Posthuman Dystopia and Artificial Intelligence: Reconfiguring Identity in Prayaag Akbar’s Leila and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape
Sougata Sahoo,
PhD Research Scholar
Department Of English
Raiganj University
West Bengal, India.
Abstract:
This paper offers a sustained critical exploration of
dystopia and artificial intelligence as hegemonic forces that recalibrate and
destabilize human identity in Prayaag Akbar’s Leila and Padmanabhan’s Escape. Situated within the
theoretical frameworks of posthumanism, Foucauldian biopolitics, and critical
dystopian discourse, the paper elucidates how lives are systematically
quantified, and selves meticulously orchestrated, within totalizing regimes that
blur the boundaries between autonomy and subjugation. Both narratives project
near-future worlds wherein artificial intelligence transcends its instrumental
status to emerge as an epistemological and biopolitical sovereign, regulating
bodies, memories, and desires with chilling precision. Drawing upon the
theoretical interventions of Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti,
and N. Katherine Hayles, this analysis elucidates the dismantling of liberal
humanist subjectivity under conditions of pervasive digital control. In Leila, AI-enabled systems of
social stratification and data-driven moral regulation render identity a
mutable, surveilled construct, perpetually assessed and disciplined through
technocratic rationality. The protagonist Shalini’s fragmented consciousness
reflects the violent imposition of algorithmic norms that reduce individuality
to measurable compliance. Conversely, Escape articulates a claustrophobic dystopia
in which artificial intelligence infiltrates cognitive and ethical domains,
collapsing the distinction between human agency and machinic determinism.
Identity in Escape becomes a spectral simulacrum, endlessly reprogrammed within a closed
technological loop. The paper contends that both texts dramatize a posthuman
dystopian condition characterized by ontological instability and existential
precarity, wherein the human subject is reconstituted as a hybrid assemblage of
flesh, code, and ideology. Ultimately, Leila and Escape foreground the
catastrophic implications of surrendering identity to algorithmic governance
while simultaneously gesturing toward fragile possibilities of subversive
posthuman becoming.
Keywords: Posthumanism,
biopolitics, surveillance, algorithmic governance, technocratic control.
Introduction
Dystopian fiction has become a pivotal genre for interrogating the
entanglement of technological systems with human identity—particularly in an
era characterized by accelerating AI/algorithmic governance, ecological
precarity, and posthuman imaginaries. While canonical texts like George
Orwell’s 1984 have long probed the intersection of surveillance and
subjectivity, contemporary Indian dystopian narratives like Prayaag Akbar’s Leila
and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape articulate nuances tied to caste,
gender, and techno-social control that necessitate a recalibration of critical
frameworks. These narratives employ speculative worlds to dissect how
artificial socio-technical infrastructures reconfigure what it means to be
human, shifting it from an organic, embodied condition to a construct mediated
by systems of power, technology, and capital.
This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of Leila and Escape
to reveal how the spectre of artificial governance—whether through purity
enforcement, environmental control machines, or reproductive
technologies—intervenes in the formation of individual and collective
identities. I read these dystopias through the conceptual apparatus of
posthumanism, drawing on theorists who argue that human identity in the 21st
century is inseparable from its technological milieus and that artificial
systems increasingly shape self-perception, agency, and socio-political
belonging.
Posthuman Dystopia and the Politics of Identity: The Posthuman Frame
Posthumanism destabilizes the modernist conception of the autonomous,
centered human subject. It posits that human identity is co-constituted with
technologies, ecologies, and networks that exceed the organismic body. In
dystopian fiction, posthumanism often materializes as systems that collapse
boundaries between humans and machines, agency and algorithm, subjectivity and
structural control. Both Leila and Escape depict futures where
identity is not merely at risk of surveillance or marginalization, but is
technologized, biopoliticized, and reengineered by artificial regimes.
