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3.61 AVERAGE
3.61 AVERAGE
Leila is set in a near-future where we see India in a totalitarian society, walls have come up dividing communities as there is a regime for purity. It isn’t acceptable for people to socialize with people from other communities anymore. There is a huge divide between people from high class living in walled communities and people from the slums who are struggling for clean water and pure air. It seems a very bleak but not so hypothetical scenario.
.
The story revolves around Shalini who was, as a child, a privileged part of this society never realizing the struggles of the poor until she was cast out of it, when her daughter, Leila, was taken away from her because she was the child of a mixed-race marriage between a Hindu and a Muslim. We follow Shalini in this book, where we see the struggles she faces to find out what happened to Leila and get her back.
.
In so many ways Shalini's journey feels like so much more than finding her daughter, it's the longing for freedom and discovering oneself in this extremist Indian society. There are many things that hit too close to home and one needn't look very far to see how this kind of society can come about, which is really something that this book makes you think about.
.
The writing is amazing, it sucked me in from the start and kept me engaged throughout.
.
There's also a TV show out on Netflix based on this book, which seems interesting although I am always skeptical about adaptations.
.
The story revolves around Shalini who was, as a child, a privileged part of this society never realizing the struggles of the poor until she was cast out of it, when her daughter, Leila, was taken away from her because she was the child of a mixed-race marriage between a Hindu and a Muslim. We follow Shalini in this book, where we see the struggles she faces to find out what happened to Leila and get her back.
.
In so many ways Shalini's journey feels like so much more than finding her daughter, it's the longing for freedom and discovering oneself in this extremist Indian society. There are many things that hit too close to home and one needn't look very far to see how this kind of society can come about, which is really something that this book makes you think about.
.
The writing is amazing, it sucked me in from the start and kept me engaged throughout.
.
There's also a TV show out on Netflix based on this book, which seems interesting although I am always skeptical about adaptations.
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Leila is set in a near-future where we see India in a totalitarian society, walls have come up dividing communities as there is a regime for purity. It isn’t acceptable for people to socialize with people from other communities anymore. There is a huge divide between people from high class living in walled communities and people from the slums who are struggling for clean water and pure air. It seems a very bleak but not so hypothetical scenario.
.
The story revolves around Shalini who was, as a child, a privileged part of this society never realizing the struggles of the poor until she was cast out of it, when her daughter, Leila, was taken away from her because she was the child of a mixed-race marriage between a Hindu and a Muslim. We follow Shalini in this book, where we see the struggles she faces to find out what happened to Leila and get her back.
.
In so many ways Shalini's journey feels like so much more than finding her daughter, it's the longing for freedom and discovering oneself in this extremist Indian society. There are many things that hit too close to home and one needn't look very far to see how this kind of society can come about, which is really something that this book makes you think about.
.
The writing is amazing, it sucked me in from the start and kept me engaged throughout.
.
There's also a TV show out on Netflix based on this book, which seems interesting although I am always skeptical about adaptations.
.
The story revolves around Shalini who was, as a child, a privileged part of this society never realizing the struggles of the poor until she was cast out of it, when her daughter, Leila, was taken away from her because she was the child of a mixed-race marriage between a Hindu and a Muslim. We follow Shalini in this book, where we see the struggles she faces to find out what happened to Leila and get her back.
.
In so many ways Shalini's journey feels like so much more than finding her daughter, it's the longing for freedom and discovering oneself in this extremist Indian society. There are many things that hit too close to home and one needn't look very far to see how this kind of society can come about, which is really something that this book makes you think about.
.
The writing is amazing, it sucked me in from the start and kept me engaged throughout.
.
There's also a TV show out on Netflix based on this book, which seems interesting although I am always skeptical about adaptations.
Some arresting descriptions of deprivation and terrible living conditions, and although I really wanted to keep reading to see what happened, the whole story didn't hang together well enough for me. I never fully understood who was controlling people apart from 'The Council' or why Shalini and her family was picked on (was it Riz or not?). Why didn't Shalini write to her mother if she was able to write to her friend and her nanny? There was too many unanswered plot points, although perhaps because of the life Shalini was forced to live, she didn't have the answers, so we didn't either. Maybe I wanted to know more about those 16 years when her daughter was gone - more about the daily grind. I know I'm not being very clear, but I was generally dissatisfied without really being able to say why.
3.5. Good but not great. Loved the idea but thought it could have been explored a bit deeper. I didn't find myself all that invested in finding out what happened to Leila.
