Grave New World

My Mirror column: 

The new webseries Leila is uneven in its language, its storytelling and its politics, but it offers plenty to think about. 

(Second of a two-part column)

In Prayaag Akbar’s 2017 book Leila, which is in English, the use of Hindustani words is limited but specific: the unconscious use of the appellations “Abbu” and “Ammi” nearly gets Riz and his brother Naaz caught as being from ‘the wrong sector’. In the Netflix show, Shalini meets Riz’s parents and calls them Abbu and Ammi – but the subtitles flatten the words into “Dad” and “Mom”. Other world-building coinages by Akbar – the thuggish army of Repeaters, or the hierarchical division of society into Categories 1-5 – are allowed to remain in the show’s English subtitles, but necessarily translated into Hindi in the spoken version, sometimes losing specificity and power – eg “Paltan” for the Repeaters – and sometimes gaining it: “Panchakarmi” has far greater punch than Category 5.

There are other times when the Hindi dialogue is as nuanced as it is possible to be, delineating minute shades of meaning that then amplify the narrative. One instance not present in the book is when Shalini (Huma Qureshi) happens to witness the police raiding a professor’s study. “Yahan toh Sen wali kitaab bhi hai,” one cop announces triumphantly to his senior. 

“Politics? Aap politics sikhaate hain?” the senior cop demands of the professor. “Sikhata nahi, padhaata hoon,” he replies sharply. That almost pedantic distinction, even on the verge of being arrested, fits the character’s academic persona. But that difference between “sikhana” and “padhaana” also makes a subtle point about this anti-intellectual universe, in which politics can only be understood as a skill – not as a subject of study. And as is already becoming true in our present, it is not a skill that the establishment wishes students to have.

There is another funny detail in the scene. The nameplate outside H. No. 1/20, a mid-sized bungalow of the sort that a Delhi University professor might currently occupy, says “Dr. Nakul Chaubey, MA, M.Phil, PhD”. Given that a PhD implies having all the previous degrees, the nameplate’s recitation of degrees might be intended as humour. But it might also be read as signifying a world in which even visitors to an academic’s house are not assumed to know what a PhD is. As many degrees as possible must be listed on an intellectual’s door, and even that listing is not sufficient armour against the barbarians at the gates. As we – and Shalini – watch in silent horror, the knot of heckling protestors shouting “Nakul Chaubey murdabad” swiftly becomes a lynch mob kicking and punching the unarmed white-bearded man, now fallen to the ground.

The targeting of intellectuals in a Hindutva-driven dystopia has appeared in a previous Netflix India original series, Ghoul (2018), whose writer-director Patrick Graham shares writing credits on Leila with Urmi Juvekar and Suhani Kanwar. In Ghoul, that aspect is more frontally addressed: the protagonist Nida Rahim (Radhika Apte) is the daughter of a retired academic called Shahnawaz Rahim (SM Zaheer). Nida is part of an anti-terrorist force, and much of the narrative tension emerges out of the father and daughter’s starkly different positions on the state’s role in citizens’ lives.

The elder Rahim’s criticism of an authoritarian government is seen by his daughter as seditious. Father and daughter are both Muslim, but the daughter has internalised that second-class status as involving a greater need to prove her loyalty to the state.

That idea of a generational shift is also a shaping influence in Leila, which contains several scenes involving the brainwashing of children – and the attempted reformation of adults – by the new state of Aryavarta.

The show’s vision of Aryavarta feels almost programmatic in its symbolic combining of historical Fascism (a two finger ‘Jai Aryavarta’ salute, for instance) with a recognisable version of the Indian present (a leader called Joshiji whose name appears on every broadcast and every poster). Schoolchildren recite “Aryavarta is my mother” while doing martial exercises; babies are addicted to animated videos about Junior Joshi, whose heroic exploits evoke Bal Narendra.

More disturbing is the use, in the episodes directed by Mehta, of variations on existing Hindu rituals – rolling on the floor, for instance, or the marriage of a woman to a dog – as punishments imposed on women who break the rules of Aryavarta. In times like ours, it seems to me more necessary than ever to distinguish our criticism of the socio-political vision of Hindutva from what feels like a too-easy mockery of Hindu practice. To imagine existing religious practices as future forms of social torture is to display a lack of both imagination and empathy.

Leila also occasionally suffers from feeling like an Indian version of The Handmaid’s Tale, the web adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel. Akbar’s novel did contain the core idea of a regime that slut-shames and drugs recalcitrant women into submission, but the Netflix version has replaced the workaday dullness of Shalini’s office-cleaning and one-room-kitchen-attached-bath with a dark, shared dormitory for women who must undergo various forms of abasement, including bathing in dirty water, polishing shoes and being guarded by eunuchs. It also seems to adopt wholesale from Atwood the vision of categories of women dressed in different colours who serve different roles in society (the handmaids, the Marthas and the Wives). 

Still, these categories do provide the show’s most fertile ground for self-examination by the class of Indians likely to be watching Leila. I was excited by the show’s foregrounding of what is a more subterranean strain in the novel, the mistress-maid reversal. But the execution of that reversal, crunched into two years instead of the novel’s sixteen, is too quick to be credible. It allows for no interiority on the parts of either mistresses or maids. And if Shalini doesn’t see how her unearned privilege is part of what has led her world to this point, how will we?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23 June 2019. (The first part is here.)