STEALING an idea, words or literary work of others and presenting it as one’s own is called plagiarism, say dictionaries.
Some may argue that a same idea may occur to the minds of two different persons at the same time. Yes, indeed, but such cases are very rare and circumstances might suggest that it was just a coincidence.
For example, Prof Hiroji Kataoka, a Japanese scholar of Urdu, once informed this writer that the idea presented in Ghalib’s couplet that says:
Sab kahan kuchh lala-o-gul mein numayaan ho gaeen
Khaak mein kya sooraten hon gi ke pinhaan ho gaeen
was said almost verbatim by a Japanese poet some one-and-a-half century ago that “beautiful people do not die; some of them just reappear in the form of lovely flowers” something that Ghalib said. But we know that Ghalib could not read Japanese and it is highly unlikely that the Japanese poet knew Urdu and had copied Ghalib.
But in the absence of such substantive evidences, most of the cases fall into the category of plagiarism. As satirist Richard Brinsley Sheridan said with tongue-in-cheek “All that can be said is that two people happened to hit on the same thought — and Shakespeare made use of it first, that’s all”.
Plagiarism is quite an ancient phenomenon, albeit obnoxious, and some of the greatest names in the history of world literature are accused of the offence, too. For instance, many ideas of Hell, Paradise and Satan as depicted in Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ are based on Islamic and Christian traditions. A research paper published about a decade ago had proved that Dante owes much to Ibn-e-Arabi’s Futoohaat-e-Makkiyah and at some places even the minute details in Dante’s work, globally acknowledged as ‘masterpiece’, are same as in Ibn-e-Arabi’s famous work.
Plagiarism transcends borders and languages. Even Marco Polo and Ibn-e-Batuta are sometimes accused of incorporating other writers’ ideas into their travelogues. It was a common practice among the playwrights of Elizabethan period to steal from other dramatists and present it as their own, writes J.A. Cuddon in his ‘The Penguin Dictionary of Literary terms and Literary Theory’.
Many Persian poets had complained that their works were plagiarised by other poets and, according to Syed Abdullah, the use of takhallus, or penname, in Persian poetry was initially introduced as a way of preventing the literary theft.
As for Urdu, Mehr-e-Neemroz, a literary magazine launched from Karachi in 1956 and edited by Hasan Musanna Nadvi, Ali Akber Qasid and Abul Khair Kashfi, had begun a permanent feature devoted to unearth the plagiaristic works. Written by a so-called ‘literary spy’, the pieces uncovered some great literary thieving. Many of these articles were published in book form under the title Che Dilaaver Ast by Karachi University back in 2004. Before publishing it in book form, Khalid Jama’i and his team had presented it in a special issue of university’s journal Jareeda.
A couple of years ago, some of these articles exposing the plagiarists were included in a special issue of Isbaat, a literary magazine published from Mumbai and edited by Ash’er Najmi. The magazine’s special issue included many new such works and was published in Pakistan, too, titled Choon Kufr Az Ka’aba Barkheezad by Lahore’s Aks Publications. Here are some ‘facts’ as narrated in these publications. These are reproduced carefully and no offense is intended:
Tarjuman-ul-Quran, a commentary on Quran by Abul Kalam Azad is not his original work and is, at times, almost a literal translation of Syed Rasheed Raza’s Arabic work Al-Manaar. But Abul Kalam did not mention it.
Some of the articles included in Muhammad Husain Azad’s Nairang-e-Khayal are free translations of articles by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. But Azad never mentioned it.
Niaz Fatehpuri’s Targheebat-e-Jinsi is not an original work and is a translation of Havelock Ellis’s The Study of Psychology of Sex. The famous ‘Khuda Number’ of Niaz Sahib’s Nigar was almost entirely written by Ishaq Siddiqui but his name never appeared on it and even the Pakistani edition of the magazine did not mention it. Niaz Fatehpuri’s work on palmistry named Firasat-ul-Yad, too, is not an original work but a translation of Cheiro’s book.
Ismat Chughtai’s novel Ziddi is a plagiarised version of a novel named Haajra. Interestingly, Haajra, written in English by a Turkish writer, Adaalat Khanum, had been translated into Urdu and Ismat copied it from the Urdu version.
It is a fact that Qurratul Ain Hyder had accused Abdullah Husain of plagiarism and in her autobiographical work Kaar-e-Jahan Daraaz Hai has given the page numbers from where sentences and paragraphs had been copied, word for word. But Abdullah Husain’s novel Naadaar Log also has plagiarised portions of Khadija Gauher’s novel The Coming Season’s Yield.
There are some other ‘facts’, too, but they need another piece.
Published in Dawn, September 27th, 2021
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