This, it would seem, is the perfect age for dystopia. As the world careens headlong into the horrors of climate change and rising fascism, as the deep-rooted violence of patriarchy is slowly laid bare, as hate and fear-mongering increasingly become the language of politics, dystopian fiction seems particularly suited to make sense of our times. Dystopian literature has long been an effective way of exploring the messes we humans are so good at creating. It takes the worst of society’s very present, very real inclinations and takes them to their extreme logical conclusion, heightening society’s ills to a point where they can no longer be ignored. Indian author Prayaag Akbar joins the ranks of sharp, devastating narratives with his debut Leila that explores a future where humanity is at the mercy of social divide.
Most conversations about the genre of science fiction and fantasy (SFF), or speculative fiction — within which falls the subgenre of dystopian (and its converse, utopian fiction) —tend to be West-centric, ignoring the rich and diverse traditions in the rest of the world. South Asia has had a long tradition of SFF writing, even if it wasn’t always explicitly categorised as such. Apart from the fantastical jinn and pari filled dastaans in our oral tradition, from the mid-19th century onward there has also existed a tradition of SFF novels and short stories in Urdu, Bengali, Tamil and other vernaculars. In the smaller subgenre of dystopian and utopian fiction, South Asia has produced remarkable works; Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, for instance, was a Bengali sci-fi writer whose English-language short story Sultana’s Dream (1905) and Bengali-language novella Padmarag (1924) are masterful narratives of feminist utopias. Muhammad Khalid Akhtar, one of the best Urdu humourists of the 20th century, dabbled in speculative fiction with his satirical Bees Sau Gyarah (1950) set in the then-distant nightmarish future of 2011. More recently, Bina Shah set her novel Before She Sleeps in a futuristic South West Asian city where women have no rights over their own reproductive systems. Akbar’s Leila is a worthy addition to this set, creating a world which is not only horrifying, but horrifyingly plausible.
Leila tells the story of Shalini, a once-wealthy woman who is now at the bottom of the political and social hierarchy of a digitised, heavily surveilled city ruled by the faceless, autocratic Council. The Council has segregated the city’s population into sectors separated by 60-foot walls and connected to each other by “skyroads.” This segregation — based on class, caste and religion — means each enclave has its own rules and rituals of marriages, births, deaths and eating. In order to avoid “impurity”, sectors even privatise their air by enclosing themselves within large air-conditioned domes. Failure of residents to abide by the orders of “purity” results in being sent to a prison, called the Tower, for “purity training.”
When the novel begins, Shalini is in the Tower, taken away from her husband Riz and three-year-old daughter Leila because they refused to live in a walled sector, choosing to make their home in the East End, the only remaining unwalled and “free” neighbourhood. But soon the Council gains more power and its militarised forces overrun East End, punishing its residents for failing to live in the sectors assigned to them according to their religious and caste identities. Forced into servitude to atone for her “sin” of not complying with the Council’s rules of purity, Shalini has been biding her time for 16 years, trying to break through the barriers thrown up by the city and find her daughter. Interspersed with the present day are Shalini’s memories of growing up in a city which is becoming increasingly preoccupied with notions of order and purity. Through Shalini’s position as a wealthy, privileged woman in the old order, we see how the city began to rely more and more on the idea of caste and religious purity, as economic crises become the trigger for social and political violence that propelled the city into sectarian authoritarianism. For instance, the Council uses the growing water crisis in the city as justification for its call for separate walled sectors for each religious and caste community, and the city’s residents gravitate to the seeming order and clarity in the Council’s plans, even as it increases inter-religious and inter-caste hostilities.
The most effective dystopian narratives are those that build their worlds on specific aspects of whatever society they are interested in engaging with, and Akbar builds his world with great skill and insight. The main premise of his novel is the physical segregation of the city; it is easy to trace the roots of this to the housing segregation widespread in many Indian cities. However, it is startling and disconcerting to see how easily it parallels greater contemporary South Asia, including Pakistan: water shortages, for example, are used to aggravate already simmering sectarian divisions. Reading of enclaves for the privileged, while the already marginalised are pushed even further into spaces between the walls, one can’t help but think of walled communities here in Pakistan that promise tidy gardens, roads and schools while slums continue to expand outside them.
