Summary of this article
India has always known ‘how’ to recognise intelligence. It simply prefers it to arrive from the right addresses, surnames and geographies
The unease around Pujarini Pradhan does not emerge as crude dismissal, but as something far more revealing—suspicion dressed up as analysis and discomfort rebranded as curiosity
Influencers within the urban Instagram commentary circuit did not attack Puja directly. Instead, they floated the possibility that she was constructed, perhaps even an industry plant
We have always been a nation of crabs in a barrel. The moment one seeks upward mobility, or steps to freedom, one is taken down by us, or, by them. I remember my college life, early 2000s, as a lower middle class, starry-eyed, student in Presidency college (obviously savarna, even with the class shackles), I was asked by a senior on my first day about Michelangelo Antonio, the Italian director. I said no, my senior nodded his head and exclaimed, this is what we get in Presidency College nowadays. He was first generation, and I was half second generation admitted to Presidency College.
I recently came across the profile of life of pujaa and her detractors, and people questioning how she is doing, saying, working, on things outside of her station. Memories came back like an episode of delirium tremens. And my past regressions into this territory also made me cringe at what urban peer pressure makes us do to people who are different, socially, culturally, and within the binaries of the urban and the rural.
India has always known ‘how’ to recognise intelligence. It simply prefers it to arrive from the right addresses, surnames and geographies. Which is why the unease around life of pujaa does not emerge as crude dismissal, but as something far more revealing—suspicion dressed up as analysis and discomfort rebranded as curiosity.
Influencers within the urban Instagram commentary circuit did not attack Puja directly. Instead, they performed a ritual that Indian elites have perfected over generations. They questioned her plausibility and consistency. They floated the possibility that she was constructed, perhaps even an industry plant. This is not a critique. This is gatekeeping in (im)polite language. This is how power maintains itself while pretending to interrogate.
What unsettles them is not what she says but the fact that she says it at all, and from where she says it. A woman in a rural household, speaking fluent English with a strong Bengali cadence, discussing parallel cinema and feminist politics without institutional endorsement or urban signages, disrupts a deeply held belief that knowledge must have a specific origin. There is no visible infrastructure of legitimacy, no aesthetic reassurance, no carefully curated background to certify her thoughts. Just speech, and speech, when it comes from the wrong place, begins to look like fraud. The questions that follow are predictable. How does she know this? How does she have the time? How does she speak like this? These are not innocent questions. They are acts of disbelief masquerading as inquiry. They are the modern equivalent of checking someone’s credentials at the door, except the door here is cultural and the credentials are invisible and/or inadequate.
For years, the same ecosystem has thrived on the circulation of rural cringe. Videos of non-urban speakers struggling with English, performing exaggerated gestures, or appearing out of place in digital environments are endlessly shared, reacted to, and monetised. Urban creators build entire personas around reacting to this content, converting discomfort into humour and difference into engagement. The tone is often framed as affectionate or harmless, but the hierarchy is never in doubt. The villager is content and remains an idiot. The urban viewer is an interpreter. The laughter flows in one direction. It is an economy that depends on asymmetry. Rural awkwardness is profitable. Rural confidence is unacceptable. Awkwardness confirms the viewer’s superiority. Confidence shatters it. This is why Puja produces anxiety rather than amusement. She refuses to be legible as either spectacle or subject of pity. She speaks as an equal, and equality is bad for all business. The ‘juggernaut’ of capitalism or even the South Asian diaspora must convert into a dosage of nostalgic cringe.
This is where the rural-urban divide reveals itself, not as a simple difference of geography but as a carefully maintained structure of power. The city does not merely consume the village; it defines it. It decides what counts as authentic rural life and what counts as deviation. It assigns roles and punishes those who step outside them. The village must either be backward or resilient, never complex. It must either suffer or entertain, never interpret. It must remain available for extraction, whether that extraction is labour, culture, or content. When someone like Puja disrupts this arrangement, the response is swift. She is not engaged with. She is interrogated and doubted, not debated. Because to accept her would require a collapse of the hierarchy that makes urban authority possible, profitable and purposeful.
The accusation of being an industry plant performs an important function in this process. It restores order. It reassures the viewer that knowledge has not escaped its proper channels, that fluency still belongs to those who have historically controlled it.
This logic has appeared before, almost unchanged. During the 2020–2021 Indian farmers’ protests, farmers were not only argued against but culturally audited. Their use of English was treated as evidence of inauthenticity. Their use of smartphones was treated as evidence of manipulation. Their consumption of pizza became a national talking point, as though carbohydrates could invalidate political demands. The question was never about food or language. It was about permission. Who is allowed to appear modern? Who is allowed to articulate? Who is allowed to exceed the limits assigned to them without forfeiting credibility?
Puja’s critics repeat this logic with remarkable consistency. The village can speak, but only in certain tones. It can appear, but only in certain forms. Anything beyond that must be explained away.
As Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, taste is a form of distinction. In India, that distinction is inseparable from caste and class histories that have long regulated access to language, education, and cultural production. To speak English fluently, to discuss cinema (art or commercial), to articulate feminist critique, these are not neutral acts. They are historically guarded privileges.
When Puja performs these acts without displaying the expected lineage of privilege, the reaction is not admiration but suspicion. She is not seen as expanding the category. She is seen as violating it. This is where savarna discomfort reveals itself most clearly. It is not always loud. It does not always announce itself as exclusion. It appears as doubt, as curiosity, as the quiet insistence that something does not add up. But what does not add up is not her existence. It is the framework used to understand her.
There are, of course, voices within the same ecosystem, including Kusha Kapila, who have supported Puja and recognised the originality of her work. But even this support reveals the persistence of hierarchy. Validation continues to move from the urban centre outward, as though legitimacy must still be granted rather than assumed. The structure bends but does not break. The village is still waiting to be certified. The city still believes it has the authority to certify.
At the centre of this moment is a discomfort that no one quite wants to name. Puja does not perform struggle. She does not narrate her life as a journey from deprivation to enlightenment. She does not aestheticise hardship for consumption. She simply exists within her life and speaks from it. That ease is intolerable. Because ease, in India, is supposed to be inherited. It is supposed to belong to those who have always had access, those who can afford to appear effortless because their effort is already secured. When ease appears elsewhere, it looks like theft.
What we are witnessing is not a debate about authenticity. It is a defence of territory. It is an attempt to preserve a map in which knowledge flows in one direction, from the city to the village, from the elite to the ordinary, from the authorised to the excluded. Puja disrupts that map simply by existing outside it. She does not announce a revolution. She does not frame herself as exceptional. She does something far more dangerous. She normalises what was supposed to be rare. She makes intelligence from the margins appear ordinary.
The question, then, is not whether she is real. The question is why so many people need her not to be. Because if she is, then the categories that structure Indian social life begin to collapse. The urban is no longer the sole site of thought. The rural is no longer a passive backdrop. Language is no longer a gate that can be guarded indefinitely. And those who have long been spoken about are now speaking for themselves, without translation, without permission, without apology.
That is the real crisis. Not authenticity, but authority. Not performance, but control. Puja does not ask for entry. She does not seek validation. She simply speaks. And in doing so, she exposes the insecurity of classes that have long mistaken access for intelligence, and proximity to power for truth.
Anirban Ghosh is assistant professor and director, Centre for Writing, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Gautam Buddha Nagar, Uttar Pradesh
