In his book, The Forger’s Shadow, Nick Groom describes plagiarism as ‘a threat, a fear, a panic, a plague. And like all other aspects of social abnormality, such as illness, madness and death , it is imagined as despotic – contagious, sickening, unnatural, and terminal; to be guarded against only with the most vigilant surveillance.’

While it is true that plagiarism went hand in hand with the proliferation of printing technologies – its first English usages date from the end of the sixteenth century – it would be foolish to deny its ancient pedigree. Plagiarism is as old as creativity. Greek authors made this charge so often that much of Alexandrine scholarship was dedicated solely to the investigation of this ‘crime’. Shakespeare is said to have lifted entire passages from North’s Plutarch and Golding’s Ovid. Thomas De Quincy accused Coleridge of plagiarism while Lawrence Sterne, posthumously attacked for plagiarizing Richard Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, wrote in Tristram Shandy, "Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?" We also have the writer in the Borges story who wants to compose the ‘Quixote itself’ but never contemplates the simple, mechanical transcription of the original: "His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide – word for word and line for line – with those of Miguel Cervantes."

All the above instances or accusations of plagiarism have one thing in common – the existence of an original that was then copied from. There is an original text that can be located in physical space and time. In the case of Kaavya Vishwanathan no such master text exists. All that exists is an amorphous formula and the charges of plagiarism that have been brought against her are nothing more than desperate attempts at patenting this formula. This is the Coca Colisation of writing and literature taken to its logical conclusion.

So what’s the ready-to-eat formula? Add hot water to powdered exotic curry, simmer for two minutes. Open packet of chick-lit seeds, add to curry and let concoction come to a boil. Remove from burner and serve piping hot. Suggestion: printing pictures of the chef’s face on table napkins greatly enhances the quality of the meal. Websites and newspapers display the evidence with breathless, barely concealed glee: this passage was copied from this passage, look how foolish she is, oh what a shame, what a sham. In the age of instant celebrity, people want to hero worship but they are also strangely thrilled when overnight fame, glamour and money are lost in a matter of minutes.

One of the books Vishwanathan has admitted to plagiarizing from is Tanuja Desai Hidier’s 2002 novel Born Confused (Push/Scholastic) – another book about an Indian-American girl growing up in New Jersey. There is no doubt that there are passages that are strikingly similar but consider another point. Is it that only Hidier has the right to write about pouring tea into saucers, drinking buffalo milk, blossoming hibiscus flowers, the smell of spices, billowy salwar kameezes, ‘brown sugar’ rotis, ‘cloud-puff’ puris, transparent samosas, garlic, sun, dust, hair oil, lizards, ‘cold baths from a bucket with a plastic dipper’ ( a mug?). Chitra Bannerji Divakaruni has done it for years, so has Shauna Singh Baldwin, as have a younger generation of ‘rootless’ multi-culti teen-lit types. There is very little to choose between each of these authors. The prose is uniformly pedestrian and functional, the subject matter predictable and formulaic. Each writer dips her ladle into the same boiling cauldron. It’s only the garnishing that is different. It turns out that everybody has been borrowing from everybody all these years, and the accusations of plagiarism are, at least in this case, illusory.

Having said that, one has to concede that the facts of this case are interesting in themselves. Even if one grants that there was an original work of art to begin with, which was then plagiarized from, it is not clear who actually did all the plagiarizing. How much of this novel was written by Vishwanathan herself? Once upon a time the relationship between writer and editor was considered sacred. It wasn’t unusual for a writer to change publishing houses when the editor left. Things are different today. Editors spend more time in sales meetings than ever before. Rather than investing in and nurturing genuine new voices, the emphasis is on netting that one-hit-wonder, the next-big-thing. Vishwanathan’s case is fascinating because the person responsible for getting her her first breakthrough wasn’t an editor or an agent. In high school, and desperate to get a place in an Ivy League university, Vishwanathan hired a professional college counselling firm called IvyWise. She met Katherine Cohen, the company’s founder and CEO and casually informed her that she was also working on a novel. Cohen asked to have a look and was excited enough to contact her representative at William Morris. It might be mentioned that Cohen herself is the author of literary classics like Rock Hard Apps: How to Write a Killer College Application. Vishwanathan acquired a literary agent who promptly declared the original story idea ‘not commercially viable.’ Next, they contacted 17 Street Productions, a subsidiary of Alloy Entertainment.17 Street is a book packager specializing in fiction for young adults. A book packager’s job is simple: come up with saleable plots, then hire anonymous writers to flesh out the storyline. With publishers like Little, Brown on their list of clients, this is a model that seems to suit everyone just fine: the writers, the publishers and, of course, the packagers.

It is at this stage that things get a little fuzzy. Since everyone associated with the book has decided to clam up, we can only conjecture. Who was doing the actual plagiarising? Did a ghost writer crack under the pressure of a deadline or was Vishwanathan doing it herself? If the novel was not written by her alone but a team of hired writers, then wasn’t it dishonest on the part of the publishers to stick her pretty face on the novel.

What does Vishwanathan do now? Like a good American, she will undoubtedly go in for counselling. She will finish her degree, become an investment banker. The corporate world will love her. Her dishonesty will be interpreted as a sign of ambition, a desire to succeed at any cost, no matter what. In her late twenties she will write a modern day memoir about fame, money, power, greed and The System. This time round she will eschew long descriptions of samosas and bucket baths, dadas and dadis. The book will become a bestseller and, having achieved her teenage ambition of becoming a literary superstar, Vishwanathan will retreat into the world of investment banking, and hopefully never write another book again. Will publishers touch her again, is public memory really that short? We just don’t know. All one does know that the bugbear of plagiarism is not easy to shake off. As William Hazlitt once declared in a lecture, "If an author is once detected in borrowing, he will be suspected of plagiarism ever after." (Courtesy: Hindustan Times, Saturday May 13)