NEW YORK:   The news last week that the estate of Margaret Mitchell, author of "Gone With the Wind," had settled its copyright infringement suit with the publishers of a novel called "The Wind Done Gone" - in which the same events are narrated from the point of view of a slave - got me musing.

Every writer nurtures an idle fantasy, a project he or she tosses around from time to time in the minds but never actually gets around to putting down on paper. I have long wanted to exact a sort of post-colonial revenge on that arch imperial literary figure, Rudyard Kipling, by subverting his overpraised novel "Kim."

Kipling's tale of a British boy who grows up for some years as an Indian, wanders the streets picking up the languages, the habits and the insights of the land, is restored to Englishness and then returns years later as a British officer uniquely equipped to play the "Great Game" on behalf of the Raj seemed to me ripe for reversal. How about a novel about an Indian boy - let us call him Mik - who, as a result of an albino birth or advanced leucoderma, is pale enough to pass as a member of the melanin-deficient race that ruled India for two centuries? Mik might grow up in a British cantonment, be trained to rule at some British institution like Haileybury or Camberley (or even Sandhurst), imbibe the ideas and attitudes, and understand the weaknesses, of the colonials. He could then come back to India, rediscover his family and his roots, and turn his intimate knowledge of the oppressors against them as a fiery nationalist.

I never got around to writing it. But Mik came back to mind with the controversy over "The Wind Done Gone." The author, Alice Randall, wanted to counter Mitchell's romanticized white-plantation South with the perspective of the enslaved blacks who made the planters' prosperity possible. Her heroine, a slave, is the illegitimate half-sister of Mitchell's Scarlett O'Hara. The Mitchell estate did not succeed in its attempts to block publication, but the book carries a prominent disclaimer, that it is an "unauthorized parody" - rather than, as the estate had alleged, an unauthorized sequel.

The issue this raises is an intriguing one. To the extent that literature captures our imagination with a version of experience that privileges a particular point of view, isn't it desirable, even essential, that others give voice to those who were voiceless, silent, marginal, even absent in the original narrative?

Tom Stoppard, the brilliantly inventive British playwright, did precisely this in his early play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," in which he took two minor characters from "'Hamlet" and, in effect, rewrote Shakespeare by imagining the scenes the Bard left out, from the confused viewpoint of two hangers-on. John Updike also reinvented "Hamlet" in his recent novel 'Gertrude and Claudius." In "Mary Reilly," Valerie Martin retold Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" from the point of view of the doctor's maid. Herman Melville's classic "Moby Dick" underwent a feminist retelling in Sena Jeter Naslund's "Ahab's Wife."

Perhaps the most highly regarded example of the genre is Jean Rhys's now classic "Wide Sargasso Sea," in which she imagined the early life of the woman who became Rochester's wife in Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre." Shakespeare, Melville and Stevenson are not merely safely dead, but gone so long that copyright on their stories has expired - not the case with "Gone With the Wind." It seems the Mitchell estate wants to assert its exclusive right to market spinoffs of the well-known characters and might not be averse to licensing its own version from a slave's point of view. It just doesn't want someone else cashing in on the idea. With last week's settlement, someone else has.

As a novelist, though, I think I shall put Mik to rest for good. The most interesting stories we can tell are the ones that come out of our own imaginations, and about characters who have had no other lives than in our own minds.

Shashi Tharoor's most recent novel is "Riot." He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.

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