The Pedagogy of Pujarini

 

The Pedagogy of Pujarini

On Babasaheb's birthday, a note on the only literacy that matters: the literacy of our own investment in caste. A Savarna influencer's "media literacy" reels against a rural Bengali creator, read step by step, turn out to be an unintentional master class in caste, gatekeeping, and the feudalism at the heart of Internet 5.0 in India.

I made myself watch every single one of Aishwarya Subramanyam's Instagram reels on Pujarini Pradhan. All of them. Twice, in some cases, because I wanted to be sure I was not being uncharitable. I was not. What Aishwarya — who posts as @otherwarya and has built a tidy following as an "internet-appointed truth speaker," to borrow a phrase from a glossy profile of her — calls "media literacy" is not media literacy. It is the sound of Savarna anxiety dressed in the borrowed vocabulary of critical theory, performed for an audience that has been trained to mistake vocabulary for analysis.

I want to take this apart, step by step, because the reels are now cultural texts. They have been cited by national outlets. They have framed how the Indian internet is discussing who gets to speak and in what accent. And they have been received by a certain class of viewer as though they were a graduate seminar, when what they actually are is something older, heavier, and more familiar: the caste gatekeeper, updated for the algorithm.

I waited to publish this piece until today, 14 April 2026, because today is Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar's birthday, and it is the only day on which I am willing to write about media literacy without euphemism. Ambedkar taught us — and by us I mean every Indian who claims to read, to think, to critique, to interpret, to teach — that literacy is not the ability to parse a text. Literacy is the ability to parse yourself. It is the courage to ask what your position in a graded, violent, ancient hierarchy is doing to the sentence you are about to speak. Ambedkar did not write Annihilation of Caste to give us a new vocabulary. He wrote it to take our vocabulary away from us until we had confronted what we had been using it to hide. The one literacy that matters in India, the one without which no other literacy is worth anything, is the literacy of our own investment in and daily perpetuation of the disgusting habits of caste. Everything else — the reading of films, the reading of books, the reading of Instagram reels — is a derivative literacy, and it is dishonest if the primary literacy has not been done.

So let us honour him today, not with a garland or a quote graphic or a well-meaning thread, but with the thing he actually asked of us: a willingness to read ourselves before we read anyone else. And let us begin by reading a set of reels that have been celebrated as media literacy and that are, in fact, a casebook illustration of the illiteracy Babasaheb warned us about.

1. The claim: "I'm just doing media literacy"

Aishwarya's framing, across her three-part series, is disarmingly modest. She is not saying Pujarini is a bad person, she clarifies. She is not even saying Pujarini is fake. She is simply asking us to think critically. She is, she tells us, teaching us how to read influencers. The content is curated. Of course it is curated. All influencer content is curated. Why, then, is this one creator exempt from scrutiny? Why can't we apply the same "healthy skepticism" to Pujarini that we apply to everyone else?

This is a seductive move, and it is worth naming it precisely, because it is the move every caste gatekeeper has learned to make in the post-Rohith Vemula decade. You do not attack. You ask questions. You do not assert privilege. You perform neutrality. You do not say "I don't like that this village woman has an audience of 700,000." You say, "I am merely interrogating the political economy of the creator-industrial complex." The vocabulary is borrowed, largely, from the very Dalit-Bahujan and decolonial scholarship that people like Aishwarya would never actually cite, because citing it would require admitting that the framework does not flatter her.

Let us be clear about what media literacy actually is. Media literacy, in any serious pedagogical tradition — whether it is Len Masterman's work from the 1980s, or the critical media pedagogy tradition that runs through Henry Giroux, Douglas Kellner, and into the more recent critical data studies of Safiya Noble and Ruha Benjamin — is a disciplined practice of asking who owns, who produces, who profits, who is represented, who is absent, and whose interests are being served by a given text. It is an evidentiary practice. It requires you to show your work. It requires you to locate yourself, as the reader, in relation to the structures you are critiquing. Critically, it requires you to turn the instrument on yourself first.

Aishwarya does none of this. She gestures. She vibes. She says the words. But the analytical scaffolding is not there.

