Looking for a ‘laapataa’ connection

It’s pretty much impossible to find an online source to watch Ananth Mahadevan’s 1999 telefilm Ghunghat Ke Pat Khol, legally or otherwise. The closest I came to watching it was on YouTube—a phone recording of the film playing on a laptop screen with arbitrary jump-cuts and really bad sound. It seems fair to assume that other people have had similar difficulties accessing the work—and yet, that doesn’t seem to stop many from claiming with absolute certainty that Laapataa Ladies, the 2023 film by Kiran Rao, has been plagiarised from it. It comes up fairly often, especially when Rao’s film gets any publicity—its Netflix release, being chosen as India’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars…

The conjecture seems to have been started by Mahadevan himself with an Instagram post from October 2023 about his film, describing the plot and ending with a throw-away comment: “Amused and humbled to find that it has inspired a similar film this year (wink emoji).” Getting rather less casual about it later, Mahadevan gave interviews asserting his claim; his argument seems to stem from the fact that both films are about brides being switched on a train because of their ghunghats, which make it difficult for them to see and impossible to be identified in a crowd.

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With this, the similarity between the two films ends, not just in the way the story unfolds from here on but in its very bones. While Laapataa uses the ghunghat trope to explore ideas such as Indian women’s lack of autonomy and inability to express their individuality, the older film uses it for comedic effect: the switched partners find love with each other in an almost Shakespearean comedy of errors. Compare this to Laapataa’s ending: one woman is reunited with her husband after a brush with unconventionality, while the other rejects hers and goes in search of her destiny, alone and unaccompanied.

Ghunghat Ke Pat Khol is exactly what it sounds like: a teleplay from the 1990s. It may be delightful in its own way, but it is also a product of its time (and budget) in terms of not just the technical aspects but also what it makes of the story. Judging it by 2024 standards may be harsh, but then, the director invited this scrutiny. 

It should not even need to be said at this point, but given how persistently the plagiarism allegations crop up on social media (duly and faithfully reported by mainstream media), we must talk about the ostensible similarities in plotting—brides being switched on a train. I am amazed Mahadevan has not claimed that the late Rabindranath Tagore stole his idea as well for the 1906 book Noukadubi, which has brides being switched on, well, public transport (it happens to be a shipwreck during a storm), while the 1961 film Ghunghat, a faithful adaptation of Tagore’s story, shares the public transport motif as well— yes, there is a train. It is not unheard of in real life either; in 2022, two sisters got married to the wrong men during a power cut in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh. There are Rajasthani and Bengali folk tales going back centuries about brides being switched deliberately or by mistake.  

Claiming that adapting a well-known trope or plucking a story from the headlines is plagiarism is to not understand, at all, how tropes emerge and are sustained. Tropes are memes, they are plot devices; ideas that originate, usually undocumented, in popular culture, and find fertile ground in some writer’s brain, who then takes it and gives it a unique shape and structure. There are entire websites dedicated to exploring tropes in popular culture (thank you, TVtropes.com, for many wasted hours) and the line between using a trope and plagiarising a story is not even a thin one. What next—Shakespeare scholars claiming that every book or film about twins switching places has been plagiarised from the Bard’s work? Or that all Hindi films about reincarnation and revenge have plagiarised each other?

Amazingly, this is not even the most ridiculous reading of Laapataa Ladies. That has to be credited to the committee that selected it as India’s entry for the International Film category at the Oscars (many expected Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, to be chosen). Its now viral letter of citation begins by saying that “Indian women are a strange mixture of submission and dominance” and goes on to claim that the film tells a story that “can simultaneously be seen as one that needs change, and one that can bring about change.” Its cringiness aside, what is striking about the “juri” in question is that it was made up of 13 men—as many on social media have pointed out, a real case of ladies being laapataa.

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