an academic article by Sanjana R. Das, III BA English
Abstract
Dystopian fiction has been a relatively new genre in the canon of Indian English writings. It caught on in the Indian market around the late 1980s with the arrival of Penguin and the other five giants of the publishing world. “The post-1980s Indian novel’s own investment in the hold of the (colonial, national) past on India’s present has affected our readings of the entire genre to such a degree that the field of Indian novel studies is almost entirely dependent on a critique of historicity”(Anjaria, p2). So while literature in regional languages still flourish, a vast majority of the educated Indian audience opt to read in English. The post-millennial Indian English writers have made a concentrated effort to break away from this trend by bringing out our very own indigenous versions of the Western works that enjoy huge popularity and massive readership. Which in turn raises a critical question, are the post-millennial works of Indian fiction really ‘Indian’ in its essence?
This paper attempts to answer this very question by drawing comparisons between Prayaag Akbar’s Leila, and Margaret Atwood’s award-winning work The Handmaid’s Tale. In exploring the psyche of the two protagonists, Shalini and Offred; as well as their respective dystopian societies, one can clearly see what exactly makes Leila uniquely ‘Indian’.
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“Dystopia is usually understood to be ‘utopia’s twentieth-century doppelganger,’ one best exemplified by science and political fiction”(Gordin, Tilley, and Prakash I). Woven as they are with strong references to the real world, dystopian fictions function as powerful post-memory devices, simultaneously involved with both the past and the present, whose main developments are explored and amplified. Some of the most popular dystopian works of all time such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, and the more recent ones like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, all attempt to portray such a horrifying reality that awaits the future generations.
Prayag Akbar’s Leila is a uniquely Indian take on this concept of dystopia. But what immediately strikes you upon first reading it, are the many similarities it holds to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Both have female protagonists in their early 30s and 40s who struggle to hold on to the remnants of their sanity after their lives get utterly torn apart by the powers that be of their respective dystopian societies. Both of them are wives and mothers, who are forcefully separated from their daughters and husbands, for having dared to oppose the regime. Leila is set in near future India where the relentless obsession with caste, religion, and class has become ubiquitous. It attempts to hold up a mirror to all sections of society to show how everybody contributes to the realization of a dystopian future. What makes it even more terrifying is how familiar and plausible this ‘near-future’ reality feels. Ours’ is a society that holds onto its ideals of casteism and purity, no matter how ‘secular’ we claim ourselves to be. We live in a society, where hate crimes, lynchings, public shaming and ‘love jihads’ are commonplace. They represent the ugly countenance of our society, which we pretend not to see. We manage to convince ourselves every single time they happen, that such incidents are far and in-between. We do not wish for these harsh realities to intrude upon the ‘happy’ modicum of our lives. Fowler sums up this Ostrich attitude of human-beings very well when she states “The world runs on the fuel of endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look” (Fowler, p232).
At its crux, Leila narrates the tale of a mother’s untiring search for her daughter. This is made abundantly clear from the very first chapter where we come across the protagonist lighting two candles on the wall to commemorate her daughter’s nineteenth birthday, who she hasn’t seen for the past sixteen years. And yet, there are no discernable traces of uncertainty in her. She is quietly confident in her belief that such a reality would eventually come to fruition. This can be seen from how she never uses ‘if’, when talking about finding Leila, it’s always ‘when’.
Told from the perspective of this mother, whose sole reason for existence is the hope that she would one day reunite with her daughter, the story vacillates between Shalini’s memories of her childhood and that of her present-day reality in the ‘Towers’. She has long been drained of any further desire to live. Her daughter remains her last and only tether to the world of the living. She demonstrates throughout the course of the novel the extents to which she is ready to go, in order to find out any information regarding her daughter. Her easy compliance to the senseless outpourings of their psychiatrist at the ‘Purity Camp’, Dr.Iyer- is almost as sickening as the sexual abuse she has to endure at the hands of the councilmen. So is the case with Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale. Her memories of her daughter are so persuasive that she does not even introduce the topic – she seems to assume that her readers will be as aware as she herself is that when she speaks of ‘she’ for the first time in chapter five, it is her lost daughter whom Offred is recalling, even though the child has not previously been mentioned. In consciously trying not to think of her daughter, Offred attempts to prevent her high strung nerves from being strained any further. She realizes how precarious her own hold to sanity is and tries to preserve it.
Both Leila and The Handmaid’s Tale depict deeply religious and patriarchal dystopian societies, who view the law as ‘a moral system and not merely as an institutionalization of force’. This law is forcefully imposed upon the people without carrying within itself any account of its own legitimacy. In Leila, the society has been segregated in accordance to the law into different castes, and communities, enclosed within tall thick walls. They each own separate sectors, the entrances to which have been cordoned off to the members of other communities. The ones who dare to break these rules are punished severely and often killed. The Handmaid’s Tale on the other hand fully embodies speculative fiction’s aptitude for the extremes. It depicts a world where fertility rates have fallen to zero, and a theocratic, militarized government has taken power in the United States, and renamed it as the Republic of Gilead. Under this new regime, women are deprived of their basic rights including the right to own jobs and bank accounts. The few who are still fertile are taken away from their families and exploited as surrogate mothers by the rich caste of the Commanders. But compared to the purity obsessed caste-based society in Leila, the possibility of a theocratic society like that in Gilead coming into existence is even higher, because history has previously recorded such incidents. For instance, the Ceausescu regime in Romania made it mandatory for each woman to have four children at the very least. Another good example is the Nazi’s “Lebensborn” program, that provided young unmarried girls to SS families in order to produce more ‘ideal’ children.
