The rise of xenophobic and authoritarian nationalism in Europe and the United States has prompted a huge surge of interest in dystopian fiction. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four have returned to bestseller lists; Sinclair Lewis’ ironically titled It Can’t Happen Here has been rediscovered as a prescient warning of the possibility of fascism in the U.S.; new novels by Omar El Akkad and Mohsin Hamid point to the dystopias that will result from a failure to address our current problems. It is no surprise that the rapid growth of militant Hindu nationalism is starting to provoke a similar interest in India.
Speculative fiction in general is an underdeveloped area of Indian writing in English. Leila , Prayaag Akbar’s debut novel and the first book to be published by Simon & Schuster India, is a dystopian work that speaks directly to the ongoing changes in India’s politics and society. But Akbar’s novel is much more than timely: it succeeds both as social criticism and as a gripping narrative, smoothly and movingly told.
Ominous foretelling
Leila is set in the near-future (perhaps 2030), in an unnamed city that seems like a cross between Mumbai and Delhi. Like Delhi, the city centre comprises a zone of sarkari bungalows set in obscenely large and lush plots; like Mumbai, it was once vibrantly cosmopolitan, with citizens from every community in India living and working side-by-side.
Shalini, the novel’s narrator, grows up in the city as the daughter of upper-middle-class and presumably upper-caste Hindu parents who are devoted to the city’s cosmopolitan ideals.
Her father watches in uncomprehending horror as tribalism takes over his city. What begins as residential segregation by dietary restrictions (a proxy for religion) becomes a total Balkanisation of the city into community-specific “sectors”: “Tamil Brahmin Sector, Leuva Patel Residency, Bohra Muslim Zone, Catholic Commons, Kanyakubj Quarters, Sharif Muslimeen Precinct, Maithil Acres, Chitpavan Heights, Syrian Christian Co-op, Kodava Martials....”
These sectors are exclusive and can be entered only with permission. Their gates are guarded by Repeaters, brutish young men who are informally empowered by the city council to enforce segregation and other repressive norms.
Their reign of terror is justified by a xenophobic appeal to tradition—as opposed to Western cultural influences—and by the belief that the new rules preserve purity. “Purity For All” is the Repeaters’ slogan. Segregation by community is accompanied by rigid patriarchy, the ostracism of widows, and extreme inequality; all this imposed, once again, in the name of purity.
Leila; Prayaag Akbar, Simon & Schuster India, ₹599.
Shalini’s father dies of a broken spirit. But she is determined to live a free life in the old cosmopolitan way. She marries Riz, her high school boyfriend, and they make a life in the East End, the only mixed sector, a prosperous oasis for those who reject the new order. They have a daughter, Leila, and secure admission for her at their alma mater. Their happiness and optimism stand in stark contrast to life outside the East End.
But the reader knows, from the opening chapter, that Leila will go missing and that, on the same day Riz will be killed. Even as the East End is officially mixed, a Hindu-Muslim couple is too much for the Council to tolerate. A gang of Repeaters storm Leila’s birthday party batter Riz to death and abduct Shalini. But they fail in their stated objective: to take Leila, who is to be brought up by the Council so that she chooses purity over her parents’ dissolute values. Leila and her nanny, Sapna, have disappeared altogether.
The rest of the narrative follows Shalini’s quest to find her daughter. The Repeaters take her to a Purity Camp for unclean women. From there, she is sent to live alongside other widows in the Towers, outside the city. She is physically and mentally weakened by the tragedy, and becomes dependent upon drugs supplied to her by the Council: but the drive to be reunited with Leila keeps her alive.
Holding up a mirror
At its human core, Leila is a story of imperishable maternal love. As social criticism, it is concerned with the long-term decline of Bombay/ Mumbai’s cosmopolitanism, as embodied by the thuggish Marathi chauvinism of the Shiv Sena and MNS—the likely inspiration for the Repeaters—and the increase in residential social segregation.
Akbar’s concerns extend beyond Mumbai to the forces that seek to repudiate the founding values of the Republic of India: that see India as a collection of antagonistic communities, and fear the notion of individuals finding their own paths to happiness.
No particular community or party is his target: instead, he points to how reactionaries of all faiths and castes use appeals to community and tradition to impose a repressive, patriarchal order.
But, both as a novelist and as a critic of Indian society, Akbar is too sophisticated to present an easy dichotomy between tribalism and cosmopolitanism. He lays bare the snobbery and hypocrisy of the liberal cosmopolitans as well. Shalini is a smug and often uncritical elite who uses the phrases “good background” and “good family” to mean people like herself—that is the wealthy—and bans Leila’s nanny Sapna from kissing the baby or using the furniture. The cosmopolitans, we discover, enabled the rise of tribalism: through their elitism and their cowardice.
Akbar’s prose is smooth and full of arresting sensory detail that nonetheless pushes the narrative forward. Like Karan Mahajan, he uses a contemporary Indian English, free of the Anglicisms that marked so much earlier Indian fiction. Akbar and Mahajan point to the overdue emergence of an Indian literary English that has escaped the realm of the Senior Cambridge essay.
The novel’s only weaknesses of note are in the construction of its dystopia. As speculative fiction, Leila is oddly unimaginative. This is most true of its generic, Suzanne Collins-style names: “the Council”, “Sectors”, “the Towers”, “the Slum.” There is a missed opportunity here, to use language creatively to invent names that reflect the culture and ideology of the tribalists, and the book’s explicitly Indian setting. At other points, such as the Purity Camp, which is run by an enigmatic bald man called Dr. Iyer, the book runs dangerously close to cliché: it is redeemed, each time, by Akbar’s gifts as a storyteller and by the sheer humanity of this particular story.
Leila; Prayaag Akbar, Simon & Schuster India, ₹599.
The author is a writer based in Delhi.