The juxtaposition of Shalini’s past and present explores her relationship to, and even complicity with, this new world order. She has memories of her own conduct that served to reinforce caste and class divisions, despite her otherwise progressive politics and her opposition to the ideology of the Council: she makes her daughter’s ayah — a lower-caste woman — sit on the floor instead of the furniture and use separate cutlery and glasses and, while the city experiences a severe water crisis, the privileged Shalini plans a birthday party for Leila around an artificial pool, using her family’s wealth and her class privilege to disregard the needs of the larger city. It is through this concurrence that the reader, slowly and subtly, realises that the difference between Shalini’s and the Council’s actions is merely of scale: the Council is reinforcing, at large, ideas of social division that are already ingrained in many of us.
An especially affecting moment is when Shalini’s search for Leila leads her to a rubbish covered slum that exists alongside the walled sectors. These spaces are where the most marginalised live and picking garbage is the only source of income allowed. As she talks to two women who explain how the air-conditioning dome of the adjacent walled sector set fire to their slum, Shalini is forced to reckon with her own privilege, even under this new order. One woman tells her, “The Tower is where they put high-borns. The people who broke their rules. Still they get big, big buildings. Toilet, fans, electricity, flush. Even when they break the rules they’re too good to be put out here with us. But us? Our crime is being born. We don’t get anything. We don’t deserve it.”
The society Akbar portrays in Leila is, in many ways, a mirror to the one in which we live. His prose is engaging, the narrative tension of Shalini’s increasingly desperate attempts to reunite with her daughter keeps the reader in its thrall. But it is his astute look into contemporary South Asian society’s worst impulses that makes Leila a truly groundbreaking entry into the dystopian genre.
Published in Dawn on October 28 2018: https://www.dawn.com/news/1441854
Most conversations about the genre of science fiction and fantasy (SFF), or speculative fiction — within which falls the subgenre of dystopian (and its converse, utopian fiction) —tend to be West-centric, ignoring the rich and diverse traditions in the rest of the world. South Asia has had a long tradition of SFF writing, even if it wasn’t always explicitly categorised as such. Apart from the fantastical jinn and pari filled dastaans in our oral tradition, from the mid-19th century onward there has also existed a tradition of SFF novels and short stories in Urdu, Bengali, Tamil and other vernaculars. In the smaller subgenre of dystopian and utopian fiction, South Asia has produced remarkable works; Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, for instance, was a Bengali sci-fi writer whose English-language short story Sultana’s Dream (1905) and Bengali-language novella Padmarag (1924) are masterful narratives of feminist utopias. Muhammad Khalid Akhtar, one of the best Urdu humourists of the 20th century, dabbled in speculative fiction with his satirical Bees Sau Gyarah (1950) set in the then-distant nightmarish future of 2011. More recently, Bina Shah set her novel Before She Sleeps in a futuristic South West Asian city where women have no rights over their own reproductive systems. Akbar’s Leila is a worthy addition to this set, creating a world which is not only horrifying, but horrifyingly plausible.
Leila tells the story of Shalini, a once-wealthy woman who is now at the bottom of the political and social hierarchy of a digitised, heavily surveilled city ruled by the faceless, autocratic Council. The Council has segregated the city’s population into sectors separated by 60-foot walls and connected to each other by “skyroads.” This segregation — based on class, caste and religion — means each enclave has its own rules and rituals of marriages, births, deaths and eating. In order to avoid “impurity”, sectors even privatise their air by enclosing themselves within large air-conditioned domes. Failure of residents to abide by the orders of “purity” results in being sent to a prison, called the Tower, for “purity training.”
When the novel begins, Shalini is in the Tower, taken away from her husband Riz and three-year-old daughter Leila because they refused to live in a walled sector, choosing to make their home in the East End, the only remaining unwalled and “free” neighbourhood. But soon the Council gains more power and its militarised forces overrun East End, punishing its residents for failing to live in the sectors assigned to them according to their religious and caste identities. Forced into servitude to atone for her “sin” of not complying with the Council’s rules of purity, Shalini has been biding her time for 16 years, trying to break through the barriers thrown up by the city and find her daughter. Interspersed with the present day are Shalini’s memories of growing up in a city which is becoming increasingly preoccupied with notions of order and purity. Through Shalini’s position as a wealthy, privileged woman in the old order, we see how the city began to rely more and more on the idea of caste and religious purity, as economic crises become the trigger for social and political violence that propelled the city into sectarian authoritarianism. For instance, the Council uses the growing water crisis in the city as justification for its call for separate walled sectors for each religious and caste community, and the city’s residents gravitate to the seeming order and clarity in the Council’s plans, even as it increases inter-religious and inter-caste hostilities.