While Akbar’s Leila does not explicitly center AI in its plot, it
constructs a dystopian society where algorithmic categorization (purity
indices, identity registries, and surveillance networks) governs life chances
and corporeal mobility. The Council—an authoritarian apparatus—utilizes
technological systems to adjudicate identity, enforce segregation, and control
access to resources. The society’s architecture, replete with “Purity Walls”
and Skydome technologies, embodies a form of artificial governance that renders
human identity as data points subject to classification and exclusion.
In Escape, Padmanabhan ventures further into the arena of
technological determinism. Here, technologies of reproduction, cloning, and
cybernetic governance erase women from the social landscape. Men reproduce
through cloning, rendering traditional gender roles obsolete and even
biologically unnecessary. In this world, identity is not derived from embodied
differences but is a function of techno-science, wherein biological femininity
has been supplanted by systemic artificial reproduction.
The posthuman condition in these texts is not utopian; it is a cautionary
threshold where human essence is subsumed by systems that purport to optimize, regulate,
or ‘perfect’ society, thus yielding new forms of alienation.
Leila—Dystopia as Algorithmic Purification, Surveillance, and Algorithmic
Selfhood
Set in the late 2040s, Leila imagines a world ravaged by
environmental degradation and governed by “The Council,” an authoritarian
bureaucracy that rigidly regulates identity, community, and bodily autonomy. In
this dystopia, fresh air and drinking water are commodified luxuries, and
social categories are used as proxies for purity and contamination.
The protagonist Shalini’s separation from her daughter, Leila, becomes an
allegory of loss in a world where identity itself has been algorithmically
codified. Her daughter is abducted for violating purity norms—inter-faith
lineage—evidencing how identity becomes a function of systemic categorization
rather than selfhood. This systemic enforcement mirrors broader societal logics
where artificial regimes of classification determine life chances.
Importantly, the novel’s dystopian hierarchy is not purely mechanical; it
is a hybrid of techno-bureaucratic and socio-cultural logics. The Purity Walls,
Skydome technologies (which purport to cleanse the air for elite enclaves), and
registries of lineage constitute systems that quantify identity, rendering
human beings as data vectors subject to inclusion or exclusion. These systems
function akin to algorithmic governance in real-world paradigms, where
automated decision-making based on data profiles can reinforce existing
hierarchies and prejudices. Such dystopian mechanisms anticipate futures in
which identity is calculated, sorted, and policed by artificial regimes.
Biopolitics and the Reduction of the Human
Drawing on Foucauldian biopolitics, Akbar’s dystopia illustrates how
governance extends beyond the sovereign’s control over territory to control
over life itself through technologies that segregate, surveil, and discipline
populations. Leila’s societal order reflects a political apparatus that
instrumentalizes ecological collapse and techno-surveillance to perpetuate
power. Water scarcity and polluted air are not merely environmental backdrops
but instruments of stratification wherein the Council allocates life-sustaining
resources
In this scenario, human identity is not grounded in agency or
self-actualization but in compliance with imposed categories of purity. Those
branded as impure—whether due to inter-religious lineage, caste ambiguity, or
non-conforming relationships—are relegated to the margins, incarcerated in
purge camps, or erased altogether. The novel’s dystopian logic embodies what
Rosi Braidotti describes as the posthuman condition, where subjectivity is
“decentered” and redistributed across material and technological networks that
condition existence. Identity becomes contingent upon data regimes rather than
lived experience.
Resistance and the Persistence of Subjectivity
Shalini’s quest for Leila reveals the residual force of personal subjectivity
against systemic reduction. While the Council deploys technological systems to
strip individuals of autonomy, Shalini’s memories, longing, and resistance
refuse to be fully subsumed by algorithmic identities. Her persistence signals
that even in hyper-controlled dystopias, human subjectivity cannot be entirely
erased—a theme reminiscent of critical dystopias that maintain a utopian
impulse by foregrounding resistance. Though Akbar’s world is grim, the
narrative space allows for cracks in the authoritarian edifice where identity,
memory, and emotion persist against the logic of calculated control.
