Pudhumaipithan - Plagiarism and Other Criticisms

Plagiarism and Other Criticisms

Pudumaippithan has been accused by some of his contemporaries and later critics of having plagiarized from the works of Maupassant. Chief among the accusers were his contemporaries Pe. Ko. Sundararajan (Chitty) and So. Sivapathasundaram and literary critic Kaarai Krishnamoorthy. Pudumaipitthan himself published the short story "Tamil Paditha Pondaati" (The wife who knew Tamil) with the foreword that it was based on Maupassant's work. Pudumaipithan's biographer T.M. Chidambara Ragunathan has identified the stories samadhi, Nondi, Bayam, Kolaikaran kai, Nalla velaikaran and Andha muttal venu as adaptations of Maupassant's works and the story pithukuli as the adaptation of a Robert Browning poem. A few more stories like Doctor sampath, Naane kondren, Yaar kurravali and Thekkangandrugal have also been tentatively identified as possible adaptations. His defenders (including Ragunathan and historian A R Venkatachalapathy) have argued that those were adaptations and not plagiarizations. Pudumaipithan did not publish the short stories which have been identified (except Tamil Paditha Pondaati) as adaptations when he was alive. They were published posthumously only after 1953. Thus, the defenders infer he would have acknowledged them as adaptations if he had published them himself (as he did in the case of Tamil Paditha Pondaati). Further they contend Pudhumaipithan did not know French and during his lifetime the other Maupassant stories he has been accused of plagiarizing had not been translated into English. In their view, Pudumaipithan has had to suffer the accusation of plagiarism due to the callousness of his posthumous publishers . All of Pudhumaipithan's adaptations were written before 1937, when he became involved in a literary feud with Kalki Krishnamurthy about adapting works from other languages. During the feud he wrote biting essays equating adaptations with literary theft.

He has been criticized for just raising uncomfortable issues and not proposing any solutions for them. He has responded by pointing out his job was only raising the issue and leaving the reader to figure out the solution. There have also been minor criticisms regarding his writing style like his digressing from the plot due to elaborate descriptions of environment and characters. Recently, Tamil critic A. Marx has criticised Pudumaipithan's portrayal of Dalits, Christians, Maravars and meat eaters as derogatory.

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