As per Umberto Eco, “Books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.” Eco neglected to mention if books only speak of other books, and if it is okay if they do, or should the authors of books that largely speak of other books be hauled over the coals, indicted for their crime and given punishments that are less stringent than those handed out to common plagiarists, but are punishments nonetheless. Had he done so, we wouldn’t have to face the conundrum raised by Urdu novelist Asha’ar Najmi’s long piece (in Hindi) on Khalid Javed’s oeuvre whose thrust is that several of Javed’s wonderfully original-seeming ideas across five novels can be traced back to novelists, thinkers, graphic novelists and filmmakers from the West. The conundrum, stated plainly, is this: What constitutes originality in fiction? More specifically: If an author directly borrows ideas or settings from another author, wrapping them in his own setting and his own style, is that a form of fraud?Inspiration or plagiarism?If we transpose the question to academic writing, the answer is a clear yes. If there is an idea that is published in the literature and you present it as your own, that’s not allowed. It’s the journal reviewer’s job to prevent it from happening, and if the reviewer fails, the journal is still duty-bound to issue an erratum or withdraw the paper if such a claim is made. On the literary side, things run in the opposite direction. I have never heard anyone say “That Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas is just a total ripoff of Valmiki!” or “Did you know Girish Karnad pulled the whole story of Agni aur Barkha out of the Mahabharata and just redid it as a play? What a scam!” And so I was somewhat perplexed as Najmi took us through all the references in great detail. And what a list of references it is! Thomas Bernhard to Emile Zola to Neil Gaiman, Kafka and Bachelard among others. Peter Greenaway and Roman Polanski do the honours from the filmmaking side of things. My own taste in literary criticism runs to the genealogy of writings and so I really enjoyed reading the essay and trying to follow the connections it made. At the end of it, I am not convinced that Najmi’s demonstration of these connections destroys Javed’s reputation as a novelist.Just the other day on Instagram, I came across a video where a guitar player was showing how the melody of the 1956 classic song from CID “Ye hai Bombay meri jaan” – whose lines “zara hatke/zara bach ke” continue to define that city despite its change of name – is a straight lift of the American folk song “Clementine.” I have to admit I felt a kind of shame that a cultural artefact that I value so much turns out to greatly lack originality. And here the lift is of the melody, which is plagiarism to the best of my knowledge. Hindi films used to do this regularly, back before the Internet turned the whole world into a village, and we have all shared in this feeling of second-classness when yet another Indian film song is revealed to have been a copy of a Western one (my personal favourite: compare the opening riff of the song “Kaisi hai ye rut” from Dil Chahta Hai to the riff from the song “Forty or fifty horses” by the Spin Doctors). My postcolonial – but not fully decolonised – mind tells me that if the copying was from Indian sources, or even Persian, Arabic or Turkic sources, or, like the great Bengali artists Abanindranath Tagore and others, from East Asian sources, the shame would have come in an attenuated form. It may even have been reversed: When Yesudas sings “Ka karoon sajni,” we know he is singing a version of a thumri sung earlier by Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, and this makes us proud rather than ashamed: we accept it as a fitting act of homage. But when Bappi Lahiri copies “Video Killed the Radio Star” in “Koi yahaan naache naache”, our heads hang in shame. That’s who we still are. So, I do understand Najmi’s great disappointment that an author whose work’s originality he so greatly admired turned out to have borrowed thoughts extensively from various Western sources. That’s where the anger may be coming from, the anger inherent in the claim that the “innocent” Urdu reading public – a group Najmi too belonged to before extensive reading made him lose his innocence – has been defrauded. My submission would be that perhaps Najmi is, in his understandable disappointment, setting the bar so high that no author would be able to jump over it. Even the authors of the Mahabharata or the Epic of Gilgamesh or Homer, who wrote the currently-back-in-fashion Odyssey (ripped off by those damned Coen brothers for their movie O Brother Where Art Thou), probably had oral or other texts they were pulling from, mercifully lost now; otherwise, they too would run the risk of being cancelled. My suggestion would be to shake off that aura, that sense born of ignorance that these works were extremely original, and re-read them for what they are, intertexts with books the author has read, and evaluate them the way all literature should be evaluated: by asking the question of whether it is true to its time and place.How to read a textIf you’re still reading, you may be wondering why a public attack by one Urdu novelist on another published in a Hindi journal is of any interest to an English novelist. The prosaic reason is that 20% of a question raised in this piece is directed at me. The question is in the context of Javed’s novel Nematkhana, translated into English as Paradise of Food, which won the JCB Prize in 2022. The prize’s five-member jury included me that year. After showing how closely related the work is to the work of the French writer Michel Tournier (quite closely) and to the novel The Cook by Henry Kressing (not so closely), Najmi asks: Was there not one person in the JCB Prize jury who had read Michel Tournier or Henry Kressing? I can’t answer for the other four, but I can say that I certainly haven’t read either; in fact, I hadn’t even heard their names. Knowing how the connections between books give me great pleasure, my sense is that if I had read Tournier or Kressing’s books it might have made me like Paradise of Food better, but that’s pure speculation. One way of getting a more definitive answer to this question might come from the jury of the DSC Prize, who gave my novel Half the Night Is Gone the prize in 2019. I could ask them whether they had read Amritlal Nagar’s Amrit aur Vish and whether they had noted that I had directly picked up the device of a novelist who is grieving his son from it. Or maybe I shouldn’t. Just like Najmi says of Javed’s various literary sources, I have long since “digested” that money.But, seriously speaking, what struck me about Najmi’s essay is that he presents himself as someone who had placed Javed on a very high pedestal because he didn’t realise that many of Javed’s ideas came from the books he had read and the movies he had seen. And because he had built up an impossible image of the writer, his disappointment overflows and his well-researched and enlightening piece is shot through with a bitterness which undermines its erudition. “Bhakti in religion may be a path to salvation,” Ambedkar had said. “But in politics bhakti, or hero-worship, is a sure road to degradation.” Similarly, I feel writers and writing should not be treated with too much reverence, not by readers and not by other writers. Dilawar Figar, who loves Ghalib, saysjo chāhte haiñ ki fauq-ul-bashar banā deñ usehameñ to us ke un ahbāb se bhī shikva hai(those who want to make a superman of him/I take issue with those friends of him)Eventually, as writers, we need to read each other with generosity and compassion, with neither hero-worship nor disdain, and with the hope that what we read will nourish us and lead us to still other books that we didn’t know of, or didn’t realise would resonate with us. And now, if you will excuse me, I need to go and find a copy of that Bachelard book that I hadn’t heard of before I read Najmi’s essay.This article first appeared on the author’s Substack.