Future imperfect

My Mirror column: a two-part series on Leila

The new web series Leila, adapted from Prayaag Akbar’s 2017 novel, imagines a dystopian India that makes for harsh but necessary viewing.

An opinion piece I read recently suggested that comedy is becoming a difficult art to practise in today’s India, as reality becomes ever more ridiculous. The same might be said, I think, of dystopian fiction. As our collective lived experience itself edges away from the rational, it becomes harder to make our irrationalities visible in the mirror of fiction.

The writer who seeks to show us such a mirror must carefully calibrate the distance between an imagined future and the present that we’ve accepted as normal. In his 2017 novel Leila, Prayaag Akbar managed to do that successfully.

The book’s chilling vision of the future was filled with details that felt entirely plausible. Akbar’s world is one where birth determines social status, where mixing is strongly discouraged and the rich have parcelled out urban space amongst themselves, dividing up the city into community-specific neighbourhoods like “the 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”. Linked by a network of “flyroads”, the leafy, peaceful universe of these segregated “high sectors” is enclosed by walls, and a vast air-conditioning system called the Skydome. The poor, known as Slummers, live beyond the walls – in a filthy, treeless world crisscrossed by Outroads, where the air is noxious with gases expelled from the Skydome’s purifiers, and the ground an endless stretch of landfills that often catch fire.

It is in a version of this universe, based on Akbar’s novel, that the new Netflix series Leila unfolds. Like the novel, the show centres on Shalini (a superb Huma Qureshi), who is suddenly hurled from an elite bubble of bungalows, swimming pools and poshly cosmopolitan schools into the margins of the new society that has come into being. “Purity for All” here means purity is all, and those who make the mistake of loving outside their communities must be punished, and schooled into submission. Deepa Mehta, who has directed the series’ first two episodes, told me in an interview that what attracted her to Akbar’s book, and to screenwriter Urmi Juvekar’s reimagining of it for Netflix, was “the journey of a person who is privileged, who has everything, but has it taken away from her in difficult times. It’s not just about looking for her daughter, it’s about looking for her dignity, her own self”.

“Wherever there is a totalitarian regime, women are having a really rough time,” added Mehta. Both for her and Qureshi, Leila’s woman-centric narrative was crucial to its politics. “The problem with a lot of female characters and roles is that you always have to be rescued by someone,” Qureshi said during the same interview. “Even in 2019, I get a lot of scripts in which [women] just have to hang around, look nice, basically support the man who saves the world. Even when the problem concerns women, a guy has to come and empower us. What about us empowering ourselves, finding that inner strength? Shalini offered me that.”

Gender is also at the crux of some changes the series makes from the book. For instance, a little boy called Roop, whom Shalini encounters during her search for her lost daughter, here becomes a little girl. “I’d seen [male children in] Lion and Slumdog Millionaire, and I thought about time, ladkiyan toh honi chahiye. It’s a desire, as a woman, to have an emotional journey to which as many women as possible are contributing,” said Mehta.

Given that a 250-page novel needed to be stretched to create a six-episode series, changes were inevitable. “A book is very different than a film, and a series completely different. That’s not an excuse, it’s the reality of the medium,” Mehta said. Some of the striking additions involve completely new characters, like the labour supervisor Bhanu (Siddharth) or the Dixit family, for whom Shalini goes to work, or the fascinating figure of Rao Saheb (Akash Khurana), who is both a founding figure of the regime and among its more conflicted critics. Other changes are within characters. The book, for instance, starts with Shalini’s husband Riz (Rahul Khanna) screaming at her that she will never find Leila, while on screen he is an almost cloyingly supportive husband, only appearing to compliment or reassure her. That change, perhaps, contributes to Shalini’s rather different self-image, from a kind of self-flagellation for cowardice in the book, to being the woman who begins the series by kicking her attackers and saying over and over, “I’m not afraid of you.”

There is also a textural transformation caused by the fact that the novel is in English, with entirely English dialogue, while the series largely unfolds in Hindi, with some characters switching to English when they would naturally do so, such as Shalini and her husband Riz.

(This column has a second part, which is here.)

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16 Jun 2019.