Despite it’s very many similarities to The Handmaid’s Tale, Leila is unique in how it abounds with the ‘Indianness’ of its protagonist. What makes Shalini so different from Offred is precisely her ‘Indianness’. The married Indian woman is often depicted as being self-sacrificing and pious, whose existence revolves solely around that of her husband, and more importantly her kids. She has no existence outside of this and finds her comfort and happiness in theirs. ‘Sarvamsaha’ and ‘Pativrata’ are some of the virtues she is expected to uphold. The society expects this of them, as can be seen in the case of Queen Gandhari (wife of the blind Kuru King Dhritarashtra, who willingly chose to forsake her own sense of vision in order to accompany her husband in all his comforts and griefs). We applaud her courage, and willingness, and extoll her virtuous conduct. But no one dares to vilify her or ridicule her for this choice. She instead, has our eternal respect. Consciously, or unconsciously it is from this mould of an ideal Indian woman, that Prayaag Akbar draws inspiration from for Leila. Akbar’s Shalini, like a ‘good’ Indian mother, tries to take upon herself the responsibility for not having prevented the disaster from happening. In clinical psychology, a person who has a martyr complex is someone who seeks out suffering or persecution because it feeds a psychological need. Such is the case with Shalini, as with most Indian mothers. She feels responsible for not having protected her family. She is wracked with guilt over losing her daughter. While rationally being aware that what happened was inevitable, she is unable to shed this guilt, and it suffocates her from within. She blames herself for having been too ‘useless’. This becomes very much apparent, when after sending away the boy she accidentally meets while taking a walk along the streets beside the towers, she thinks to herself “Him too I did not protect” (Akbar, p35). She holds these ‘assumed’ guilts deep within herself and draws strength from them to stay steady on her mission. They weigh her down, and yet at the same time, they serve to anchor her sanity. Atwood’s Offred, on the other hand, does not try to assume guilt. She knows very well, who exactly are the ones responsible for her horrible plight. And while her situation could be considered even more terrible than that of Shalini’s, Offred refuses to even entertain the idea that her husband Luke could be dead. She is dead set on believing that he had somehow survived and that he would soon arrive to rescue her and their daughter. She refuses to accept otherwise, even though the rational part of her brain realizes this truth. We see how desperate she is to cling to this version of reality from how she cries and remonstrates herself after having unconsciously referred to her husband in the past tense “Is, I say. Is, is, only two letters, you stupid shit, can’t you manage to remember it, even a short word like that?”(Atwood, p239). Shalini on the other hand, after having watched her husband Riz bleed to death in front of her own eyes, is more ready to accept the reality of his death. And yet, this does not stop her from holding imaginary conversations and arguments with him. She firmly believes that his soul has yet to leave her side.
Shalini from Leila starts off as a forward-thinking progressive urban girl, who is unapologetic about having sex, drinking, and smoking. She leads an independent existence outside of the ‘laws’, thumping her nose at the patriarchal society. She has a job and a life outside of her family. But the moment she loses them, everything changes. Now she is desperate, to find out any details at all, and this desperation has gradually chipped away at her sense of self. She no longer has a life outside of her daughter. She becomes the ultimate ‘Indian’ mother. Offred, on the other hand, fights back and strives to hold onto her sense of self. Yes, she cares for her daughter, but hers’ isn’t that all-consuming need you see in Shalini. She fights back not just for the sake of her family, but also her own. Her inner thoughts deeply teem with sarcasm. They allow her to derive a perverse sense of pleasure in mocking her oppressors. She survives by numbing herself to her surroundings, by refusing to think. Because “Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last”(Atwood, p17). You see her refusal to give in to the circumstances at several instances spread across the novel. The very line she keeps muttering “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” is a testament to this. But then she comes across a photo of her eight-year-old daughter, and the fact that her child might not know of her existence devastates her. This becomes a turning point in her life, and she stops struggling so hard. You get a sense of her deep anguish from the lines “I have been obliterated for her. I am only a shadow now, from back behind the glib shiny surface of this photograph. A shadow of a shadow, as dead mothers become. You can see it in her eyes: I am not there” (Atwood, p238). In the wake of this realization, comes another- her existence has lost its purpose. This then numbs her to the outside reality and she briefly enters a state of oblivion, wherein she gives caution to the wind and decides to make the most out of her bleak reality. It is only the news of her friend Ofglen’s death that manages to shock her back into existence.
The most important lesson that these two works teach us, is that big changes don’t happen overnight but are often the results of a long drawn-out process. In both of them, it was the lack of an immediate and effective reaction against the abuse of political power that allowed things to degenerate and fall into dystopia. To conclude with, despite the many similarities in the lives of our two protagonists, the ‘Indianness’ of Shalini’s psyche, as well as that of the sectors provide a sharp contrast to that of Offred as stated above. Thus post-millennial Indian fiction, in catering to the needs of the reading audience, has to a large extent become capable of shaking off the effects of colonialism, and to make these works unique in their easy affectation of Indianness.
Works Cited
Akbar, Prayaag. Leila. Faber and Faber, 2019.
Anjaria, Ulka. A History of the Indian Novel in English. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Random House US, 2019.
Belluzzo, Cecilia. ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ A Reflection on Sexual Politics and the Revolutionary Power of Dystopias. Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/38589039/_The_Handmaids_Tale_A_Reflection_on_Sexual_Politics_and_the_Revolutionary_Power_of_Dystopias.
Fowler, Karen Joy. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2016.
Gordin, Michael D., et al. Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility. Princeton University Press, 2010.
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