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The mother of all cultural battles is being fought in Kerala's literary landscape these days. The state's most celebrated litterateur and Jnanpith laureate, M T Vasudevan Nair, has slapped a Rs 1 million defamation suit against noted artist and literary critic M V Devan for calling him a plagiarist.
In a recent interview published in the Kala Kaumudi weekend edition, Devan, who is also a famous painter, sculptor and philosopher, said that Nair has been copying articles from reputed foreign publications like The New Yorker and The Partisan Review.
Devan alleged that Varanasi, a serialised Malayalam novel by Nair, is of substandard nature and devoid of any literary merit. "What sort of a literature is this? Is this M T Vasudevan Nair's own work? Who knows whether it is copied? Once I wanted to brainwash him against his plagiarism," he said.
Devan also revealed that he and other leading litterateurs like N P Mohammed, who now chairs the Kerala Sahitya Akademy, have advised Nair that it is not proper for him to copy works from foreign publications.
But Devan said whenever they took up the matter with Nair, the latter said, "It does not matter and no one here would know."
Devan told rediff.com that he stands by what he has said in the interview. "M T Vasudevan Nair and me have been friends for long. I have advised him on numerous occasions to stop plagiarising from foreign publications."
"I have said the truth. Truth hurts and that may be why he has file a criminal defamation complaint against me. I have asked my lawyer to prepare the case for me," Devan stated.
When contacted, Nair said he did not want to react to Devan's charges as he has already filed a criminal defamation suit and appeared before the chief judicial magistrate in Kozhikode regarding the case.
The 69-year-old Nair, who is a nationally acclaimed writer and filmmaker, produced the Kala Kaumudi newspaper in the court in which Devan's interview appeared. Nair has also held the printer and editor, Prasad Lakshman, as the second accused, the correspondent, V D Selvaraj, as the third accused and the layout artists, Biju V Nair and Sunil Kumar, as the fourth and fifth accused respectively.
"The manner in which the interview piece was displayed in the newspaper with my photo smacked of an attempt to deliberately degrade me," Nair said in his complaint.
It is not the first time that Nair and Devan have fought. Last year, when Nair made an award-winning movie called Oru Cherupunchiri, Devan claimed that it resembled the story of writer U K Kumaram. But Nair did not respond to Devan's charges then.
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