Kamal Ghorui
On social media, there is a controversy raging around an unusual person. She is an Instagram reels sensation unlike any other. A married woman from rural Bengal who gives us a peek into her daily routine while talking about things. The films of Takeshi Kitano and David Lynch. About the importance of menstrual leave. About the books she has read and the ideas that they have sparked. About going to the local mela and buying things. She is not exoticising rural life nor is she performing it. She is doing something that comes naturally to her and doesn’t quite grasp why this is so surprising to everyone else.
Her name is Pujarini Pradhan, and her Instagram account, @lifeofpujaa, has gathered close to 7 lakh followers. What is riveting about her is her lack of self-consciousness, her easy erudition and ability to talk about complex ideas with simplicity and directness. She is utterly at ease in her milieu and combines conversations about high cinema with joyfully shopping at melas and thinking aloud about her life. One can understand why she became so popular in such a short time.
And for a while, she received almost uniform appreciation. Her following grew by word-of-mouth, by people telling one another that they had to check her out. One felt elevated by discovering her. There was a sort of delight at being able to share such good news. This example of a rural woman speaking in not-quite-perfect English talking about things that should be impossible for her to talk about. The videos were heartwarming.
But it is worth recognising what exactly the heart was being warmed by. Not by the actual content she put out. Few responded to her thoughts on cinema. Her views on menstrual leave were widely appreciated but not engaged with in the way they would have been had an urban woman from the metro said the same thing. What people were responding to was the fact of her. A village woman who is articulate in English. A homemaker who knows world cinema better than most of her followers. What made for the enthusiastic reaction, was the surprise. And however well meant, surprise is another word for low expectations.
When we share a video of Puja and say “you have to see this,” we are not saying “what an interesting view on Tarkovsky’s cinema.” We are pointing to a delightful anomaly. We admire her, feel heartened by her, but we do not quite listen to her. We cannot look beyond who she is in all our admiration.
That easy celebration is now encountering some hurdles. Puja is monetising her content; she is collaborating with brands. Absolutely standard stuff for most popular creators, but not when it comes to her. A wellknown influencer critic accused the account of being an organised effort to monetise performed authenticity. Puja’s realness, the suggestion went, was itself an artfully constructed product. Urban audiences were consuming her out of liberal guilt.
The accusation works not because it is true but because it is unfalsifiable. Once a question like this is asked, there is no way to satisfactorily unask it. If she carries on, she is performing consistency. If she changes, she is rewriting her script. If she defends herself, she is protesting too much. If she stays silent, she acknowledges guilt. The question is not a question; it is a trap.
The questions about authenticity arrived precisely when Puja started making money. When she was producing her commentary for free, nobody questioned whether someone was writing her captions. What the audience had been calling authenticity was in reality her poverty. But there is a deeper truth at work here. The supporters and the detractors have more in common than either would admit. Both need her to remain extraordinary, because if she is ordinary, there is nothing to feel, no warmth, no suspicion, no content worth sharing. Both refuse to do the one thing that would have made the controversy impossible: simply engage with what she actually said. Treat her as a peer rather than a phenomenon.
The class difference is at the heart of both the admiration and the criticism. This is not just about social media, although the internet does have a way of diminishing what it serves to build. It is a problem of how we deal with class mobility when it appears unexpectedly. An IIT graduate heading a global company is a story we understand. A village woman talking about cinema we haven’t seen is something we need to create a new category for. It fits nothing that exists, and what fits nothing must be either celebrated as miraculous or dismissed as manufactured. There is a reason why a woman from rural Bengal evokes such intense reactions. She gives us proof that thoughtfulness and depth are not exclusively a function of circumstances and that the ideals a lot of us believe in are possible to arrive at without necessarily having the privileges we do. That there is something universal in those ideals. We want to believe she is possible because if she is not, everything wrong with the world is more intractable than we can bear to admit. Which is why the power runs the opposite way from how it appears. We need Puja more than she needs us. She was talking about David Lynch while cooking long before we found her. She will be doing it long after we move on. The real question was never whether she is authentic. It is whether we are ready to treat her as simply another person with interesting things to say. On current evidence, not quite yet.
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