It is a battle for credit and images of Muslim freedom fighters of India. A few days after Salar Jung Museum hosted an exhibition of freedom fighters who were Muslim; Syed Naseer Ahamad, a former journalist, has come forward with a claim that he is the author of the information and that the drawings are copied from his book, The Immortals , published in 2014.
“I have been working on freedom fighters for a long time. My first book was a 32-page Telugu volume of Muslim women freedom fighters of India that was published in 1998. I have written 13 books in all and they are all focussed on freedom fighters.
For this 352-page, The Immortals , I spent nearly 17 years, and now comes this,” says Mr. Naseer.
“They have reproduced errors and wrong punctuation of the book in the text used at the exhibition. And that’s why I am convinced that they have copied the text. While my book uses the greyscale drawings of V. Justice, Imran’s exhibition uses line drawings but with the same angle,” informed Mr. Naseer.
While Syed Naseer Ahamad claimed that he met Imran in 2012 in Santoshnagar in a café beside Yadagiri Hotel and handed over a model copy of his book, Imran denied any such meeting.
“My younger brother Mobin met him as he wanted a sponsor for the book. My brother gave him Rs. 2.5 lakh to get the book published,” says M.A. Imran, who is an aeronautics engineer, and works in Muscat.
Imran, who has taken the exhibition to Delhi, says he has worked with an artist called Mallikarjun from Nalgonda over time to stage the exhibition.
“I am a portrait artiste. I was approached by Imran in 2013. And the first drawing I did was of Hazrat Mahal,” says Mallikarjun, showing some of the drawings sketched with a sepia-tinted crayon.
The drawings in the book as well as those in the exhibition have an uncanny resemblance to each other.
Both Mr. Imran and Mr. Naseer are now threatening legal action against each other. And how this mystery of similar text and drawings in a book from 2014, and an exhibition from 2016, unravels remains to be seen.
