Why this 25-year-old Assamese novel set in a newly liberalised India continues to endure | North East India News

Borgohain persisted; Pujari relented. The rest is history.

Hriday Ek Bigyapan (1998) — Pujari’s debut novel that follows the friendship of two women in a newly liberalised India— became a breakout success, capturing the collective imagination of a generation of Assamese readers.

25 years — and multiple reprints — later, it continues to endure. Last month, the book crossed another milestone: Penguin Random House launched its English edition, My Poems Are Not For Your Ad Campaign, translated by bilingual (Assamese and English) writer Aruni Kashyap.

For Pujari, now 60, with 12 novels and multiple awards (including the prestigious Sahitya Akademi) under her belt, it is a gratifying silver jubilee gift. “Call it a coincidence — because it was not planned that way — but the book will reach an English audience on its 25th anniversary,” she says.

But even all these years later, it is the success of the original that continues to amaze her. “I’m still getting royalties,” says Pujari. “And every year, I tell myself: okay, probably this is the year the book won’t sell. But year after year, people keep buying it…keep blessing me.”

A New World

Published by Guwahati-based Students’ Store, Hriday Ek Bigyapan (literally ‘the heart is an advertisement’) tells the story of Mohua and Bhaswati, two freethinking working women, strangers till they are brought together by their jobs at a Kolkata (then Calcutta) ad agency in the 1990s. Their stints don’t overlap but they meet and an unlikely friendship blossoms. In the backdrop of an India that had newly opened up its economy, the two find themselves — and each other.

It was a world rarely written about in Assamese literature, which, at the time, largely depicted stories in rural settings. But the subject of this modern Assamese novel came to Pujari naturally. “I could write it because I lived it,” she says. Months before she was commissioned, Pujari was hired as a marketing representative of an Assam-based media house in Kolkata. The new job gave her a ringside view of the glitzy universe of advertising.

“It was a different world,” Pujari explains, “On one hand, it was rosy: the market was flooded with new brands. There were new clothes, new shoes, new perfumes, new everything. But there was also a dark side. It coincided with the commodification of women’s bodies, of a consumerist culture, of eroding values in a newly globalised world… I knew I had to tell the story.”

US-based Kashyap, who translated the book over several years as he moved homes and jobs across borders, describes its ideas as “radical and progressive”. “The book was questioning ideas of marriage, of parenthood, spoke freely of sex and desire… the protagonists (both women) were assertive, had agency. These were not things you read about in Assamese literature everyday,” he says.

Poet and author Dibyajyoti Sarma, who runs Red River, an independent poetry publishing venture, says that the novel introduced “a new world” to Assamese readers.  “For a state slowly emerging out of insurgency, the novel introduced a new world to the younger generation. A world they wanted to be a part of…a world beyond Assam. So, a novel set in the glitzy ad world in Kolkata was an ideal escape, and the young readers bought into it.” Translating it for an English audience, he says, is a “major cultural moment” for Assamese literature.

Author Anuradha Sarma Pujari won the Sahitya Akademi Award 2021 for her novel, ‘Eyat Ekhon Aranya Asil’. (Express photo)

A Prolific Novelist

Buoyed by the success of her first novel, Pujari — the initially reluctant novelist — began to write prolifically, while also editing two Assamese magazines Sadin and Satsori (which she continues to edit till date).

Within a year, her second novel Ejon Eshworor Xondhanot (‘In Search of a God’)— a coming-of-age novel about an introvert — was published. Then there was no looking back: in book after book, Pujari wrote freely and fiercely about emotions and human relationships, about desire and sexuality, about ambition and aspiration, about love and loss. In many of the books — whether it was Sahebpurar Boroxun (2003) or Nil Prajapati (2013) — women had defining roles, rarely bound by the shackles of societal pressures. Asked if it was a conscious decision, Pujari says that it was more obvious than conscious. “Every woman is innately strong and independent, is it not?” she asks.

Yet, it was not always that easy. Close on the heels of publishing Kanchon (2002) — which touched upon sexual agency — Pujari remembers the criticism. “Some called it pornography… others said it was sensational literature,” she says. “Many could not digest it because these were subjects no one really spoke about — let alone — write about.”

But she remain undeterred. “I never cared much,” she says. “They were important things to write about simply because they were true…facts of life.” Pujari is now working on her thirteenth novel.