Class, Caste, and Nationalism in Contemporary Indian Dystopias: A Critical Study of Prayaag Akbar’s Leila

Abstract

In Prayaag Akbar’s Leila, the walls, purity laws, surveillance, and fear of the near-future India are a matrix of organized exclusion. This paper demonstrates that dystopia in the Indian context is not a mere dystopia of the state. However, also a dystopia of old social divisions sharpening under the new authoritarian regime; this paper explores the intersections of class, caste, and nationalism in the novel. This paper’s argument is that Leila is powerful in that it frames the global dystopian form in the anxieties of India: caste hierarchy, communal division, gated urban privilege, environmental breakdown, and the political language of purity. The novel turns a personal tragedy into a political landscape of a divided country through Shalini’s quest to find her daughter. Her travels through walls, camps, and spaces that are secured indicate that the state is not only a force but also a force that controls memory, intimacy, movement, labor, and reproductive life. This paper also suggests that class privilege in Leila is not a product of the system of oppression. The novel demonstrates how upper-class comfort contributes to the same sort of segregation that eventually consumes those who have benefited from it. Meanwhile, caste is the more fundamental principle of division, and nationalism provides moral backing to violence by declaring exclusion as protection and purity as public good. The paper also analyses the relationship between the bodies of women, ecological scarcity and surveillance technologies in sustaining this order.