2. Let us actually read the reels

Reel one opens with the hook: Is Life of Pujaa an industry plant? The rhetorical structure here is worth dwelling on. An "industry plant" accusation is, in its original usage, a specific claim with a specific evidentiary requirement. You are alleging that a person appearing organic is, in fact, the product of an industry investment designed to manufacture the appearance of organic rise. This is a falsifiable claim. It requires you to produce, at minimum: (a) the industry actor doing the planting, (b) the investment, (c) the manufactured rise, and (d) the gap between the claimed biography and the actual one.

Aishwarya produces none of these. What she produces instead is a vibe — the suggestion that Pujarini "feels off," that something is "not adding up," that Pujarini is "too polished," that her English is "too good," that her references are "too knowing." These are not pieces of evidence. These are symptoms of the viewer's own expectations being violated. And the violation, stated plainly, is this: Aishwarya did not expect a woman in a cotton saree in rural East Midnapore to have read Khaled Hosseini and watched Kubrick and to have a point of view about them in English. The reel is, at its evidentiary core, a confession of what Aishwarya thought a village woman was and was not allowed to be.

Reel two pivots. Faced with pushback, Aishwarya reframes. She is not attacking Pujarini. She is attacking "Savarna guilt." She is warning the Savarna women in her audience not to infantilise Pujarini, not to treat her as a symbol, not to deny her the capacity for evil. This is a genuinely audacious move, because it allows Aishwarya to cast herself as the clear-eyed anti-caste analyst while doing the precise thing anti-caste analysis names as harmful — which is to place a Dalit-Bahujan or lower-middle-class woman under a suspicion from which Savarna creators are structurally exempt. The sleight of hand is this: by naming "Savarna guilt" as the problem, Aishwarya positions herself as the one who has transcended it. She is not Savarna-in-denial; she is the Savarna who sees. The fact that the seeing, in practice, consists of demanding that a village woman prove herself to a Bandra audience is left uninterrogated.

Reel three is where the performance collapses into its own premise. By now the question has moved from "is Pujarini a plant" to "why are you so invested in her being real." The interrogation has turned on the audience. This is a classic rhetorical escape hatch — when the original claim cannot be substantiated, you dissolve it into a meta-question about why anyone was asking in the first place. Aishwarya concludes, grandly, with a question she clearly believes is profound: What does authenticity look like in a digital world where everything is manufactured? Can you trust me? The line is meant to land as humility. It lands, instead, as a tell. Because the one thing Aishwarya has not done, across thirty minutes of video, is turn the instrument on herself.

3. What actual media literacy would have asked

If Aishwarya had been doing media literacy — as opposed to performing it — the reels would have looked fundamentally different. She would have begun with the question: who is asking, from where, and with what stake in the answer? She would have disclosed, at the top, that she is a Tamil Brahmin woman based in Bombay, educated at the University of East Anglia in the UK, a former editor-in-chief of Elle India, a former deputy editor of Vogue India, and the co-founder of a Mumbai content studio. She would have disclosed that the entire cultural apparatus through which she became a person whose opinion about influencers carries weight — Condé Nast, Hearst, the Bombay fashion-media circuit, the English-language magazine economy — is itself one of the most caste-stratified professional ecosystems in India. She would have disclosed that the claim "I am merely asking questions about authenticity" is being made from inside the single most manufactured authenticity industry in the country.

She would then have asked the actual structural questions. What does it mean that a rural Bengali woman with a Bengali-accented English can build an audience of 700,000 outside the Bombay-Delhi content pipeline? What does that rupture tell us about the gatekeeping function historically performed by magazines like Elle and Vogue — publications whose job, for decades, was to curate which Indian women counted as cultured, and in which accent? What does it mean that an audience is choosing Pujarini over the polished, agency-represented, Bandra-anchored lifestyle influencer whose content Aishwarya herself helped create the template for? Whose economic model, exactly, is being disrupted here — and is the person raising the alarm about "manufactured authenticity" perhaps not entirely neutral about that disruption?

