What pictures come to mind when we’re asked to imagine a well-read person? It’s usually someone dressed formally, possibly in expensive-looking clothes. Their environment complements their attire, probably a stuffy university classroom. And most definitely, it’s a man.

We have always associated knowledge, or even the curiosity to attain it, with men of the upper classes. When someone defies the image that has, for years, shaped our thinking both consciously and subconsciously, we experience a sense of dissonance. It’s almost as if we find it unbelievable that someone who doesn’t fit into that box could be well read. Recently, Pooja, an Indian creator from Lakhimpur Kheri in Uttar Pradesh, posted a reel in which she was cooking and quoting Dostoevsky. Apparently, people online did not like that. They called her names like “dehati” or fake, because they could not fathom that someone like her might have access to the same resources they do.

In a reel she made in response to those comments, she said, “Being in a village doesn’t mean our knowledge has to stop at the village gate.” We are taught from childhood that knowledge has no bounds and is for anyone curious enough to want it. Someone who dresses “simply” or speaks English with an accent different from yours, while also talking about nineteenth-century Russian authors, feminism and their own life experiences, should not be a cause for alarm or shock.

But there’s a very specific reason why our first reaction is shock. It’s because we, the upper classes, consider ourselves gatekeepers of some sort. Because for generations the access to media and literature, especially those that come from the West have been restricted to only a few hands. Over time, that access stops feeling like a privilege and becomes a feeling of entitlement. We began to believe that being well-read is a sign of our own taste and discipline, rather than the product of a head start. So when someone from a small village in Uttar Pradesh quotes Dostoevsky, it makes us uncomfortable in our privilege and shifts the power structures we have become so comfortable with.

It’s also why our discomfort has a pattern. We love a story of someone from humble beginnings making it, as long as that story stays a story: a scholarship kid we can feel proud of, a “self-made” success we can hold up as proof that the system works. We are happy to cheer for people from below, so long as they stay below us. Rise enough to stand beside us, to share our references and speak with our authority, and suddenly you’re an imposter, a show-off, someone “trying too hard” because our support for social mobility is conditional on that distance and seperation staying intact.

Creators who speak from outside the usual circles of authority have met the same reception again and again. Like Pujarini Pradhan (Life Of Pooja), a creator from rural West Bengal, was alleged by another creator for being an 'industry plant'. Her reels are mostly everyday life in her household, mixed with literature, culture, feminism and personal reflection, and that is what connected her to her viewers. After much discourse online, she had to reveal her finances and what all her agency handles for her, to prove her authenticity. The label “industry plant” does the same work as “dehati” or “fake”: it recasts a woman’s own effort as something manufactured by someone else, so that her success can’t be taken at face value.

Taste, reading lists, and an easy command of English are what sociologists call cultural capital, and like any currency, they hold their value only through scarcity. When a woman in a village can quote Dostoevsky over a chulha, the scarcity cracks, and with it the assurance that our upbringing made us inherently more refined. That’s a hard thing to admit about ourselves, so it’s easier to question her sincerity than our own advantage. Mocking her as “dehati” or fake is a way of putting the boundary back and of keeping the gate we've never really been able to admit is a gate.

This isn’t uniquely Indian. Across the Global South, how we engage with Western literature and media reveals where we sit in the status quo, and who we think has the right to read, interpret, and speak. Colonial education left behind more than a language. It left a hierarchy in which English, the Western canon, and a certain manner of speaking became markers of refinement.

That is the same conditional mobility we saw earlier, just on a larger scale. We are comfortable when someone from below consumes the canon quietly, as a sign that they have been properly “uplifted” by it. But when they interpret it, bring their own lives and politics to it, or speak about it with authority, we call it pretension. The right to read, it turns out, is more widely granted than the right to be taken seriously as a reader. 

Pooja quoting Dostoevsky while cooking isn’t just a threat because she read him, but because she didn’t wait for permission to say what he means to her. And a world in which the margins can interpret the centre on their own terms is one where those of us who have long mistaken access for intellect have a lot more to answer for.

Follow Bhukkad Pooja and Life of Pooja on Instagram.

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