An epistolary battle has started in social media over a book, Indra’s Net, authored by controversial writer Rajiv Malhotra and published by Harper Collins, India, in 2014 following charges of plagiarism by some people who posted their comments decrying him for allegedly copying without attribution from a book by Andrew Nicholson, Professor of Hinduism and Indian Philosophy in State University of New York at Stony Brook.
The story began earlier this month with an online public petition by some 50-odd people requesting the publisher to make a formal, public apology and to withdraw the book from the market following charges of plagiarism. But there were many who did not find anything wrong with Malhotra’s book and they dismissed charges of plagiarism.
Another campaign started on Facebook and Twitter with a plethora of comments both in support of Malhotra, and against him, after for the first time Nicholson, Professor of Hinduism and Indian Philosophy, came out in the open accusing Malhotra of plagiarizing from his book Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History, published by Columbia University Press, 2010.
Nicholson said he felt the time has come to speak out. “I am the author of Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (Columbia University Press, 2010, and Permanent Black, 2011), a work that was extensively plagiarized in Rajiv Malhotra’s Indra’s Net. I had planned to stay silent as I usually avoid comment on heated, politicized issues such as this.
“However, when Rajiv Malhotra described me as an “ally” of his on his Twitter feed, I knew that the time had come to speak out to clarify the differences between his views and my own. As upset as I am about his plagiarism of my work, I am even more upset about his distortions. One of the more puzzling aspects of this whole affair is that Malhotra praises my work effusively while vilifying the work of my mentor and dissertation supervisor….,” he wrote.
Not to be left behind, Malhotra hit back.
“I am glad you have entered the battlefield so we can get into some substantial matters. I used your work with explicit references 30 times in Indra’s Net, hence there was no ill-intention. But I am not blindly obeying you, contrary to your experience with servile Indians; hence your angst that I am ‘distorting’ your ideas is unfounded,” Malhotra wrote in Facebook addressing the professor as ‘Dear Nicholson.’
He said that his writing relating to Nicholson’s work can be seen as twofold: one where he cites his work, and secondly where it is his own perspective, and that the professor is not entitled to attribution on second count.
“I am prepared to clarify these attributions further where necessary. But … I am going to actually remove many of the references to your work simply because you have borrowed from Indian sources and called them your own original ideas. I am better off going to my tradition’s sources rather than via a westerner whose ego claims to have become the primary source,” he said.
He said that this western hijacking of adhikara (ownership) is what the elaborate western-defined and western-controlled system of peer-reviews and academic gatekeepers are meant to achieve – turning knowledge into the control of western ‘experts’ and their Indian sepoys.
One Mr. Balbir Prajha wrote on Facebook: “RM, you did not even use quotation marks around the texts that you copy pasted from Nicholson and other’s texts. That is plagiarism. End of story…. RM’s claim that it is OK not to use quotes around text which he directly took out of other books because Sanskrit does not use quotation marks is absolutely a bizarre explanation.”
According to a Scroll.in report, Permanent Black, which published Nicholson’s book in 2011, said the usual trajectory of such a book in the world of scholarship is for it to become the focus of academic exchange, debate, and critique, and for its ideas and arguments to percolate through readers.
“Naturally, therefore, it is deeply disturbing for us, as a publisher of the finest international scholarship on South Asia, to find that Unifying Hinduism has been used unethically by Rajiv Malhotra in Indra’s Net (HarperCollins), the nature and varieties of misuse having been exposed in the media. Such exposure is currently the best available redressal mechanism in our context, and Professor Nicholson’s statement, which we endorse, provides weight and specificity to the charges against Rajiv Malhotra.
“As for HarperCollins, their willingness to rectify future editions of Rajiv Malhotra’s book would be welcome were it not for the fact that there may be nothing left for them to put in a “corrected” edition: much of the book has been shown up as a patchwork of other people’s work minus attribution. This is usually defined as plagiarism.”
The post Social Media Battle Over Author Malhotra’s Alleged Plagiarism appeared first on News India Times.