Purity, Precarity and Power: Prayaag Akbar’s Leila

Abstract

This chapter looks at the way Prayaag Akbar’s Leila (2017) thematizes precarity—not just individual but entire communities of vulnerable subjects. Closely aligned with Judith Butler’s now-classic formulation in Precarious Lives and Frames of War, the chapter looks at vulnerability as less a weakness than a condition in which the state has a major role to play. It shows how vulnerable subjects are embodied and embedded—in specific ecosystems that rather than protect the subjects, seem to transform their vulnerability into dependency and helplessness. That is, eroding social apparatuses are the primary cause of eroding ‘social ontologies’, thus rendering precariousness to citizens. The chapter discusses three ‘assets’ as central to the vulnerable subject’s survival: human assets (such as education and health), physical assets (the infrastructure) and social assets (networks, social welfare measures). In Leila all these forms of assets are responsible not for the amelioration of vulnerability, but its very opposite: the amplification of vulnerability into defencelessness.