On the other hand, Netflix’s Leila (2019), while based on the book, takes liberties with the prose. And this is what scares the reader the most – the darkness of the prose, the tempered fragility of Shalini’s psyche after 16 years of holding her family (her disappeared daughter and murdered husband) inside her mind, the all-encompassing feeling of existing in a dystopia.Īkbar’s Leila, though overtly is a story of Shalini’s ceaseless resolution to find her daughter, becomes a narrative about the subject within a dystopia – her struggles with the Orwellian dilemma of being imprisoned in the better world of the past, while simultaneously being coerced to face the twisted totalitarian future.

Purity One’s administration believes in separating the privileged from the filth and decay of the rest of the city – creating a classist, misogynist, casteist and communal bubble. Everyone who lives in this dystopia is in fear of The Council – an omnipresent, all-powerful body whose slogan is “Purity for all” there are vigilante thugs of The Council called the Repeaters who do the Council’s dirty work, and a purity camp exists for the ones who have gone astray. Akbar’s Leila is set in the “near future”, in a fictional but readily recognisable Indian city – Purity One, where various communities live somewhat “comfortably” segregated and sequestered behind 60 feet walls. She goes in search of Leila in a dystopic landscape that is overwhelmed by sectarianism and totalitarian rule. Prayaag Akbar’s novel, Leila, is about a mother, Shalini, who is separated from her daughter, Leila (born to a Hindu mother and Muslim father), forcibly by the members of an authoritarian, fundamentalist cult, and detained in a “purity camp”.

Leila by Prayaag Akbar