Hydrosocial Precarity and Postmillennial Indian Fiction: Reading Prayaag Akbar’s Leila

This paper aims to make a contribution to the debate on how hydropolitics help us understand the socio-spatial dynamics of urban space and identity formation by reading the speculative city in Prayaag Akbar’s Leila (2017). The paper attempts to give Leila, frequently read under dystopic genre fiction, a hydropolitical reading, an overlooked critical paradigm, particularly in the context of postmillennial Indian fiction. To that end, it draws upon the concept of hydrosocial territories to spatialize the city-splitting in Leila. This kind of approach critically reconfigures water, as a new social, that shapes the spatial. The paper charts how the neoliberal “Council” in Leila governmentalizes the hydrosocial relations. Central to its hydroterritorial apparatus is the utilization of different contours, including pipe politics, water time, and hydraulic citizenship that induce hydrosocial precarity.