It’s been a busy year, and a bustling few weeks for the makers of the International Emmy nominee, Made in Heaven (MIH), since its much-awaited second season dropped on Amazon Prime – a show adored across quarters of urban, Savarna India, which is seemingly the show’s target demographic.
As an Intellectual Property (IP) and a cultural phenomenon, the show is very now, albeit preachy and predictable, and doesn’t shy away from getting into terrains and social issues that filmmakers and studio executives would typically approach with a fair degree of caution.
Audiences waited with bated breath for four years through pandemic-induced delays for Excel Entertainment and Tiger Baby Films to add the second installment of the show.
This is but a cherished addition to their larger, widely appreciated canon.
The Stark Resemblance Between Dutt and Menke
The most talked about and critically acclaimed episode (spoilers ahead) in a rather pale season is episode five, The Heart Skipped a Beat, directed by Neeraj Ghaywan.
Its central conflict is the privileged tone-deafness of the fiancé and prospective in-laws of the protagonist, Pallavi Menke (brilliantly played by Radhika Apte), and the subsequent assertion arc of her Dalit identity.
Menke is troubled with her Savarna lover and his family’s politely couched casteism that progresses quickly to a more pronounced and ugly kind at her suggestion of planning a twin wedding ceremony: 'Dalit-Buddhist’ wedding rituals alongside the groom’s family demands for Savarna Hindu rituals.
The to-be bride’s mere proclamation of wanting rituals that honour her Ambedkarite-Navayana legacy disrupts caste purity dynamics within the upper caste groom’s family and the rest of the episode is premised upon the turbulent reconciling of their deep cleavages.
Menke is an accomplished writer, academic and public figure who 'comes out’ as Dalit in a critical scene of the episode as an Indian in America who’s 'made it,’ asserting her pride of being a grandchild to a woman who cleaned toilets in Savarna India.
A couple of minutes into the episode, like many viewers, I too instantly thought of Yashica Dutt’s pathbreaking memoir, Coming Out as Dalit (2019), published by Aleph. It gave me great joy to think that her book’s premise made it to an OTT show’s subplot.
The Politics of Copyright
I’d assumed the makers of the show would have optioned 'adaption, abridgement and/or research’ rights for Coming Out as Dalit for the episode’s core development and then gone on to take what are called ‘creative liberties’ to further fictionalise Menke’s character for the screenplay, as is the norm in the making of any creative project.
More often than not, film and streaming projects about complex, part real, part fictionalised plots involve the buying of rights of, in many cases, multiple books that become part of the research corpus that then inform the drama’s writing.
What is unique to this case is the near proximity of biographical and lived aspects of Dutt’s life that bear resemblance to Menke’s screen life.
The Town Square That Is Social Media
What has followed since is a polarising and heated public debate on social media, where thousands of people who’d congratulated Dutt, having assumed she was party to the making of the episode, subsequently discovered that her labour went unacknowledged from the show’s opening and end credits.
Nowhere, apart from Ghaywan’s public Instagram post with a nod to Dutt’s memoir along with Sujatha Gidla’s Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (HarperCollins India) and Suraj Yengde’s book Caste Matters (Penguin Random House India), does the episode written by Alankrita Shrivastava, Zoya Akhtar, Reema Kagti with additional story credits by Neeraj Ghaywan and Rahul Nair, acknowledge IP and copyright sources that inspired its writing.
Dutt wrote a heartbroken response expressing her hurt for not being credited and sought permission from and asserted her rightful reclamation of her life's work evoking a long tradition of Dalit women’s labour being stolen by Savarna India.
Gidla herself has tweeted about the insincerity of the makers who have ended up factionalising and pitting Dalit writers against one another when calling out the show for 'stealing’
She’s advised Dutt to pursue legal action like Bomman and Bellie of the Academy Award-winning documentary by Kartiki Gonsalves and Guneet Monga, The Elephant Whisperers, have. The Mahout couple has sent a legal notice to Sikhya Entertainment alleging exploitation and inadequate compensation as well as demanding a sum of ₹ 2 crore as a goodwill gesture for their labour.
Even if the episode wasn’t directly based on Dutt’s memoir — as the show’s producers have categorically insisted, denying any claims of misappropriating it in a public statement — to the readers of the book like myself, it was screamingly inspired by her life, among other sources.
The Makers’ Version Reeks of Entitlement
It takes a village to make a show as expensive as MIH, the first season of which alone costs 100 crores as per an interview the show’s co-protagonist Arjun Mathur who plays Karan Mehra gave to Newslaundry in 2019. All technicians, hairstyling interns, ‘runners,’ locations, hospitality, production, camera, and finance crew are duly credited in the show’s end credits as is the norm and ethics of film and streaming content-making in India.
It takes an army of publicists, communication teams, and the best of legal minds for the kind of statement they issued in the 'public relations disaster’ that followed. This carefully drafted statement reads like a press release and is difficult to reconcile with, given my own admiration for the kind of work Tiger Baby Films and Excel Entertainment have championed over the last two decades.
Among Dalit-Bahujan circles, the statement has been perceived to be an arrogant and dismissive cop-out move that goes as far as to dispossess and discredit Dutt of her trauma, her emotional and literary labour, its core argument being that 'coming out’ is an 'academic LGBTQIA term’ and ‘was used by Prof (Dr) Sumit Baudh in the Indian caste identity context in 2007 in an article published by Tarshi.’ To Dutt, this response ‘comes from a condescending place.’ As I see it, it has ended up adding insult to injury.