A media-literate reading would have asked, further: what is the history of accusing subaltern intellectuals of being "too articulate to be real"? Because this is not a new accusation. It is the oldest one in the Indian caste playbook. It is what was said about Jotirao Phule when he wrote Gulamgiri. It is what was said about Ambedkar at Columbia and at the LSE. It is what was said about Rohith Vemula's letter. The consistent Brahminical move, across 150 years of Indian modernity, has been to treat the articulate Bahujan as an impossibility that must therefore be a fraud. "How can she speak like this?" is not a question. It is an accusation. The question is the accusation. Pujarini understood this instantly, which is why her response to the entire controversy was so devastating. Like it's hard? she said. That one line did more critical media literacy than Aishwarya's three reels combined, because it named the premise and refused it.

4. What bristles her

I want to spend a moment on the affect of these reels, because affect is where caste lives when it is not allowed to speak its own name. Watch Aishwarya's face while she is talking about Pujarini. Watch the particular cadence of the "I'm just saying" voice. Watch the tiny, knowing smile when she lands on the phrase "Savarna savior complex" — a smile that says, I am the one clever enough to see through this, I am not one of those Savarna women, I am the exception. What is bristling in her, visibly, is the intrusion. Pujarini is not asking permission. Pujarini is not waiting to be ratified by the Bombay circuit. Pujarini is not pitching a column to Elle. Pujarini is not showing up at the Jaipur Literature Festival hoping a senior editor will "discover" her. Pujarini is already there — speaking to 700,000 people about Kubrick and Premchand and Hindu patriarchy and the English language itself, from a house with cracked walls in East Midnapore, without ever having had to pass through the tollbooth that people like Aishwarya have spent their careers operating.

This, precisely this, is the wound. And because the wound cannot be named in its true form — "I am upset that a village woman has bypassed the credentialing system I represent" — it must be displaced onto a more respectable language. The language of media literacy. The language of skepticism. The language of caring about the audience. The language of "just asking questions." This is what Gayatri Spivak, writing about an earlier moment of this same structure, called the benevolence of the native informant. The Savarna liberal, unable to countenance a subaltern who speaks without the mediating apparatus of the Savarna translator, must find a way to re-insert herself as the necessary interpreter. If Pujarini can be recast as a suspect, then Aishwarya can be recast as the discerning guide who teaches us how to read her. The interpreter is restored. The gate is re-erected. Order is kept.

5. The gatekeeping, and its long Brahminical lineage

Let us name the gatekeeping for what it is. Gatekeeping in the Indian English-language media has always been a caste function. The magazines, the literary festivals, the publishing houses, the op-ed pages, the panels at India Habitat Centre, the long-form culture reviews — these are not caste-neutral institutions that happen to be staffed by upper-caste people. They are caste institutions. They were designed to reproduce a very specific social type: the cosmopolitan, English-speaking, metropolitan, culturally-confident Indian, usually Brahmin or upper-Kayastha or Parsi or upper-caste Syrian Christian, who could converse fluently with a foreign correspondent about Ray and Tagore and was understood, both at home and abroad, as the authorised voice of India. This social type was not an accident. It was the output of an institutional apparatus — schools, universities, magazines, clubs, and informal kinship networks — whose function was to produce and reproduce it.

Aishwarya is a product of that apparatus. I say this without malice; I say it because it is the only honest starting point for reading her. A Tamil Brahmin graduate of an English medium education, an MA from a British university, a career inside Condé Nast and Hearst India, a Bombay base, a content studio in the city that is the headquarters of the Indian image economy — this is a CV that maps, almost perfectly, onto the historical function of the Brahminical interpreter class. Not the agraharam Brahmin of her grandmother's generation, perhaps, but the same social position, updated: the one who stands between the Indian vernacular world and the English-speaking cultural economy, and who takes a toll at the gate. The magazine editor is, structurally, the descendant of the temple priest. The function is the same: to certify what counts as legitimate, to admit some supplicants and refuse others, and to produce, through that work of selection, a bounded sense of the sacred.

