Indrani Aikath Gyaltsen (1952?1994) was an Indian novelist and columnist.

Early life [ edit ]

She 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 [ edit ]

She 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 [ edit ]

Indrani 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 [ edit ]

Soon 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 [ edit ]

She died after consuming sodium phosphate ( rat 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 ]