About the nastiest accusation one writer can throw at another — always presuming the second writer isn’t Shakespeare, that unabashed borrower of plots — is the charge of plagiarism. At the receiving end is MT Vasudevan Nair, the eminent writer and Jnanpith award winner who is one of Kerala’s best-known literary figures.

According to www.rediff.com, Devan’s incendiary comments were made in an interview to Kala Kaumudi. Devan slammed Nair’s Malayalam novel, Varanasi, calling it substandard. “Is this M T Vasudevan Nair’s own work? Who knows whether it is copied? Once I wanted to brainwash him against his plagiarism,” he said. Devan also accused Nair of plagiarising articles from foreign magazines in the past.

Last year, this column dealt with the strange case of Isaac Eapen, who accused not just Nair but Paul Zacharia of plagiarism. Eapen’s charge against Nair was that he had copied a short story by writer Nirmal Verma. Verma repudiated the charge himself, pointing out that while he and Nair had addressed similar themes, the stories were different.

Eapen’s accusation that Zacharia had borrowed too freely from Anatole France was also fallacious; Zacharia and France both had Pontius Pilate as the central character, but there all resemblance ended.

The fault lay not with the sincerity of Eapen’s belief in his accusations, but with his definition of plagiarism. To Eapen, a strong thematic resemblance was enough evidence that a writer had wilfully stolen another writer’s work. He ignored the fact that writers may arrive at the same theme independently, that one writer might choose to explore a subject introduced to him by a colleague’s work from an independent angle, or that writers who inhabit the same milieu may indeed end up addressing very similar themes.

As an illustration, to say that The Clockwork Orange and The Catcher in the Rye both deal with disturbed teenage boys is not to say that Anthony Burgess plagiarised J D Salinger or vice versa.

I don’t know whether Devan has evidence that Nair plagiarised Varanasi; but he had none when he hinted a year ago that Nair had borrowed the plot of his award-winning film, Oru Cheru Punchiri from Jayaraj’s Karunam.

Karunam, like Oru Cheru Punchiri, also featured an ageing couple. In this case, as with the earlier instance where Nirmal Verma featured, the supposedly plagiarised author himself was not the accuser. Jayaraj made no claims himself, leading one to believe that it was only a similarity in theme that had led to an unwarranted charge of plagiarism.

If Devan’s charges have any weight to them, he had better be in a position to back his statements up with concrete evidence. Plagiarism is proved most easily when the plagiarist has borrowed entire lines and paragraphs — as the late Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen did when she plagiarised an entire Elizabeth Goudge novel.

Unless a writer has followed the exact structure and logic of an argument or obviously paraphrased rather than copied, however, it is very hard to prove plagiarism of theme. If Devan does prove that Nair has actually plagiarised, rather than produced his own variations on a theme, it will be for Nair to apologise to all those who now respect him and his work.

I met Nair briefly at the literary festival held in Delhi this year — too briefly to judge whether or not he was a plagiarist, but long enough to come away with a respect for his integrity. He had been asked to read a piece, along with several other writers. Unused to the short attention spans of the Capital, he chose a long story. An organiser asked him to cut it short.

By then, Nair had realised his error. But he explained gently that his selection was not a piece that could easily be edited; to attempt to do so would be to disrespect, not him in his persona of author, but the work of authors that they were gathered there to celebrate. He finished his reading with dignity, having made his point: a writer’s work is not always to be carved into bite-sized pieces, to be treated merely as entertainment. More than the craftsman even, he was saying, the artefact demands respect.

If Devan’s statements are unjustified, he will have done tremendous damage — with a plagiarism charge, some of the mud usually sticks, justly or not. If Nair is guilty, he will pay in terms of his name, his reputation, his integrity. But unless Devan produces the articles in question, or produces the original that Varanasi is supposed to have been borrowed from, we have to assume that Nair is innocent of wrongdoing. To refrain from judging him in the absence of evidence is the least we can do at present.

Pedant’s Corner: I don’t blame Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee for complaining that a recent letter from the Trinamool Congress fazed him with its “big words”. The first sentence of the letter should be preserved as a classic example of the Indian penchant for using language as a blunt axe. “We are deeply shocked to envisage the appalling instance of your govt’s bumptious act of recalcitrance in trampling over the solem (sic) order...”

I was deeply shocked to envisage the letter writer’s cavalier attitude towards language. To envisage is “to have a mental picture of”; it is not usual to envisage an instance of anything. To call the government’s act “bumptious” is technically feasible, if the letter writer meant that the government had been noisily overbearing.

But to be recalcitrant is to be obstinately defiant of authority. One presumes that the authority in question is vested in the government, in which case it is being obstinately defiant ... of itself? There is also a point of more general confusion here: the government cannot logically be recalcitrant in its trampling over (on?) a solemn order. In brief, and to borrow the letter-writer’s gloriously confused style, rarely has my flabber been so gasted.

nilroy@lycos.com