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For much of her college life in West Bengal’s Midnapore city, Pujarini Pradhan felt invisible. “If you ask people in my college, they probably won’t remember me,” she said.
Unlike the girls from “big families” of the city, Pradhan was from a village in East Midnapore. “I used to go wearing a salwar suit, and one look at me they knew that I came from a village,” she said.
But Pradhan was fascinated by the world that her co-ed college opened up. She was “fascinated” by the girls she saw there. “They wore jeans and tops, their hair was so silky, their manner of talking was so confident,” she told Scroll.
She made no friends, barring two other students from nearby villages. “Nobody knew us,” said Pradhan, who studied English literature from 2019 to 2021. “We just came, attended college, studied and left,” Her classmates even forgot to inform them about their farewell party.
But college was not only about being ignored by those who seemed, at the time, better than her. It introduced Pradhan – now a 26-year-old influencer who goes by the name of @lifeofpujaa on Instagram – to the internet.
“I’ve been on social media since I was 18 years old,” she said. “I wouldn’t know the world outside if it were not for the internet. But people won’t necessarily teach it to you. You find out by going online,” she said.
In less than a year, Pradhan’s Instagram account, where she posts in English about her life as a woman in an East Midnapore village, has gathered 7.5 lakh followers, brand deals from Netflix and Audible – and a not-inconsiderable fandom.
She speaks to her followers about the books she reads and the films she watches – Rosarita by Anita Desai and The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, the films of Japanese actor and director Takeshi Kitano – and shares her feminist reflections on womanhood and motherhood. As a woman in a rural setting who knows her mind and speaks in English, she challenges stereotypes about who is considered intellectual and influential.
Prerana Subramaniam, a cultural studies scholar and content creator herself, says that Pradhan “quietly unsettles a hierarchy through her content”.
“What makes Pujarini Pradhan stand out is not only that she speaks about books, films, and ordinary life in English, but the setting and the composure from which she does it,” Subramaniam said. “She speaks from a domestic, small-town world that Indian audiences still do not automatically associate with intellectual authority, aesthetic confidence, or interpretive ease. That is why her presence feels larger than ‘content’.”
Last month, Pradhan found herself at the centre of a social media storm as content creators Niharika Jain and Aishwarya Subramanyam questioned if she was “completely authentic” or if she was “performing a carefully curated persona” – and even if she might be an “industry plant”.
They wondered how she was making such reels when she herself spoke about not having enough “social and cultural capital” or leisure and insinuated that she had hired agencies to do a lot of her work.
Pradhan’s response, when it came, was characteristically spunky.
First, she pointed out that it only took her 15 to 20 minutes to shoot and edit her response video and that this was “not something magical” but something that “anyone can do”.
Then she noted how creators like Jain and Subramanyam wanted to typecast her into the mould of a suffering village woman. “ They want to see me suffering in every video, they want me to complain about my life, they want me to seem sad,” she said. “But the moment I started earning money from my videos and the moment I started giving liberal opinions on feminism or anything they felt like I am a danger.”
In an interview with Scroll, Pradhan looked back at her journey to becoming a content creator. She recalled how she taught herself and learned from others how to access films, books and other information. People like her, said Pradhan, “have made our pathway on our own”.
A digital native
Pradhan is the eldest daughter among three siblings from a rural family in East Midnapore. She declined to reveal the name of her village.
She is also the first in the family to finish a bachelor’s degree. Her father is a shopkeeper and her mother a homemaker.
Pradhan considers herself privileged for having completed her graduation in English honours. “If I hadn’t gone far to attend college then I might not have attained the kind of exposure I did,” she said.
After her graduation, she wanted to study for a Master’s degree and find a job.
But the Covid-19 lockdown resulted in her spending one and a half years at home, during which she faced intense pressure from her mother to get married.
As she had said in her posts, Pradhan did not want to marry early in life. “Whenever I used to say no to marriage, she would accuse me of having a romantic relationship with someone else,” she told Scroll. “She couldn’t understand that people could have desires in life other than getting married.”
But her mother also insisted that Pradhan should be able to continue her education after marriage, when her husband’s family approached them for her hand.
“I thought it was a great opportunity too,” Pradhan said. “I would finish my education and I would get to escape my mother too,” she said.
So, at the age of 21, she was married to a man from a neighbouring village.
In 2022, soon after her wedding, Pradhan enrolled in a Master’s course. Since the college was three hours from her home, she planned to stay at a hostel near her college on weekdays and travel back home on weekends.
For three months, Pradhan did her best but the constant travel and other difficulties made her fall sick and she eventually dropped out of the course.
Her husband encouraged her to get a B.Ed degree from a college closer home. But Pradhan could not enroll for the course as the college asked for a “migration certificate” from her earlier college, which she did not have. He then bought her books to study for the West Bengal Public Service Commission exams. Pradhan prepared for the exams until she got pregnant.
After her son was born in 2023, Pradhan said she fell into “something like post-partum depression”. “I felt I had not been able to accomplish anything and was sitting at home without a purpose,” she said.
She tried taking up some freelance work in marketing or translation, but there was nobody to guide her.
About eight months ago, Pradhan began playing around with making video stories and posting on Instagram. As a digital native, she had experimented with social media a lot and even ran a meme account earlier, but she was hesitant to focus on herself. “Whenever I used to see a new app, I would end up opening an account,” she said.
