Is Pujarini Pradhan aka @lifeofpujaa an industry plant or authentic influencer? Well, why can’t she be both? We may want authenticity, but we all know it will only pay once it’s strategised and curated
Pujarini Pradhan is a married young woman living with her son and husband in rural Bengal, and makes videos about movies, books and shares views on anything cultural and societal. She has an easy, relatable, and pleasing personality. Pic/X/@lifeofpujaa
What a week it’s been on social media. The life of Pujarini Pradhan, or as we know her @lifeofpujaa, was scrutinised and brought under the scanner. Like any influencer’s should, one of her detractors — creator/journalist/ influencer Aishwarya Subramanyam — told us. Pradhan is a married, young woman living with her son and husband in rural Bengal, and she makes videos about what movies she saw, what books she read, and her views on anything cultural and societal. The question was first asked by therapist and influencer Niharika Jain, who questioned Pujarini’s authenticity. “She posts every day, which requires one to consume a lot of social media in the first place. That needs time,” she said in a video that I now can’t access, as Jain has made her profile private.
Jain said that Pujarini’s online persona was a curated image designed to make her relatable. She felt that keeping in mind her village background, fluent English, intellectual commentary, something could be
“constructed”. Subramanyam, on the other hand, in a three-part video series that was more theatrics than facts, said only one thing, “We should care about how marketing sneaks into our mind so diabolically.” The rest of the elite social media, many of whom are Pujarini’s followers and fans, rallied for Pujaa’s rights for Pujaa’s life.
In a piece published in Sunday mid-day on November 9, 2025, Pradhan told journalist Arpika Bhosale that she started speaking in English so that the people around her village wouldn’t understand what she was saying. She then went on to say, “Realities of women in rural India are different, and it takes time to build a life anywhere, be it a city or village.” That’s what she has done — built a good, and now lucrative, life. She now has 722k followers, and has recently done collaborations with audible.in, and Netflix. As she explained in a video released after the conspiracy theories, she went through different content agencies, some who duped her, to finally work with an agency who gets her vision and is helping her get legit collaborations. Like any influencer would and should.
My colleague and friend Mohar Basu, also Bengali, pointed out another interesting detail — women in rural Bengal usually are well read, even if they haven’t completed their education. She recently tweeted, “My paternal grandmother, who grew up in Basirhat and didn’t go to school after Class 5, was the one who introduced me to Tolstoy. She obviously read it in Bangla but she was a voracious reader. The dichotomy is hard to explain to anyone who is not from Bengal”.
Subramanyam and Jain both seemed to be wary of the kind of woman that Pradhan seems to be — the perfect trad wife who reads, critiques, is a feminist, and also now, is making a lot of money. Does this offend women who have laid claim to radical and aggressive feminist ideas thanks to their independent, I-need-no-man, I-wear-no-mangalsutra/sindoor (read Awkward Goat) stance? Is it just plain old jealousy between influencers? Or is it just to be contrarian for the sake of views?
My view is: How the hell does it matter? Pradhan is good on camera and makes her points eloquently. She has an easy, relatable, and pleasing personality that audiences like. Her slow-living content is also novel and relaxing for someone hustling and living in a city. That she is now making money comes with the kind of followers and views she is getting — and she better make hay while the sun shines. That’s only prudent.
Why are we discussing her authenticity, when we have influencers selling everything and anything under the sun because they get paid to do so? Does the iPhone lover love it because it’s the best phone on the planet or because they got it free and got paid to collaborate with Apple? How does it matter who she is in her personal life? We like who she is on social media. That’s all. Period.
If we started going by the metric of “who is being their real self” on Instagram, most influencers would be out of a job. We live in a world where aesthetics, and camera angles matter the most. And Pujaa now seems to be winning at all of it. So let her enjoy it, like every other influencer does. She has earned it.
See you next time.
Ranting and raving about all that’s trending on social media, Aastha Atray Banan is an author, creator, podcaster, and the Editor of your favourite weekend read, Sunday mid-day. She posts at @aasthaatray on Instagram.
Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
Subscribe today by clicking the link and stay updated with the latest news!" Click here!
