GUWAHATI: One of the most popular Assamese novels of the 20th Century has been launched in English 25 years after it became a bestseller.
Hriday Ek Bigyapon, translated into My Poems are not for Your Ad Campaign, was published in 1998 in Assamese. It was veteran journalist and Sahitya Akademi award–winner Anuradha Sarma Pujari’s first novel, based on her experience of working in the advertising sector in Kolkata.
“The story was first published by an Assamese weekly magazine in 1996 and then in the form of a book by the Guwahati-based Students’ Store two years later,” she said, crediting noted litterateur, the late Homen Borgohain, for inspiring her to write.
Penguin Publications published the English version of her novel, as translated by author Aruni Kashyap, who teaches at Georgia University in the United States.
“The country was besieged with an excessive burden of international loans, making the World Bank intervene. India had no choice but to open her gates for foreign investors in the 1990s,” Ms Pujari said.
“The liberalisation policy attracted many multinational companies in a bid to grab a share of a hitherto unexplored market. Internationally acclaimed brands of perfumes, clothes, shoes, cosmetics and many more consumer goods made their forays into the country through franchisees,” she said.
My Poems are not for Your Ad Campaign narrates how multinational companies depended on advertising agencies to lure consumers through prime media and strategic urban positioning of their products. The advertising agencies, mostly located in the metropolitan cities of Mumbai, Kolkata, and Delhi, were workplaces where cut-throat competition existed both within and between the companies.
“The electronic media was yet to make an entry and it was the print media along with the government-run Doordarshan that acquired the bulk of the advertisements from these agencies,” Ms Pujari said
It was against this backdrop that she began her literary journey. As the representative of an Assam-based media house in Kolkata, she observed the sale and marketing sections of her publication closely. Her book underlines how liberalisation led to increased material greed, affecting the ethos, social fabric, family structure, and social culture of a nation.
“I hope the content of Hriday Ek Bigyapon would appeal to English readers,” Ms Pujari said.