Her first forays on Instagram were tentative. “I was initially very insecure on Instagram, I used to think I didn’t look good,” she said. “I made multiple accounts and deleted them.”
After posting a few short reels about everyday moments, Pradhan in September posted a reel in which she spoke in English about being mocked for making reels.
When she checked her account an hour later, she was stunned to see that it had received 50,000 views. “I don’t speak English in my daily life,” she said. “And for four-five years, I had not even practised speaking it. But while cutting vegetables, I made another video in English so that people in my village wouldn’t mock me. That is the reel which went the most viral. I got one lakh followers because of that reel.”
Soon, Pradhan realised that people were interested in her and her thoughts, so she began telling them more. She made reels on a range of themes that she thought her audience would connect with – curly hair, body hair, patriarchal rituals in weddings.
“One time, a man commented online that anything is better than girls dancing on Instagram,” she recalled. “So I made a reel about that too, saying that if I knew how to dance I would have been very happy because I never got a chance to learn singing, dancing or drawing.”
A day in the life
As her followers have grown, Pradhan has become consistent with her posts.
Her day starts around 7.30 in the morning. Both her mother-in-law and her husband share household chores and make adjustments for Pradhan to be able to make content.
“My mother-in-law knows that I do this work so she doesn’t wake me up,” she said. In the mornings, if she is not cooking lunch, she helps out in the kitchen and then escapes to the terrace for a bit to work.
As a young mother with a two-year-old son, her day revolves around taking care of him. In the afternoons, when her son takes a long nap, Pradhan watches films, shoots or edits her videos. In the evenings, she sits next to her son and reads.
It is her husband who cooks in the evenings. At night, when her family has fallen asleep, Pradhan gets time to read, edit and prepare for her videos, at times staying up as late as 1 in the morning.
By now, Pradhan’s entire extended family has learnt about her social media success and are supportive of her. However, most people in her village are yet to learn about her fame, except for a young neighbour who helps her out with her work.
‘A filmmaker’s eye’
Lately, Pradhan has also begun sharing extended videos, set to music and shot like films that capture the beauty of the mundane in her daily life. They have received a lot of praise, with some fans observing that Pradhan has “a filmmaker’s eye”.
Pradhan said she had been making videos for a while, but she was not sure if they were worth showing to others.
Her love for movies goes back to a time between 2018 and 2023, when she devoured a lot of films on her phone. “I watched more films than the number of books I read, because books are expensive,” she said. “One book costs Rs 500-Rs 600 and I didn’t like to trouble my husband since that is a lot of money. But I could watch a lot of films, maybe one or even two films a day.”
The internet was her portal to cinema. “I wouldn’t have access to these films if not for the internet,” Pradhan said. “I would have to travel two-three hours to find a theatre and even then I wouldn’t find these films. Yes, piracy is illegal. But should we sit and wait for a cinema hall to be built close by?”
She added: “We have made our pathway on our own, by figuring out what we need to do to access things.”
When I asked Pradhan what her favourite films were, she shot off a long list of international and Bengali films – Ritwick Ghatak’s Titas Ekti Nadir Naam and Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar, Perfect Days by Wim Wenders and Little Forest by Yim Soon-rye.
“Little Forest is a Korean film about a young woman who leaves her job in the city and goes to live in a village,” Pradhan said. “She grows vegetables, and revives friendships with her childhood friends, wanders about in her cycle, cooks things the way her mother did. She lives her life in her own way. Watching that film was a very peaceful experience.”
Pradhan said she hopes to make an actual film someday when her son gets older. “I usually shoot what I find at home and my surrounding areas, but if I start going outside then I can record a lot more, observe more and capture it,” she said. “Whenever I go somewhere, even if for a little while, I start thinking about how this would make a nice frame.”
‘I am not poor’
Pradhan had not heard about the controversy questioning her authenticity until she was told about it by a manager from her talent management agency to which she had signed up in January.
“What these two influencers did was not necessary at all,” she said. “If they had some evidence [against me] then it would be worth sharing, but there was no logic to their points. They just felt that I didn’t have the brains for such content and so surely someone must be helping me.”
Pradhan said she had earlier worked with an agency, which was helping her with brand collaborations, but she left them after she realised they were underpaying her. In January, she said, she joined another agency which also only supports her with talking to companies and brands.
The misconception, she said, is that intelligent content about books and films can come from a specific class and are also meant “just for a specific class.”
People also make the mistake of assuming that Pradhan is poor. “They say: How can someone from a rural area make such videos?” she said. “But I’ve never claimed in my videos that I’m poor. I think our income is adequate and keeps me economically stable. Every villager is not poor, there are different classes in villages. We might not be rich but we have never struggled for food. We are comparatively privileged. I am privileged because my mother sent me to college.”
As the controversy grew, Pradhan said she started to feel afraid for the creators who had questioned her. Later, she said, she even put up a story requesting her followers to let them be – and not leave hateful comments.
It’s an unsavoury side of the internet that she is now more aware of. “The internet can be a very good thing and a very bad thing,” she said, matter-of-factly.
But the controversy has left her a “little scared” about how her opinions will be received. “I might speak from one angle but people might misunderstand me. As my followers grow, I feel more afraid.”
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