Imitation or copying or worst plagiarism has once again raised its head with the accusation by Amjad Sabri that his father’s qawwali number "Bhar Doo Jholi" has been stolen and used in the recently released Indian blockbuster film Bajrangi Bhaijaan.
Amjad Sabri has accused the producers of the film of having used the number without acquiring the rights, thereby infringing the copyrights act. He has also accused them of having made changes to the lyrics which, in his view, has violated the sanctity of the form which has had quasi religious implications to the many who see art as an undergrowth of a religious sensibility.
The so-called unhinging of the qawwali from its origins has been going on for a long time. Since the 1960s when the same Sabri Brothers became a sensation in France, the graph of the musical form has been on the ascendancy internationally. It reached its nadir with the worldwide acceptance of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan as the representative of a new movement or a trend which came to be labelled as World Music.
In short, World Music was drawing upon the musical sources from around the world, more so of forms which were very peculiar to certain cultures or sub cultures, and then putting them through the wringer of modern technological sonic devices, creating a final product more familiar to the sounds the contemporary ears were more attuned to hear.
The qawwali compositions many of which are new but most of which also appeal to the initiated audiences are attributed to many venerated figures going back hundred of years. The qawwali according to the grapevine is at least a seven hundred year old form, its origins attributed to the genius of Amir Khusro. Many of the compositions assigned to the person of Amir Khusro have, according to oral sources, travelled hundreds of years down to us. It is a matter of great surprise if these compositions and the instrumentation associated with the form had remained unchanged all these centuries. As forms fade and are reworked, the basic music material reinvents itself to address some of the essential human aesthetic requirements.
Art, as indeed knowledge, does not operate in a void and both are cumulative in character, building upon the artistic or knowledge inheritance of humankind. It is not limited to an individual, though the individual effort does play the role of a catalyst. There could be various terms to define and understand the process of absorption and then creativity, involving expressions like influence, emulation and its most unabashed form -- rank copying -- that falls under the definition of plagiarism.
All art has been influenced by much of the former art forms; many have emulated a master or a great to discover one’s own contours of expression and then the spirit of the age. Both these categories do not fall in the definition of being imitations, though these may carry unmistakeable traces of it in the final product.
Perhaps the present conditions have facilitated the growth of plagiarism. The major characteristic of today’s world, its insatiable derive to consume (the elements of nature, the inherited stock of wisdom and the fund of knowledge) has been put in the service of a consumerist society where the highest virtue is to gobble up and discard the chaff with as much speed as possible. It is the demand of the insatiable consumerist setup that whatever is created or produced is never enough for the consumer’s appetite. This appetite has to be satiated by recycling and churning out material that can fill the vast gaps left empty by the fact that nothing remains to be said.
The representative of this culture or the decisive turn which culture took was Andy Warhol. He obliterated the distinction between the poster and the painting and found that advertising in the contemporary world had more meaning than art in its conventional sense. The rapid reproduction of the posters and that too of an iconic popular film star or the installations of thrown away trash like the cans were his statement about the value of creativity in a world that was becoming increasingly dominated by mass production. And this mass production necessitated sameness; conformity that facilitated an appetite to consume the mass produced product.
The house of plagiarism is the film industry. In India, for example, films from Hollywood are lifted scene by scene, dialogue by dialogue and the only creative ability shown by the unit making the film is to give it local colourisation. Similarly in theatre and some of our literature most of the plays which were considered to be works of local geniuses were actually adaptations of foreign plays, mostly English and European which were being palmed off as their very own.
This kind of imitation was always a norm in film music in particular. If one looks at the history of film music, it is apparent that some of the very famous compositions have been influenced by already existing compositions. Composers like S.D. Burman, Salil Chaudry and Shanker Jaikishen, O.P. Nayyar, all borrowed very heavily from the western and other musical sources and then indigenised those in their own compositions. S.D. Burman more than others was directly responsible for introducing the jazz and samba rhythms into the Indian film music and has been highly lauded for it in his very illustrious career. It was only with his son R.D. Burman that the western tunes and rhythmic patterns started becoming obvious in the mainstream musical scores.
Plagiarism has become so rampant that some of it is now "declared plagiarism". In painting, for example, the works of the great masters are copied and painted by contemporary artists and then sold in the market as copies. Perhaps, in the past too, hundreds of fakes were palmed off as originals as suspicions have now been cast on some of the most prestigious art collections and galleries for possessing fakes instead of originals.