‘My Poems Are Not For Your Ad Campaign’: Shining idealism versus hypocritical corporate culture

Anuradha Sarma Pujari’s first Assamese novel, Hriday Ek Bigyapan, was published in 1997. It is set in post-liberalisation India where the economy had opened up, “globalisation” had become a catchphrase, but liberal values remained scarce. Aruni Kashyap’s English translation, My Poems Are Not For Your Ad Campaign, performs an act of quiet balancing in keeping the socio-cultural milieu of the 1990s alive while keeping the narrative from feeling dated, efficiently bridging a gap of 26 years. With a distinct coming-of-age flavour, albeit with a protagonist in her late 20s rather than adolescence, the story traces the journey towards the self-realisation of Bhashwati Chaliha, a small-town girl with a conventional middle-class upbringing.

A patriarchal culture

Bhashwati studied anthropology at college, worked at a school for a short while, married a suitable boy, a personnel officer in a multinational company, moved with him to Delhi and studied Mass Communication there, published a collection of poetry, moved to Calcutta, and without much exercise of will or agency, almost accidentally, found a job with an ad agency as their Public Relations Officer. In Bhashwati, the novel identifies a moral compass, a self-conscious, refreshingly unjaded heroine whose critique of the capitalist enterprise and of deeply ingrained misogyny in patriarchal cultures shapes much...

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