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| Figure 1: Screenshot of the online shop mentioned in Banerjee's social media |
There is a very old story in Bengal, and in every part of the subcontinent shaped by the long arm of Brahminical order, about who gets to speak and who must be silent. It is a story that begins, in the textual imagination, with molten lead poured into the ears of the Shudra who dared to hear the Veda, and with the severed thumb of Ekalavya, who dared to learn archery without the permission of his caste superiors. The story is told as if it belongs to a finished past. It does not.
It continues, with a different set of props, a different vocabulary, a different set of delivery platforms. The lead is no longer molten. The thumb is no longer severed with a blade. The weapon now is a Facebook post with three hundred and sixty-two likes, written in an English that prides itself on its elite-school polish, announcing that a rural feminist video blogger from the margins of Bengal must submit herself to an examination — a live examination, mind you, not an edited one — before a "chosen audience" of "learned netizens," so that her authenticity can be adjudicated. The jury, self-appointed, is a woman who sells saris online.
This is the scene. It has to be named precisely, because the precision is the politics. A Brahmin woman named Paroma Banerjee, whose public life on social media consists largely of modelling her own sari collections for sale through online platforms (the Brahminical caste structure that Banrjee draws on would place this work toward the bottom of the caste hierarchy), has decided that Puja Pradhan — a young woman from rural Bengal whose reels on farming, food, land, the body, and the everyday politics of being a woman in a village have reached audiences far outside the sealed chambers of metropolitan Bengali respectability — is suspicious.
Suspicious of what? Of being too articulate. Of being too composed. Of not collapsing, in front of the camera, into the grateful, grammatically broken, visibly grateful rural subject that the Bengali bhadralok imagination requires of anyone from the countryside who enters its field of vision. Puja Pradhan's offense is that she does not perform the script. And so she must be tested. Note here the Khaap she attempts to organize through the trope "What do you say, learned citizens?"
The test, as Paroma Banerjee proposes it, is a marvel of the genre. It is to be a live Q and A session. There will be a "chosen audience" — chosen, of course, by the jurist herself, because the jurist cannot imagine that a jury might be constituted by anyone other than people like her. Puja will "face" this audience. She will be "questioned" on the subjects she "boldly talks about in her reels." And then, presumably, the verdict will be handed down. The learned netizens will nod or shake their heads. The rural woman will either pass or she will not.
Either way, the structure of the encounter — the summoning, the framing, the insistence on a live broadcast because live means no hiding, live means we will catch you — reenacts, with remarkable fidelity, the oldest choreography of the caste order: the lower caste is made to perform for the upper caste, on the upper caste's stage, in the upper caste's language, according to the upper caste's rules. The performance is called a debate. It is not a debate. It is a ritual of submission, and the only uncertainty permitted is how the submission will be graded.
What is astonishing, and what is not astonishing at all, is the confidence. Paroma Banerjee does not appear to have paused for even a moment to ask herself by what right she, a seller of saris-a form of work placed much further below in the Manuvaadi caste ideology she draws her lens from, appoints herself the examiner of a feminist content creator's epistemology. The question does not arise because in the Brahminical grammar of public life, the right is not earned; it is inherited. It comes with the surname. It comes with the school. It comes with the accent. It comes with the address in South Kolkata or in a diasporic suburb from which one flies back, occasionally, to lecture the "colony chhap" on etiquette.
It comes, above all, with the unexamined conviction that one's presence in the room is, by itself, a form of authority, and that everyone else is present on sufferance.
This is the first thing to name: the gatekeeping is not a byproduct of the Brahminical structure, it is the structure. For two and a half thousand years at least, the caste order has maintained itself not primarily through violence at the point of contact — though there has been plenty of that, and there continues to be plenty of it — but through the monopoly over the means of knowledge production. Who reads. Who writes. Who recites. Who teaches. Who sits at the front of the classroom and who sits outside the door. Who is allowed into the library and who must wait at the gate. Who gets to decide what counts as rigorous, what counts as serious, what counts as thought at all.
The Dharmashastras were not just texts; they were an operating system, and the operating system reserved root access to a small slice of the population and left everybody else with, at most, a limited and supervised guest account. The entire apparatus of purity and pollution, the intricate taxonomy of who could touch what and who could eat with whom and who could draw water from which well, was always, underneath everything, a way of managing access to knowledge and to the conditions under which knowledge could be produced and circulated. The body was policed so that the mind could be enclosed.
Bengal has a very particular relationship with this enclosure. The Bengali Brahminical class, the bhadralok, built its self-image in the nineteenth century on the idea that it was the most enlightened, the most reformist, the most cosmopolitan, the most literary fraction of Indian society. It wrote novels. It translated Shakespeare. It started newspapers. It produced the Tagores, who became a shorthand for the whole. And in the act of producing itself as the bearer of refinement, it also produced, necessarily, its outside: the "colony chhap," the coarse, the unpolished, the villager, the Dalit, the Adivasi, the Muslim, the poor woman of any of these categories, who existed in the bhadralok imagination either as an object of paternalistic concern or as a figure of comic contempt, but almost never as an interlocutor. The bhadralok talked about the rural. It did not, on the whole, talk with the rural. When the rural spoke back, as Puja Pradhan is now speaking back, the reaction was and is incomprehension curdling very quickly into rage. How dare she. Who let her in. Where did she learn to speak like that. Who is behind her, because she cannot possibly be doing this on her own.
