Underexplored Feminist Dystopias in Contemporary Indian Speculative Fiction

Abstract

The genre of feminist dystopian fiction, globally dominated by Anglophone texts like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, has provided a powerful vocabulary for critiquing patriarchal control. However, scholarly focus has largely remained on Western contexts, overlooking a burgeoning and culturally specific body of work from other regions. This paper addresses this critical gap by examining underexplored feminist dystopias within contemporary Indian speculative fiction. It argues that texts such as Prayaag Akbar’s Leila (2017) and Manjula Padmanabhan’s The Island of Lost Girls (2015) construct uniquely Indian dystopias where patriarchal oppression is inextricably linked with local anxieties surrounding caste, religion, and neo-liberal development. Through a close reading informed by postcolonial feminist theory and Foucault's concept of biopolitics, this paper demonstrates how these novels move beyond universalist critiques of patriarchy. They instead foreground an intersectional model of dystopia, where the female body becomes the primary site of state control, not just over gender, but over the purity of the community and the nation itself. By analyzing these narratives, we can decolonize our understanding of the feminist dystopian genre and recognize its potent function as a diagnostic tool for the socio-political fissures of contemporary India.