The most effective dystopian narratives are those that build their worlds on specific aspects of whatever society they are interested in engaging with, and Akbar builds his world with great skill and insight. The main premise of his novel is the physical segregation of the city; it is easy to trace the roots of this to the housing segregation widespread in many Indian cities. However, it is startling and disconcerting to see how easily it parallels greater contemporary South Asia, including Pakistan: water shortages, for example, are used to aggravate already simmering sectarian divisions. Reading of enclaves for the privileged, while the already marginalised are pushed even further into spaces between the walls, one can’t help but think of walled communities here in Pakistan that promise tidy gardens, roads and schools while slums continue to expand outside them.
The juxtaposition of Shalini’s past and present explores her relationship to, and even complicity with, this new world order. She has memories of her own conduct that served to reinforce caste and class divisions, despite her otherwise progressive politics and her opposition to the ideology of the Council: she makes her daughter’s ayah — a lower-caste woman — sit on the floor instead of the furniture and use separate cutlery and glasses and, while the city experiences a severe water crisis, the privileged Shalini plans a birthday party for Leila around an artificial pool, using her family’s wealth and her class privilege to disregard the needs of the larger city. It is through this concurrence that the reader, slowly and subtly, realises that the difference between Shalini’s and the Council’s actions is merely of scale: the Council is reinforcing, at large, ideas of social division that are already ingrained in many of us.
An especially affecting moment is when Shalini’s search for Leila leads her to a rubbish covered slum that exists alongside the walled sectors. These spaces are where the most marginalised live and picking garbage is the only source of income allowed. As she talks to two women who explain how the air-conditioning dome of the adjacent walled sector set fire to their slum, Shalini is forced to reckon with her own privilege, even under this new order. One woman tells her, “The Tower is where they put high-borns. The people who broke their rules. Still they get big, big buildings. Toilet, fans, electricity, flush. Even when they break the rules they’re too good to be put out here with us. But us? Our crime is being born. We don’t get anything. We don’t deserve it.”
The society Akbar portrays in Leila is, in many ways, a mirror to the one in which we live. His prose is engaging, the narrative tension of Shalini’s increasingly desperate attempts to reunite with her daughter keeps the reader in its thrall. But it is his astute look into contemporary South Asian society’s worst impulses that makes Leila a truly groundbreaking entry into the dystopian genre.
Published in Dawn on October 28 2018: https://www.dawn.com/news/1441854
A spooky, sad dystopian story of the love of a mother set in a near-future India where, like the proverbial frog boiling slowly, religious extremism takes over almost without any push-back. Also an apt metaphor as climate change is the major factor causing the takeover. As areas of the city must encase their areas in, essentially, air-conditioned domes to survive- tribalism becomes extremely pronounced. The more westernized, secular family at the center of the story ends up with no place in society, suddenly disenfranchised, their daughter taken from them.
The story is similar in many ways to The Handmaid's Tale, where the main character has been subjected to years of reeducation. It is told in a series of flashbacks as she goes on a quest to find her missing daughter. The way all of these events have affected her mental health ends up being the story-
It is bleak, but so well-written, and the insights into the diversity of India's many cultures, ethnic groups, and belief systems, was fascinating and illuminating. I can't say i really enjoyed it, but the journey was worth it.
The story is similar in many ways to The Handmaid's Tale, where the main character has been subjected to years of reeducation. It is told in a series of flashbacks as she goes on a quest to find her missing daughter. The way all of these events have affected her mental health ends up being the story-
Spoiler
the ending brutal and unsatisfying.It is bleak, but so well-written, and the insights into the diversity of India's many cultures, ethnic groups, and belief systems, was fascinating and illuminating. I can't say i really enjoyed it, but the journey was worth it.
The future is so like the present. Is it really the future or something that is currently happening in this country? What if this reality is existing right now.
If you have seen the Netflix series based on this, and even if you have not, let me assure you the book is far superior to it. They have taken enough creative liberties with the series to make it just a poor imitation of the original. The book, on the other hand, is meticulous, intelligent, thoughtful and very much believable. It progresses in a more organised fashion than the series and slowly reveals the ugly nature of a scary future society.
Nothing about the story is positive and that's the beauty of it. If you haven't watched the series yet, read the book, it's a treat!
If you have seen the Netflix series based on this, and even if you have not, let me assure you the book is far superior to it. They have taken enough creative liberties with the series to make it just a poor imitation of the original. The book, on the other hand, is meticulous, intelligent, thoughtful and very much believable. It progresses in a more organised fashion than the series and slowly reveals the ugly nature of a scary future society.
Nothing about the story is positive and that's the beauty of it. If you haven't watched the series yet, read the book, it's a treat!