Indrani Aikath Gyaltsen (1952–1994) was an Indian novelist and columnist.
Indrani Aikath Gyaltsen | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1952 Chaibasa, Bihar, India |
| Died | 1994 (aged 41–42) |
| Occupation | Freelance Journalist |
Early life
editShe was born in Chaibasa, Bihar in 1952 to a local coal-mine owner and had a privileged upbringing. She was educated at Loreto Convent School – a premier Catholic School in the nearby city of Jamshedpur, before leaving India to continue her studies at Barnard College, New York City.
Personal life
editShe was briefly married and was divorced, after which she moved to Calcutta where she was wooed by a succession of men, allegedly rejecting an Indian Army Officer because of "the Punjabi accent" of his spoken English. She ultimately remarried a tea-plantation owner of Tibetan origin and moved to an estate high above Darjeeling in the embattled north-eastern state of Assam.[citation needed]
She ran a hotel there and authored three novels: Daughters of the House, Cranes' Morning (1993) and Hold My Hand, I'm Dying, the last being published posthumously[1] after her suicide.
Mentorship of Khushwant Singh
editIndrani wrote to Khushwant Singh, a famous Indian man-of-letters, who answered her letters as he did of many aspiring young Indian writers, encouraging her. She mailed her first novel to him chapter-by-chapter, and he mentioned her to David Davidar, head of Penguin Books in India.
Plagiarism scandal
editSoon after its publication, it became clear that her second novel, Cranes' Morning, had been plagiarised from The Rosemary Tree by the English novelist Elizabeth Goudge, which had been published in London by Hodder & Stoughton in 1956. Molly Moore of the Washington Post Foreign Service wrote: "Aikath-Gyaltsen recast the setting to an Indian village, changing the names and switching the religion to Hindu but often keeping the story word-for-word the same".[2] When the plagiarism was uncovered, Crane's Morning had been published by Penguin Books in India and Ballantine Books in the U.S. but not yet in the UK.[2]
Suicide
editShe died after consuming poison in 1994 not long after the plagiarism was discovered.[citation needed] She had come back to her father's ancestral house where she was engaged in a contentious battle over property and assets against her own mother and sister, from whom she was estranged.[citation needed]
Khushwant Singh wrote about her in his book Women and Men in My Life, which he dedicated to her.[3]
Novels
edit- Daughters of the House (1992)
- Cranes' Morning (1993)
- Hold My Hand, I'm Dying (unknown)
References
edit- ^ See: Khushwant Singh, Women and Men in my Life, 1995. As of 2013, the book was not available through such agencies as Amazon.
- ^ a b Molly Moore, "Plagiarism and mystery" Archived 2012-08-12 at the Wayback Machine, Washington Post Foreign Service, 27 April 1994. Retrieved 2012-11-11.
- ^ Khushwant Singh, Women and Men in My Life, 1995