Escape—Technological Erasure of Gender and Identity: A World Without Women:
Techno-Social Genocide
Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape presents a dystopia even more radical
than Leila, one in which technological systems have obliterated the
category of women altogether. This world is shaped by techno-scientific logic
that privileges artificial reproduction, cloning, and cyber governance,
rendering traditional gender roles redundant. A key consequence is the
near-extinction of women and a society structured entirely around male bodies
and cloned identities.
This narrative is an unsettling exploration of how technology can be
complicit in patriarchal logic when not tempered by ethical frameworks. In
Padmanabhan’s dystopia, technological mastery has not liberated identity but
has reinforced gender hierarchies by eliminating the very category of
woman—which, paradoxically, was historically oppressed. Here, technological
systems have replaced natural reproductive processes with cloning technologies,
effectively eradicating women’s reproductive roles. This narrative exposes the
dark side of technological determinism: a future where technology intensifies
gender oppression under the guise of progress.
What Escape dramatizes, then, is the paradox of a technocentric
society that imagines itself emancipatory but ends up reproducing and
amplifying patriarchal domination. Technology in this dystopia is not neutral;
it is imbued with social biases that reflect and exacerbate existing
inequalities.
Posthuman Bodies and the Crisis of Gender
Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape presents a radical
dystopian vision in which the technological restructuring of the human body
precipitates a profound crisis of gender and identity. The near-total erasure
of women from the novel’s world destabilizes the ontological foundations upon
which gender has historically been understood. Unlike conventional dystopian
narratives where power operates primarily through surveillance, discipline, and
the regulation of existing bodies, Escape imagines a regime in which
technology intervenes at a far more fundamental level—reengineering the
biological conditions of human existence itself. This shift marks a decisive
movement from biopolitical control over bodies to techno-scientific control
over life’s very possibility. In Padmanabhan’s dystopia, men reproduce through
cloning and artificial reproduction, rendering women biologically unnecessary.
This technological redundancy of women is not merely a narrative shock but a
critical extrapolation of patriarchal logic embedded in techno-scientific
progress. Gender, which has traditionally functioned as a core axis of identity
formation rooted in sexual difference and reproductive embodiment, loses its
structural relevance. Identity no longer emerges from lived bodily experience
or relational difference but from technological replication. The cloned male
body becomes the norm, producing a society characterized by homogeneity,
repetition, and the elimination of difference. This condition generates a
crisis of authenticity. Historically, identity has been anchored in
embodiment—shaped by biological specificity, social experience, and memory. In Escape,
however, the body is no longer a site of origin but a manufactured product,
reproducible and modifiable at will. When bodies can be technologically
produced without organic processes, the distinction between original and copy
collapses. Identity, under such circumstances, becomes detached from history
and lived experience, reduced instead to a functional outcome of systemic
design. Padmanabhan thus exposes how technological reproduction threatens to
empty identity of depth; turning subjectivity into a programmable construct.
From a posthumanist perspective, Escape resonates with theoretical
arguments that technologies increasingly mediate not only human behavior but
the very boundaries of the body itself. Posthumanism challenges the notion of a
fixed, autonomous human subject, emphasizing instead the entanglement of humans
with technological systems. In Padmanabhan’s narrative, this entanglement
becomes dystopian: technology does not expand human possibility but constrains it
within rigid, artificial norms. While the destabilization of gender binaries
might appear emancipatory in theory, Escape demonstrates that such
destabilization can be deeply violent when orchestrated by unequal power structures.
Crucially, the novel warns that technological mediation alone does not
dismantle hierarchy. Instead, it risks reconstituting oppression in new forms.
The elimination of women does not abolish patriarchy; it perfects it by erasing
the gendered Other entirely. Thus, Escape reveals a central paradox of
posthuman futures: while technology has the potential to unsettle normative
categories of gender and identity, it can just as easily ossify new regimes of
dominance if ethical and political accountability are absent. Padmanabhan’s
dystopia, therefore, serves as a cautionary meditation on the dangers of
surrendering the human body—and identity itself—to unexamined techno-scientific
power.