When a village woman from East Midnapore walks up to the gate, opens it herself, and walks through without acknowledging the gatekeeper, the gatekeeper has two options. She can concede that the gate was always arbitrary. Or she can insist, with increasing urgency, that the woman who walked through is not really what she appears to be — that she must be a plant, a construction, a trick, a manufactured thing — because if she is real, the gate is a fiction, and the gatekeeper's whole life is a fiction with it. Aishwarya's reels are the second option. They are the sound a gate makes when it realises it has become decorative.

6. Internet 5.0 in India is feudal — and this is what the feudalism sounds like

There is a comforting story that circulates in Indian tech-optimist circles about the internet as a democratising force — a story in which every additional smartphone, every cheap data plan, every vernacular keyboard, chips away at the old hierarchies of caste, class, and language. I have spent two decades studying what actually happens when digital infrastructure meets entrenched social structure, and I can tell you that the comforting story is at best a half-truth. What we are calling Internet 5.0 in India — the creator economy, the short-video platforms, the influencer-industrial complex, the agency-brand-algorithm pipeline — is, in its dominant mode, extraordinarily feudal. It is organised around patronage. It runs on who you know in Bandra and Juhu and Powai. It rewards, with algorithmic amplification and brand deals, the creators whose aesthetic, accent, and worldview mirror the existing Savarna-metropolitan cultural order. The people who profit from it — the agency founders, the brand managers, the account managers at the platforms, the editors who write the trend pieces — are overwhelmingly drawn from the same narrow demographic that has always run Indian English-language media.

The Pujarini controversy is a perfect ethnographic specimen of this feudalism in operation. Notice who has "standing" in the discourse. Notice whose opinion is treated as expertise. Notice which voices get framed as "the creator economy weighs in" and which get framed as "a rural woman responds to her critics." Notice that Aishwarya's authority to pronounce on Pujarini is assumed in every piece of coverage, while Pujarini's authority to speak at all is the thing under dispute. This is not a level playing field disrupted by a bad actor. This is a feudal court in which a peasant has shown up, spoken eloquently, and must now be processed — either by being incorporated on the lord's terms, or by being expelled as a counterfeit.

And yet — this is the part the comforting story gets right, though not for the reasons the tech optimists think — the feudal court is not all there is. The same infrastructure that enables the feudalism also enables the disruption of it, and this is the dialectic we must hold on to if we are going to think clearly about what is happening. Pujarini built an audience of 700,000 without the mediation of a single magazine editor, a single literary festival curator, a single publishing house commissioning editor, a single Condé Nast or Hearst masthead. She did it from a house that people like Aishwarya have been trained, by their entire education, to read as a "modest rural home" — and she did it in an English that people like Aishwarya have been trained, by that same education, to hear as insufficiently credentialed. That is a rupture. It is the kind of rupture that Ambedkar dreamed of when he wrote about education as the instrument of annihilation. It is the kind of rupture that the Dalit-Bahujan media movement, from Round Table India to The Shudra to countless YouTubers and Instagram creators that the English-language press never covers, has been producing for at least a decade. Pujarini is not the first. She is the one who became impossible to ignore.

7. The pedagogy Aishwarya will not receive

I want to end with what the Pujarini moment is actually offering to people like Aishwarya, if they were willing to take it. It is offering a pedagogy. Not in the demeaning sense of "a teachable moment," but in the Freirean sense — the pedagogy of the oppressed, in which the person historically positioned as the object of knowledge turns out to be the one producing the knowledge, and the person historically positioned as the knower turns out to be the one who has the most unlearning to do.

Aishwarya has an MA in film and cinema studies from a British university. She has read, I have to assume, at least some of the same theorists I read. She knows the vocabulary. What she has not been taught, because her social location did not require her to be taught it, is how to hear a woman who was not produced by her kind of institutions as a peer in thought. Her education at Bandra dinner parties and British seminar rooms did not include this — could not have included it, because the entire point of that education, for that class, is to secure the graduate's position as the one who interprets the subaltern rather than the one who learns from her. When Pujarini says like it's hard?, the correct response for someone trained in critical theory is to sit with the line, to recognise it as the single most sophisticated intervention anyone has made in the entire discourse, and to ask herself why she was not able to produce it. The incorrect response is to post another reel.

