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Abstract
This paper is interested in an emerging canon of post-millennial Indian dystopian fiction in English and the related themes of precarity and (im)purity. After introducing some recent novels and texts from the domestic Indian literary scene, the paper looks to demonstrate how precarity, (im)purity and changing ideas of India(nness) are manifested in Prayaag Akbar’s Leila, a 2017 Indian post-millennial dystopian novel in English. To focus on these particular themes, I consider the novel’s urban geography in terms of its modes of segregation, specifically how the walled sectors of the dystopian, near-future metropolis divide a city ruled over by the Repeaters and pervasive surveillance systems, whilst the Slums and the Outroads lie beyond the city limits. This focus on (im)pure involves an examination of representations of class, privilege, freedom of movement and religious affiliation. Overall, this paper is especially interested in how the dystopian as a narrative mode is harnessed in order to recount ‘precarious’ urban existence, a theme that runs through the wider body of post-millennial Indian dystopian fiction. Through discussion of the (im)purity trope and particularly through the narrative mode of the dystopian, I argue that Leila, like other recent Indian works of this genre, tangentially engages with certain socio-political themes of the second decade of the millennium such as segregation and develops ideas of India(nness) in relation to the Indian post-millennial contemporary.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the South Asia reviewers for their insightful comments and also Kama Maclean for the professionalism with which she manages the journal.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Anil Menon, Half of What I Say (New Delhi: Bloomsbury India Pvt. Ltd, 2015).
2. Samhita Arni, The Missing Queen (New Delhi: Zubaan and Viking, 2013).
3. Vikram Balagopal, Savage Blue (Noida: HarperCollins Publishers India, 2016).
4. Varun Thomas Mathew, The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay (Gurugram: Hachette India, 2019), p. 26.
5. Lavanya Lakshminarayan, Analog/Virtual and Other Simulations of Your Future (Gurugram: Hachette India, 2020).
6. E. Dawson Varughese, ‘Post-Millennial “Indian Fantasy” Fiction in English and the Question of Mythology: Writing beyond the “Usual Suspects”’, in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 54, no. 3 (Dec. 2017), pp. 460–74.
7. Prayaag Akbar, Leila: A Novel (New Delhi: Simon & Schuster India, 2017).
8. Michael Green, ‘Nadine Gordimer’s “Future Histories”: Two Senses of an Ending’, in Wasafiri, Vol. 9, no. 19 (1994), pp. 14–8 [14].
9. B. Chattopadhyay et al. (eds), Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories (Abingdon/New York: Routledge India, 2019).
10. See E. Dawson Varughese, Reading New India (New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2012).; and Ulka Anjaria, Reading India Now: Contemporary Transformations in Literature and Popular Culture (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2019).
11. Anjaria, Reading India Now, p. 21.
12. Ibid.
13. Louise Waite, ‘A Place and Space for a Critical Geography of Precarity?’, in Geography Compass, Vol. 3, no. 1 (2009), pp. 412–33 [414].
14. Marcel Paret and Shannon Gleeson, ‘Precarity and Agency through a Migration Lens’, in Citizenship Studies, Vol. 20, nos. 3–4 (2016), pp. 277–94 [278].
15. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York/London: Verso, 2016), p. 25.
16. Ibid.
17. Bryan Yazell, ‘The Politics of Precarity in William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy’, in Studies in the Fantastic, Vol. 6 (2018/2019), pp. 39–69 [42].
18. Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious (New York/London: Verso, 2015), p. 22.
19. Ibid.
20. Jago Morrison, ‘The Turn to Precarity in Twenty-First Century Fiction’, in American, British and Canadian Studies, Vol. 21, no. 1 (Jan. 2014), pp. 10–29.
21. Gregory Claeys, Dystopia: A Natural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 5.
22. Ibid., p. 7.
23. Yazell, ‘The Politics of Precarity in William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy’, p. 41.
24. Ibid.
25. As Fraser writes of Lefebvre’s ‘planned/practiced city’, ‘the distance between the “planned city” and the “practiced city”: whereas the “planned city” was the static, geometrical, rational city as designed by urban planners from above, the “practiced city” was the dynamic city understood as a lived space, an inhabitable city’: Benjamin Fraser, Toward an Urban Cultural Studies: Henri Lefebvre and the Humanities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 31.
26. Fatima Vieira, ‘The Concept of Utopia’, in Gregory Claeys (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 1–27.
27. Akbar, Leila, p. 48.
28. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 87–8.
29. Carl H. Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago, IL/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 39.
30. Ibid., p. 42.
31. Akbar, Leila, p. 74.
32. Ibid.
33. Vieira, ‘The Concept of Utopia’, p. 18.
34. Akbar, Leila, p. 30.
35. Ibid., p. 31.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., p. 35.
38. Ibid., p. 145.
39. Ibid., p. 31.
40. Deya Roy, ‘Negotiating Marginalities: Right to Water in Delhi’, in Urban Water Journal, Vol. 10, no. 2 (2013), pp. 97–104 [102].
41. Gopal Guru, ‘For Dalit History Is Not Past but Present’, in K. Satchidanandan (ed.), Words Matter: Writings against Silence (New Delhi: Penguin, Viking, 2016), p. 142.
42. For examples of such sources see Sambaiah Gundimeda, Dalit Politics in Contemporary India (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2015), p. 212; Vasvi Oza, ‘Questions of Reading and Readership of Pictorial Texts: The Case of Bhimayana, a Pictorial Biography of Dr. Ambedkar’, in Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, Vol. 4, no. 3 (2011), pp. 351–65; and several sections of Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2009).
43. Akbar, Leila, p. 123.
44. Ibid., p. 127.
45. Ibid., p. 61.
46. Ibid., p. 5.
47. Ibid., p. 99.
48. Butler, Frames of War.
49. Ibid., p. 50.
50. See Lily Cho, ‘Citizenship, Diaspora and the Bonds of Affect: The Passport Photograph’, in Photography and Culture, Vol. 2, no. 3 (Nov. 2009), pp. 275–87.
51. Akbar, Leila, p. 50.
52. Ibid., p. 51.
53. Ibid., p. 52.
54. Ibid., p. 61.
55. Ibid., p. 63.
56. Ibid., p. 64.
57. Ibid., p. 33.
58. Ibid., p. 111.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., p. 112.
62. Ibid., p. 111.
63. Ibid., pp. 19–20.
64. Lorey, State of Insecurity, p. 22.
65. Nancy Ettlinger, ‘Precarity Unbound’, in Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 32, no. 3 (2007), pp. 321–2.
66. Akbar, Leila, p. 122.
67. Ibid., p. 187.
68. Ibid., pp. 130, 131, 203.
69. Ibid., p. 130.
70. Ibid., p. 135.
71. Ibid., p. 137.
72. Ibid., p. 138.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid., p. 134.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid., p. 187.
77. Vieira, ‘The Concept of Utopia’, p. 17.
78. Arjun Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (London/New York: Verso, 2013), p. 131.
79. Akbar, Leila, p. 111.
80. Ibid.
81. Aimee Bahng, Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2018), p. 11.
82. The Government of India (as opposed to the state governments) is often referred to by media outlets as ‘the centre’.
83. Debjani Ganguly, This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 81.
84. Mathew, The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay, n.p.g.