The charge that Puja Pradhan is an "industry planted influencer" is worth sitting with for a moment, because it tells us everything about the mental furniture of the accuser. The accusation is not, in the first instance, about evidence. No evidence is offered, and none is required, because the accusation is not operating in an evidentiary register. It is operating in the register of metaphysical impossibility. The bhadralok brain, confronted with a rural woman who is articulate, composed, political, and reaching a large audience, cannot process the combination. The combination violates a rule it has internalized so deeply that the rule no longer feels like a rule; it feels like reality. Rural women do not do this. If something that looks like a rural woman is doing this, then something else must be going on. There must be a puppeteer. There must be a script. There must be an "industry" somewhere, a shadowy financier, a backroom of men, because the alternative — that the rural woman is the author of her own speech and her own reach — is unthinkable. Not unlikely. Unthinkable. And so the jury is convened to discover the puppeteer, and if the puppeteer cannot be discovered, then the rural woman herself must be broken until she confesses.
This is where the second post enters, and the second post is, if anything, more diagnostic than the first, because it is the moment when the mask slips and the wound underneath is revealed. Bengal, Paroma Banerjee writes, glorifies its poor, its jobless, its sickly, its marginalised, its dropouts — "basically all categories of financially or professionally unsuccessful people." They are, she says, "the single largest khaap panchayats on social media." Read that sentence again. The poor and the marginalised, in her telling, are the khaap panchayats — they are the violent enforcers, they are the ones imposing judgments, they are the oppressors. She and her kind — "city bred, educated in the best schools and colleges, and even after scoring university ranks, decided to live and work in the Bengal / Kolkata we once lived and felt so proud to be a part of" — they are the victims. They are "the marginalised ones." The communicative inversion is total. The person whose class position gave her access to the best schools, the best colleges, the leisure to pose for collection photographs in Tibetan monasteries and Parisian streets, the cultural capital to pontificate on who is and is not authentic — this person is the marginalised one. The "colony chhap" majority with a phone and a message challenging her caste supremacy is the oppressor.
This is not a slip of the tongue. This is the core move of Brahminical politics in the Internet age, and it deserves to be called by its name. It is the move of the privileged subject who, on encountering any challenge from below, instantly reassigns the vocabulary of suffering to herself. It is the move by which the perpetrator of hierarchy claims the mantle of the victim of hierarchy. It is the move that allows the upper-caste woman to denounce the rural feminist in the language of feminism, to denounce caste privilege in the language of meritocracy, to denounce the public square in the language of the public square. It is, if you will, the manuvadi feminism that the Hindutva project has been cultivating with great care for at least three decades — a feminism that speaks of empowerment and voice while reserving the empowerment and the voice for women who already have them, and that treats the claims of Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim, and rural women as threats to be neutralised rather than as the actual substance of any liberation worth the name.
The manuvadi feminist is a very particular creature. She will tell you she believes in women. She will post on International Women's Day. She will quote, if pressed, a line from Tagore or from a curated list of Western authors. She will say the word "patriarchy." And then she will turn, without any sense of contradiction, and demand that a rural Dalit-Bahujan woman be put on trial in a live broadcast so that her authenticity can be verified by a jury of upper-caste strangers. The contradiction is not felt as a contradiction because in the manuvadi feminist imagination, the women whose liberation is at stake are always, by default, women like her. The other women — the ones in the villages, the ones in the tea gardens, the ones in the bustees, the ones in the fields, the ones who clean the homes of the manuvadi feminists and are not invited to sit at the table — those women are objects of discourse, not subjects of it. They can be discussed. They can be spoken for. They can be saved. What they cannot do is speak in their own voice about their own lives and be heard as peers. If they try, the jury will be convened.
And the jury, please note, is not operating according to any criterion that would survive even the most generous application of its own stated standards. Paroma Banerjee, in demanding that Puja Pradhan demonstrate her knowledge through a live test, is announcing, implicitly, that knowledge is the thing at stake, and that the possession or non-possession of knowledge is what separates the worthy speaker from the unworthy one.
Very well. By that criterion, what exactly is the knowledge production of the jurist herself? She sells saris. She posts selfies from travels. She offers, as her contribution to public discourse, a mixture of aesthetic self-promotion, self-advertising as the "modern woman" and casteist complaint. There is no scholarly output. There is no reportage. There is no sustained engagement with the subjects — agriculture, rural economy, gendered labour, ecology, the politics of the body — that Puja Pradhan takes up in her videos. There is, in short, nothing that would pass the test that the jurist proposes to administer to the defendant. If the test were applied equally, the jurist would be the first person disqualified from the room.
