In Anuradha Sarma Pujari’s Assamese novel Hriday Ek Bigyapan, a poet refuses to let her employer turn a line from her poem into a detergent ad. For Pujari, that small refusal marks a larger boundary: work may be bought, but a person’s thoughts and private life need not be made saleable. The novel was published as a book in 1997; its English translation, My Poems Are Not for Your Ad Campaign, appeared in 2023.
What is My Poems Are Not for Your Ad Campaign about?
The novel follows Mohua, a poet who works at an advertising agency. When her boss asks her to supply a line from her poem for a detergent campaign, she declines: the poem is personal, not advertising copy. In a 2023 interview with Scroll, Pujari described the episode as a way to express the idea that people should retain ownership of their thoughts and inner lives. Read the Scroll interview.
The English title comes from this moment. Its contrast between a poem and an ad campaign condenses the novel’s concern with the point at which ordinary life, creative work and identity become products to be sold.
How does the novel connect advertising and commodification?
Pujari drew on her own experience working for an advertising agency. In the Scroll interview, she recalled, “I worked for an ad agency in those days, and I realised then that everything and everybody would eventually become a commodity.” She presents the agency’s workers as economically dependent and vulnerable to exploitation, even when employment may appear to offer independence.
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Her critique reaches beyond advertising. Pujari links capitalism and globalisation with the treatment of people, labor and private identity as marketable goods. She also argues that personal branding can pressure people to behave according to the image they sell. These are the author’s interpretations of the novel and the society around it, not independently measured findings about the economy or advertising.
What does the novel say about gender and private life?
Pujari connects commodification to patriarchy, including the ways women’s bodies and labor can be valued or exploited. In her account, economic independence does not automatically mean freedom from exploitation. The novel’s attention to work and private life therefore also raises questions about who controls women’s time, choices and public image.
Pujari also discusses children and adoption through the characters Mohua and Bhashwati. She says Mohua’s choice to live among orphans informs Bhashwati’s later decision to adopt a child. These plot details are drawn from Pujari’s interview, rather than a separate examination of the novel’s full text.
Why does Pujari bring environmental concerns into the discussion?
In the interview, Pujari connected her concern about the market’s reach with concern for the natural world. She spoke of changes around Aamchang Wildlife Sanctuary, near her home, and said that nature appears in her writing. This is her personal observation and perspective; the interview does not establish independent data about environmental change at the sanctuary.
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When was the Assamese novel published, and who translated it?
Pujari said Hriday Ek Bigyapan first appeared in an Assamese magazine before being published as a book in 1997. The English translation, My Poems Are Not for Your Ad Campaign, was translated by Aruni Kashyap and published by Penguin Random House India on May 29, 2023. Google Books lists the English edition at 176 pages. See the Google Books catalog record.
The same catalog description calls the Assamese original an “instant bestseller” and says it had thirty-two reprints in its first ten years. That figure is the catalog’s publisher-description claim; Pujari’s interview confirms the book’s 1997 publication but does not independently verify the reprint count.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to read the novel’s central claim
Pujari’s line, “Everybody has been commodified, there is no escape,” is deliberately sweeping. In context, it expresses her reading of a culture in which advertising and market logic can shape not only what people buy, but how they present themselves and what they are willing to sell. The refusal at the center of the English title offers a counterpoint: even within paid work, a person may try to reserve something as their own.
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