy ends the book brings echoes of another classic. “She turned to say once again : ‘Naaley. Tomorrow.’” Does that ring a bell? Gone With The Wind perhaps? --------------------------------------------------------