But the test is not meant to be applied equally, and this is the whole point. The test exists to be applied downward. The jurist exempts herself from it because in the Brahminical order, the Brahmin is not the object of examination, the Brahmin is the examiner. Her authority does not derive from what she has produced; it derives from who she is. Her school is offered as credential. Her college is offered as credential. Her rank in a university examination taken decades ago is offered as credential. None of these are accomplishments in the sense that she means the word when she applies it to Puja Pradhan. They are inheritances. She did not earn the school; her parents' caste and class positioned her for it. She did not earn the college; the same structure carried her through. She did not earn the cultural capital that allows her to write English sentences with that particular sneering cadence; the cadence was installed in her by the very Brahminical system she is now weaponising against a rural woman who grew up outside that system and acquired her voice through her own labour, in her own tongue, on her own terms. The inheritance is rebranded as merit, and the merit is then used as a cudgel against those who were excluded from the inheritance in the first place. This is the oldest con in the caste playbook, and it is being run, in 2026, on a Facebook feed, with emojis, to the applause of three hundred and sixty-two "learned netizens."
What makes this moment specifically a moment of Internet 5.0, and not just a reiteration of something ancient, is the infrastructure that amplifies the cudgel. The digital public sphere in India — what was once promised, in the earnest discourse of a decade ago, as a great democratiser, a place where the Dalit voice and the Adivasi voice and the rural woman's voice would finally reach the centre — has been captured, with astonishing speed, by exactly the same castes and classes that captured every previous public sphere. The algorithms reward the already-amplified. The verification badges cluster around the already-credentialed. The journalists who cover "social media debates" are, overwhelmingly, from the same caste fractions as the Paroma Banerjees, and they cover the debates through the lens of the Paroma Banerjees, and when a Puja Pradhan enters the frame, she is covered as a curiosity, as an anomaly, as a problem to be investigated, rather than as the thing she actually is, which is a cultural producer of significance operating in a language and an idiom that the metropolitan press simply does not know how to read. The entire ecosystem — the platforms, the press, the commentariat, the brands, the advertisers, the "chosen audience" of learned netizens — conspires, without anyone having to plan the conspiracy, to ensure that the jury is always upper-caste and the defendant is always somebody else.
And here is the thing that must be said plainly. The question is not whether Puja Pradhan is "authentic" by somebody else's criteria. The question is why the criteria are theirs at all. The question is why a rural feminist video blogger owes any explanation, to anyone, for the fact that she exists and speaks and is listened to. The question is why the default assumption — the assumption that runs so deep it appears to the jurist as common sense — is that articulacy in a rural woman is evidence of fraud, while articulacy in an upper-caste woman selling saris is evidence of education. The question is what it would mean to refuse, entirely, the summons to the examination hall; to refuse the test; to refuse the jury; to refuse the whole apparatus by which the Brahminical order, having lost the legal authority to pour lead or sever thumbs, has invented a softer and more deniable set of instruments to do the same work. The refusal is not a rhetorical gesture. It is the precondition for anything like a free public sphere in India actually coming into existence, because as long as the jury is seated, the public sphere is a courtroom, and in a courtroom there are no peers.
It is worth, finally, situating all of this where it belongs, which is inside the larger project of Hindutva and its manuvadi feminism. The erasure of Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, Muslim, and rural women from the category of "women whose voices matter" is not a side-effect of the Hindutva project; it is one of its central architectural features. The project needs an "Indian woman" who can be held up as the pure, the noble, the authentic, the deserving subject of protection and concern. That figure has always been, and continues to be, upper-caste and Hindu by default. Everyone who does not fit is either erased from the frame entirely or allowed in only as a threat, a suspicion, a problem. When Paroma Banerjee demands that Puja Pradhan submit to a test, she is not acting as a lone eccentric. She is acting as a functionary, probably unconsciously, of a much larger ideological operation whose job is to keep the boundary of "real" Indian womanhood policed and pure. The sari business and the purity politics are not accidentally adjacent. They are two faces of the same thing: the commodification and the gatekeeping of an idea of the "authentic" Indian woman, sold on one channel and enforced on the other.
Puja Pradhan does not need to pass anybody's test. The people who need to pass a test are the ones who have appointed themselves the examiners, and the test they need to pass is the one history will eventually administer, in its own time and by its own methods, to everyone who mistook their inheritance for their worth. In the meantime, the rest of us — those of us who grew up inside the Brahminical machinery and spent years trying to understand what it did to us and to everyone around us, and those of us who grew up outside it and know exactly what it did because it was done to us — owe the rural feminist video blogger from Bengal something more than applause. We owe her the elementary solidarity of refusing to show up when the jury is convened. We owe her the refusal to treat the summons as legitimate. We owe her the willingness to name the sari-seller as the sari-seller, the jurist as a usurper, the test as a trap, and the whole spectacle as what it is: the latest, and not the last, performance of a very old and very tired violence, dressed up in a very new platform's interface, demanding one more time that the margins come to the centre and beg to be let in.
They will not beg. They are already inside, and they brought their own language with them, and the doors the jurists are guarding open onto rooms that nobody who matters is sitting in anymore.