Inspiration vs appropriation: Whose story is it anyway?

Some achievers are discovering that their stories are being used in films with no acknowledgment or remuneration, writes Roshan Thyagarajan.

Most of our lives are now but a series of surface-level algorithms. Patterns. Codes. Dots. Dashes. But even those in the business of building and administering intelligence of the artificial variety are aware that the human condition cannot be reduced to a game of permutations and combinations.

Anthropologists and linguists say that a key component in the continued story of our species is that each of us has our own unique story. Some express it and some don’t, but there is no denying the sanctity of the story. Your story. Our story. But, ‘sanctity’ is almost always a matter of convenience and greed when it comes to Indian cinema.  

Ask those who ‘borrowed’ S C Madhu Chandan’s ‘Organic Mandya’ story and turned it into a blockbuster Telugu movie called ‘Maharishi’. “Someone from Hyderabad came to us in 2016 and told us he was writing a script for a Telugu movie and he was using the story of my life,” Chandan tells DH. “We didn’t think too much about it, but when the movie came out, a friend told me that this story really reminded him of my story. I watched and realised it was.”

The story was about how an engineer returned from the United States, saw the plight of farmers in his native Mandya, and set out to do something about it. He eventually builds a business to connects farmers to consumers, supporting sustainable organic farming by promoting chemical-free agriculture practices. He didn’t mind that they took the story, but was disappointed that they didn’t give him any credit. “They should have had the courtesy to tell us at least. We wrote to them on their social media pages, but they ignored us. Also, knowing that these things happen in India all the time, we didn’t bother taking the legal route,” he says. He would have been satisfied even with a simple line saying the story was ‘inspired by’ his real-life story.  

A similar story played out a couple of years ago when Yashica Dutt’s book ‘Coming Out As Dalit: A Memoir’ was turned into an episode of a web series called ‘Made In Heaven 2’.

The similarities were striking, and had the story been unmemorable, they might have got away with claiming it was just another story. But Yashica’s lived experience and its telling was too unique to be just another story. 

“I was curious when Alankrita Shrivastava (the screenwriter of the show) was interested in meeting me in 2021. When she asked for the meeting, I assumed it was in the context of a project, but when I asked her, she said: ‘I was just visiting and wanted to meet you’.”

Since the revelation, though, Yashica has sought legal resources to fight the battle, and while there isn’t a conclusion in sight, all she has received for calling the makers out is inappropriate, caste-related backlash on social media. Oh, and for being a person who claimed validation for a story which ‘wasn’t hers to begin with’. This after she had put out the book a couple of years before this episode even aired!

For that matter, consider ‘Super 30’ or ‘Article 15’ or ‘Kantara’, the beneficiaries were those involved in the movie, not those who actually lived those stories. 

But, the bigger issue at hand isn’t so much that these stories are ‘stolen’, ‘borrowed', ‘inspired by’, ‘adopted from’ (we can wait for our society to be marginally more evolved to delve into that conversation), it is the fact that none of these ‘creators’ acknowledged that they were active recipients — sometimes in confidence — of stories others had lived through.

Would movie makers lose out on a lot by offering a line or two to those who they have taken from?

“Not at all,” says well-known film critic M K Raghavendra. “See, genres work on formulas, but stealing unique plot lines is not okay. There is so little uniqueness in Indian cinema at the moment. All they do is exploit the powerless because they know that taking them to court would not result in much. Actually, it won’t result in anything. If you have clout in India, you can get away with anything, and a lot of these people in the movie industry have the clout to get away with it.”

As for the question about why filmmakers don’t acknowledge the sources of their stories, he says, “Maybe they don’t want to share their slice of fame and money that comes from these movies?” And as valid as the hypothesis is, the answer is more likely rooted in Raghavendra’s former sentiment: ‘exploiting the poor for their lack of resources’. 

It is beginning to seem like AI has more of a conscience than some of those who live among us. Surely, being reduced to an algorithm is better than having the very thing that makes you unique taken away from you by one of your own.