The deeper pedagogy, though, is not about Aishwarya. It is about what the internet still holds as a site of possibility in spite of the techno-capital and the feudalism and the algorithmic reward structures that continually push it back toward the old hierarchies. Pujarini is using the same platform as Aishwarya. The same Instagram. The same Reels format. The same brand-deal ecosystem. The same fifteen-to-twenty-minute production cycle that any creator in Mumbai uses. And she is using it to do something the platform was emphatically not designed to do — to make a rural, lower-middle-class, Bengali-accented, self-taught intellectual woman the centre of a national conversation about caste, gender, authenticity, and who gets to speak. This is not in spite of the platform. It is a use of the platform that its designers never imagined and its gatekeepers cannot yet metabolise. This is what the internet, at its best, has always been for — not the flattening of hierarchy, which is the liberal fantasy, but the creation of unauthorised speakers, which is the much more uncomfortable, much more valuable, much more historically significant thing.

The Dalit-Bahujan movement has understood this for longer than the mainstream English press has been willing to notice. The Adivasi and Indigenous media networks I have worked with across seventeen countries have understood it. The peasant women whose voices I have been learning from for twenty years in the work that I do have understood it. Pujarini is walking a path that was cleared by people whose names were never in Elle, and whose refusal to ask permission is the single most important political fact of the present Indian internet. That she is now articulating that refusal at a scale impossible to ignore is not a scandal. It is the pedagogy. It is the thing the gatekeepers were always afraid of, and which no amount of tastefully edited Reels about "media literacy" can keep out.

Coda: on what critical media literacy actually costs

There is one more thing I want to say, because I have taught media literacy to undergraduates for longer than Aishwarya has had an Instagram account, and I care about the craft. Critical media literacy is not a vibe. It is not a tone. It is not a performance of discernment for a sympathetic audience. It is a discipline that costs you something, because the first person the instrument must be turned on is yourself. If you are not willing to ask what your caste location, your class location, your linguistic location, your institutional history, and your professional incentives are doing to the reading you are producing, you are not doing media literacy. You are doing something much older, much more comfortable, and much more politically useful to the status quo. You are doing gatekeeping in a Tamil Brahmin accent, and calling it critique.

Pujarini, from her house in East Midnapore, has done more critical media literacy in one sentence — like it's hard? — than the entire three-part reel series she was made to answer for. The sentence names the class contempt embedded in the question she was asked. It refuses the framing. It turns the instrument on the interrogator. It does all of this in the accent the interrogator was counting on to be disqualifying. That is the whole curriculum, right there. The rest of us, including those of us who have been writing about caste and communication for thirty years, are still catching up to her.

And this brings me back to why this piece is dated 14 April. Ambedkar's birthday is not, for me, a day of commemoration. It is a day of audit. It is the one day of the year when I ask myself, with as little flattery as I can manage, whether the work I have done in the last year has been honest to the thing he was trying to teach. Most years the answer is not enough. This year, watching the Pujarini reels circulate and be received as sophisticated cultural criticism, I was struck by how completely the primary literacy had been skipped. Everyone in the discourse was reading Pujarini. Almost nobody was reading themselves. And reading yourself — your caste, your institutions, your comfortable sentence patterns, your professional incentives, the class of viewer you are performing for, the particular kinds of Indian women you have been trained to find suspect — is the beginning of literacy in Ambedkar's sense. Without it, no reading of anything else can be trusted. With it, even a reel you disagree with becomes an occasion for the only kind of learning that matters.

Babasaheb did not ask us to be clever. He asked us to be honest about what we are. On his birthday, that is the literacy I am trying to practice, and the literacy I am asking — of Aishwarya, of her audience, of myself, of every one of us who was ever handed the vocabulary of critique without being asked first to locate ourselves inside the system that produced the vocabulary — that we attempt together. It is the hardest literacy. It is the only one that counts. Everything else is a reel.

Aishwarya, if you are reading this — and I suspect you might be, because people like us always read the pieces that name us — the offer is open. The pedagogy is available. It was available the first time you pressed record. You are still allowed to turn the camera around. Today, of all days, is a good day to do it.