The Savarna Cultural Industry of India
As an editor and publishing professional, having been in the industry for close to a decade, I routinely help and advise authors who want to see their books to be adapted for screen. It becomes a near-reality for only a fraction of India’s writers.
Famously forgotten is the row over Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone, the source IP for Three Idiots that reportedly earned over ₹ 400 crores, while Bhagat made a pittance of ₹ 9.9 lakhs without being credited for it in the movie.
For those of us in the literary, media, and creative ecosystem that conveniently do not provision for affirmative action within our privatised labour economies, and who are complicit in the largely Savarna composition of our workplaces, editorial, and newsrooms, we owe our underrepresented writers and peers from marginalised identities such as the Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi or queer communities a greater degree of caregiving, mentoring, and platforming.
The writer’s room and key positions in the making of this episode such as the directorial role do not suffer from the problem of representation – show running this episode is Ghaywan – an incredibly sensitive and stellar film director who is a Dalit himself. The title The Heart Skipped a Beat is a fitting one as it is the most loved, heartfelt, and soulfully portrayed episode plot in the entire season.
Where team MIH erred is due copyright and compensation. It begs the saying that apart from representation and amplification, what the Savarna media ecosystem also owes a Dalit writer, who is structurally deprived of a level playing field so as to access mobility, education, nutrition, employment, love, and acceptance in Savarna India, is fair compensation.
A whole series of variables determine which book becomes a bestseller and which remains undermarketed and undiscovered.
A Structural Imbalance
Much has changed for some writers who now secure better film adaptation deals in the era of OTT streaming that have a massive content flooding mandate. A senior non-fiction writer reportedly bagged a multi-crore deal for the adaptation of his biography of a 20th-century historical Indian luminary.
Sacred Games, one of Netflix’s multi-billion dollar projects reportedly earned Vikram Chandra, the writer of the novel, big money. The advance for his book alone was reportedly a multi-million dollar deal. But not everyone has similar fortunes.
Sometimes, it takes for a writer to really find success with their third or fourth book. Many go unsung and underread because of the dominance of self-help, romance, mythology, and sagas that occupy a bulk of what post-liberalisation India reads.
It is also a business that’s disproportionately unfair to what are called ‘mid-list’ writers who sell a few thousand copies and empirically secure only the semblance of a micro percentage of commercial success.
Debut writers like Dutt have it even more difficult. Literary festivals tend to favour and invite crowd-pullers. Book reviewers and the media that cover new books, an increasingly shrinking space, tend to go with bestsellers or popular writers. Amazon’s algorithm is already biased against a debut writer who has a limited digital footprint and presence.
The advance against future royalties that a debut writer typically secures in India is a marginal sum mostly to cover basic expenses in the making, research, and writing of a book.
Yet, what drives them is the passion with which independent publishing houses like Zubaan, Yoda, Roli, Speaking Tiger, Juggernaut, Niyogi, Navayana, Pratilipi-Westland, Jaico, Manjul, Panther’s Paw, Seagull, among others publish their lists. In this case, Aleph, Dutt’s Indian publisher, invested a great deal of work in championing her book. It is not without cause to argue that India’s Savarna publishing ecosystem has failed its Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi writers, prompting visionary publishers like Yogesh Maitreya to start Panther’s Paw that exclusively publishes Dalit writing in India.
The Politics of Transformative Justice
Most writers cannot live as writers and must have multiple gigs or steady jobs to support themselves. This is also true of many publishing professionals. Writing is but one of the things you may do. Writers write for the sake and ethic of writing. It pays no one’s bills except for some successes and outliers.
Both Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell, the winners of 2022 International Booker Prize for Tomb of Sand, wrote and translated books for decades for a small but dedicated readership that consistently engaged with their work.
The Booker Prize deservedly catapulted them to a global public stage. With due credit to their stellar literary journeys, prizes are, at the end of the day, assessed by people, a jury which comes with their socialisation, prejudices, and tastes.
As Arundhati Roy famously remarked after her Booker win, "It’s still the judgement of five people and if it had been other judges, it could have been another book. And I don’t think it means that my book is a better book than another book. It’s just a luckier book… I’ll write another book if I have another book to write, not because I won a prize for my last one.”
Not all books get as lucky. It is against this context that Dutt deserves her due.
It isn’t a gross exaggeration to say that those we hold most dear may often disappoint us the most and whose transformative journeys we may be most invested in. The makers, cast, producers, multi-directors of MIH have a special place in the hearts of their viewers. Everybody wishes for the show to thrive, gain more success, and bag awards, and critical acclaim just like we would hope for Dutt to write many more books, each deserving of more success.
So, what does the work of repair and reconciliation look like? What would the contours of restorative and transformative justice be in this case? First, before anything else, is labour – one of deep listening, of apology, care, and course correction.
The ethical thing for team MIH would be to own up to the negligence, misjudgement and acknowledge the harm caused. Creating room for a safe space for a conversation to negotiate the compensation for Dutt’s labour is the right thing to do. They will emerge out of this with greater love, respect, and a renewed fandom. There’s a universe of books, writers, and stories waiting to be adapted and be 'inspired’ by. After all, so much life has gone by since Shakespeare happened.
(Chirag Thakkar is a publishing professional, writer and editor based in Delhi. He tweets @chiraghthakkar. The views expressed here are entirely his own and do not represent that of an organisation nor those of the Quint.)
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