A plagiarism row has hit the Malayalam literary scene following allegations of similarities in the plots of noted fiction writer K. R Meera’s Kalachi and popular author Haritha Savithri’s Zin.

The debate initially began in the social media after Ms. Savithri referred to literary theft and the cover-ups made by those involved in it without mentioning anybody’s name in her Facebook post in May 2026. It expanded into a controversy after a few netizens wondered whether she was mentioning about the similarities in the plots of her work and Ms. Meera’s Kalachi as both the novels featured women travelling into conflict-hit regions in search of their lovers.

Zin was published in 2022 and it received the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for Best Novel (2023), while Kalachi was published in 2025.

Meera’s response

Though Ms. Meera maintained silence over the controversy initially, she came up with a detailed Facebook post on Tuesday rejecting the allegations. She asked whether a novel that began publication in November 2020 derived its idea from a book published in 2022 or did the 2022 book derived ideas from a novel already published in 2020.

Ms. Meera recalled that the she began writing the novel in 2019 and started publishing it as a series in a web magazine from November 16, 2020. She said the complete plot of her work was “evident in the first chapter itself.” She recalled that her attempts to travel to Kazakhstan as part of the research for her novel was hit by the pandemic crisis in 2020. However, she was able to undertake the journey in 2022 after flight services had resumed.

In her reply on Facebook, Ms. Savithri said there were fundamental similarities between the books and that these could have been avoided. She said she “knew” that Ms. Meera had read Zin when it was published. “The controversy would not have arisen if the writer had avoided the basic similarities, despite being aware of the content of my novel,” she said.

She pointed out that the social media posts that referred to the serial publication of Kalachi from November 2020 failed to mention that only the first six chapters had appeared online.