On the Sevvarali Poocharam plagiarism, misrepresentation allegations, Anjali Tripathi writes on appropriation and whether the Indian copyright and other IP laws are equipped to handle such sensitive cases alleging caste based appropriation. Anjali is a fourth-year law student at JGLS with an interest in IP rights, access to education, and the creative arts. Her previous posts can be accessed here.
Seeing Red, Silencing Truth: The Theft and Caste-Washing of ‘Sevvarali Poocharam’
By Anjali Tripathi
Imagine working for years on something that is personal, painful and important to you. Something which is difficult, but you know needs to be spoken about. And then one day, you hear about someone more privileged taking that voice away from you to make it their own.
On April 24th, Tamil writer and journalist Jeyarani received a text from a friend: “Look, they’ve made a film out of your story!” The film in question, Seeing Red, had just premiered at the MAMI Film Festival under the mentorship of acclaimed director Shalini Vijaykumar. By the end of her first viewing, Jeyarani was devastated, not flattered. It did not feel like something she could be proud of because this wasn’t homage. It was theft of her identity, her story, her life – in broad daylight.
The makers of Seeing Red allegedly plagiarised her story, Sevvarali Poocharam, right down to the period, specific gestures, and emotional arc. What’s worse is that they had also committed a subtler, more insidious violation: they caste-washed it. This story about a lower-caste woman’s ritualised abuse from her rural home towns was lifted and inserted into a Brahmin household. In this act of blatant and hurtful erasure, her lived experiences, political meanings, and her hard work were taken from her.
Legal scholar Mathias Siems defines unethical appropriation through three thresholds: denial of origin, disrespect of cultural context, and diminishment of the source culture’s significance, which align directly with this case. This is a case study in appropriation, both legal and social, and poses an uncomfortable but urgent question: What happens when the law’s definitions of originality, authorship, and harm fail to account for caste-based appropriation?
The Story That Was Stolen
Jeyarani’s Sevvarali Poocharam, part of her anthology Sennilam (2024), is a beautiful example of memory-work, protest literature, and community testimony. The story chronicles the lives of women from marginalised castes subjected to pey pidithal (spirit possession) and saami aadudhal (ritual trance). These practices function less as healing than as tools of patriarchal control and caste-based violence in these communities.
The protagonist, Senbagam, is accused of being possessed after a series of misfortunes befall the village. A public punishment disguised as a remedy follows, led by self-acclaimed priest Savukku Sudalai. Then comes the climactic twist where Senbagam, along with other women, turns the ritualised whipping into an act of rebellion. This moment is cathartic, political, and real for the viewers. Jeyarani has seen this world first-hand: “I wrote Sevvarali Poocharam to release the weight from my memory.” But in Seeing Red, that weight is lightened, whitened, and woven into a very different fabric.
The ‘Adaptation’ of the Story
According to Jeyarani, even though the arc itself has been preserved in the film, the ‘soul’ of the story has been displaced and, as a result, the very exploitation it claims to critique has been replicated. This has been done by them by using the veil of artistic liberty as a shield. As Chinmayi Arun argues, in the context of digital platforms and information governance, silencing of marginalised voices often occurs not through overt censorship, but through systems of erasure that render those voices unintelligible or unrecognised within dominant frameworks of visibility and legitimacy. This conceptual framing is critical to understanding how caste-washing operates as both a cultural and communicative act of violence.
Between the Law and the Gaps
Let’s turn to the law. Under the Indian Copyright Act, 1957, Section 57 protects an author’s moral rights (you can read more about it in this post by Mrinalini Kochupillai), including the right to claim authorship and to prevent distortion of the work. In Eastern Book Company v. D.B. Modak (2008), the Supreme Court reaffirmed that moral rights include protection against distortion of the original work, yet also set high thresholds for proving harm. On the surface, this should be a textbook case: Sevvarali Poocharam is a published, original literary work; Seeing Red bears significant resemblance; the author was never credited or approached.
However, the situation opens up a can of worms for Indian IP law because it forces us to confront harms a spill beyond just individual authorship and into collective memory, culture, and lived experience. But moral rights litigation is slow, underused, and often fails in cases of idea vs. expression debate. The deeper problem here is one the law barely recognises: what if the harm isn’t just to an author, but to a community?
Scholars of Traditional Cultural Expressions (TCEs) and indigenous IP have long argued that copyright regimes are inadequate to protect folklore, oral narratives, and collective cultural knowledge, especially in postcolonial contexts. As noted by Michael Brown in “Who Owns Native Culture?” copyright frameworks often fail to address collective harm to marginalised communities. India lacks a sui generis law for TCEs, unlike South Africa’s Indigenous Knowledge Act, which offers community-level authorship and protection against distortion. A similar framework exists in the Pacific region, such as the Fiji government’s Traditional Cultural Expression Bill 2016, which grants perpetual communal copyright, highlighting India’s lack of such protection. Could Sevvarali Poocharam be treated as a form of TCE? Perhaps. A sui generis TCE framework goes beyond individual copyright by recognising collective authorship, giving communities perpetual rights over expressions. It provides remedies for distortion or misappropriation without needing to prove individual authorship. Such mechanisms directly address the gaps in copyright law by protecting cultural integrity and ensuring that benefits return to the source community.
Appropriation as a Social Crime
This Brahmanical painting of Dalit paint is the same sleight of hand that turns the Kunbi saree into high fashion that is not produced in Goa any longer (where it is primarily from). Instead, it is popularised by weavers in Karnataka while erasing its agricultural roots. Another harmful instance is that of a company that sells blue-dyed couture “inspired by Hong Kong protestors” without acknowledging the police violence behind it. As legal scholar Mathias Siems categorises, this act meets all three thresholds of unethical appropriation:
- Denial of origin (no credit to Jeyarani),
- Disrespect of cultural context (transposition to a dominant caste setting),
- Diminishment of the source culture’s significance (stripping the original community’s meaning and power).
As Rancière might say, this is the redistribution of the sensible: turning speakers into background noise, and trauma into commercialisation.
What Justice Looks Like (And What It Doesn’t)
Jeyarani is not asking for credit or compensation. She’s asking for the removal of the film, a public apology from director Shalini Vijayakumar, and for MAMI to rescind its selection. Why reject compensation? Because to accept credit would be to legitimise distortion. .
In IP scholarship, we often debate the limits of free speech, artistic liberty, and moral rights. But some stories sit at the edges of these frameworks – they are not just told, but are carried. They are sacred texts of memory, borne by those without a state, without copyright, and without institutional protection.
To steal these stories and caste-wash is erasure at its finest, made palatable through different forms of disguise. Of course, these are not always simple judgments. Who decides what is beyond the reach of artistic reinterpretation? Where do we draw the line between homage and harm? These are difficult questions, and our current legal frameworks are ill-equipped to answer them.
Still, acknowledging complexity should not prevent us from recognising when harm is real and ongoing. As these dilemmas become more common, we must ask not just what the law allows, but what justice demands – and begin to imagine new frameworks that can reckon with memory, power, and the ethics of storytelling.
A Final Reflection on Who Gets to Tell, and Who Gets Taken
As a young woman navigating the intersections of law, art, and identity, I find myself asking: What happens when the very spaces that claim to amplify marginalised voices become complicit in their erasure? Platforms like MAMI, creators under the mentorship of big names, and even audiences – must ask themselves: Whose story is this? Who is profiting from this pain?
To “see red” is one thing. To recognise whose blood it is? Quite another.