Just a question of rights

The plagiarism allegations against Udta Punjab come as a huge disappointment at a time when the film industry is becoming acutely aware of the importance of obtaining rights to novels

Of late, Bollywood has begun to read. An industry not known to dive into literature, other than a rare Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay or Premchand, has been seeking inspiration in books. While embarking on his Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!, filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee bought the rights to all of Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay’s Byomkesh Bakshi stories in all the languages other than Bengali. His Shanghai was based on the French novel Z by Vassilis Vassilikos. He also has the film rights for V. Sudarshan’sAnatomy of an Abduction: How the Indian Hostages in Iraq Were Freed, about the kidnapping of three Indians in Iraq in 2004.

Banerjee is not the only one. Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions had acquired the film rights for Amish Tripathi’s The Immortals of Meluha, Rahul Bose clinched Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke, and Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment is reported to have Anuja Chauhan’s The Zoya Factor in its kitty. Not to forget the crowd favourite author, Chetan Bhagat.

Plagiarism allegations

It’s in this light that the plagiarism allegations against Udta Punjab, a film on the widespread drug abuse in Punjab, come as a huge disappointment. A recent story on a news website detailed the striking similarities between certain characters, situations, plot points, and devices in the film and Ben Elton’s 2002 novel High Society. If there were so many takeaways from the book, why couldn’t the film rights for it have been negotiated legally? In times of the World Wide Web, when any information is just a click away, the stealth also smacks of sheer foolhardiness and misplaced overconfidence that the inspiration will remain covert, that it won’t become public. The truth is that in this day and age, we have no place to hide.

Plagiarism is not new in Bollywood. It has been an eternal hashtag, especially when it comes to music. You can draw up a huge laundry list of films copied from — or, at the least, inspired by — other films.

It Happened One Night became Dil Hai Ke Maanta Nahin and Chori Chori, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers got made as Satte Pe Satta, Sabrina got turned into Yeh Dillagi, The Silence of the Lambsplayed out as Sangharsh, Ek Chhotisi Love Story blatantly lifted from A Short Film About Love right down to the title. Nothing came out of these revelations; perhaps the makers of the originals never even got to see or hear of these tributes.

The possibility of the imitation getting called out openly happened a few years ago when an online post went viral for detailing scene-by-scene lifts from foreign films in Anurag Basu’s Barfi!, India’s official entry to the Oscars.

Obtaining rights 

Something has been changing since then. Even filmmaker Sanjay Gupta, much maligned by accusations about consistently stealing from foreign films (he turned Reservoir Dogs into Kaante and Oldboy intoZinda) sought legal remake rights for his recent film Jazbaa, based on the Korean film called Seven Days. Like him, most mainstream filmmakers are becoming conscious of obtaining legal permission and remake rights. Warrior was officially adapted as Brothers, and The Man From Nowhere became Rocky Handsome. The Hindi version of The Fault in Our Stars is under production. Filmmaker Sujoy Ghosh travelled all the way to Japan a while ago to seek the film rights of Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X, even as viewers kept debating about the shadow of it lurking in the Malayalam film Drishyam.

At one level, the disingenuity of the makers of Udta Punjab undoes their own genuine efforts as well — the socio-political contextualising of the story, for instance. The time and effort spent in doing research in Punjab, the recreation of the dystopia the State has become, and how the film sheds light on the havoc that drugs are wreaking in Punjab all get sidestepped now under the looming shadow of the allegations.

It also comes as a major blow in how it gets the emerging young, offbeat, idealistic Hindi cinema under the scanner. In one shot, the cinema that had purportedly been re-energising the industry with its inventiveness, out-of-the-box ideas and narratives stands to lose much of its sheen, capacity for grandstanding, and moral high ground. If only the makers of Udta Punjab had made a call or sent an email to Ben Elton.

namrata.joshi@thehindu.co.in

Source: 2-10-2016