Patriarchy and Technological Governance
Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape does not merely
speculate upon a technologically advanced future; it anatomizes the insidious
manner in which technology, when subsumed within patriarchal power structures,
becomes an accelerant of historical injustice rather than an instrument of
liberation. The near-total absence of women in the novel is not framed as a
catastrophic accident of science, but as the grim culmination of entrenched
socio-technological logics—logics that originate in the systematic devaluation
of female life through practices such as female foeticide, gender-based
discrimination, and the techno-economic privileging of male productivity.
Padmanabhan’s dystopia thus reveals technology not as an autonomous force, but
as a mirror that reflects and magnifies the ideological biases of the society
that engineers it. In Escape, technological governance internalizes
patriarchy so thoroughly that it renders women biologically obsolete.
Artificial reproduction and cloning, far from neutral scientific breakthroughs,
are deployed as tools of erasure, eliminating the need for female bodies
altogether. This transformation represents the ultimate victory of patriarchal
rationality: domination no longer requires oppression or surveillance of women
because technology has absorbed and enacted misogyny at a structural level.
Patriarchy, in this dystopian future, no longer operates through overt coercion
but through systemic design, embedding gender hierarchy into the very
architecture of existence. The novel powerfully demonstrates how technological
systems, once naturalized as efficient and objective, can conceal profound
violence beneath the rhetoric of progress. By presenting a society that views
the elimination of women as a logical solution to social inconvenience,
Padmanabhan exposes the ethical bankruptcy of techno-scientific rationality
divorced from critical reflection. The disappearance of women is not mourned
within the dominant order; it is rationalized, optimized, and normalized. In
this normalization lies the true horror of the dystopia: injustice is no longer
experienced as injustice but as systemic necessity. Escape therefore
functions as a speculative warning of exceptional urgency. It dismantles the
myth of technology as an inherently emancipatory force and insists that without
sustained ethical and political intervention, technological advancement can
entrench inequality in irreversible forms. The posthuman condition depicted in
the novel is not one of transcendence but of annihilation—a dystopia of erasure
in which identity itself is redesigned according to patriarchal imperatives.
Padmanabhan’s narrative exposes the terrifying potential of technological
governance to redefine humanity by subtraction, offering a chilling reminder
that the future, if left unexamined, may perfect the very injustices it claims
to overcome.
Artificial Systems, Surveillance, and the Collapse of
Agency Algorithmic Policing and Panoptic Control
In both Leila and Escape, dystopian futures
are orchestrated through artificial systems that closely resemble contemporary
regimes of algorithmic governance and digital surveillance, thereby collapsing
the boundary between speculative fiction and lived modernity. These novels
dramatize the evolution of power from visible authoritarianism to invisible,
automated control—systems that do not merely coerce obedience but manufacture
compliance by embedding surveillance into the fabric of everyday existence. In
this sense, both texts exemplify what Michel Foucault theorized as panopticism:
a mode of power in which the possibility of constant observation induces
self-discipline, rendering direct violence unnecessary. In Leila,
surveillance infrastructures permeate social life with surgical precision.
Citizens are continuously monitored through checkpoints, registries, and
data-driven purity metrics that govern access to space, resources, and
legitimacy. Identity becomes a bureaucratic artifact, reducible to lineage
records and ideological compliance. These surveillance mechanisms do not simply
observe behavior; they actively shape it, compelling individuals to internalize
the logic of the regime. The omnipresence of monitoring produces docile
bodies—subjects who police themselves in anticipation of algorithmic judgment.
Here, power is decentralized yet omnipotent, operating through systems rather
than sovereign figures. The result is a profound erosion of agency: individuals
act not out of choice but out of algorithmically induced fear and normalization.
Escape radicalizes this panoptic logic by extending surveillance beyond
behavior into the ontological domain of bodily existence. Where Leila
polices identity through infrastructural surveillance, Escape
reconstructs identity at the biological level through techno-scientific
intervention. Reproductive technologies and cybernetic controls function as
embedded algorithmic gatekeepers, determining not merely how individuals
behave, but who is permitted to exist at all—and in what form. Surveillance in
this context is no longer external; it is inscribed into the body itself. The
human organism becomes a site of technological governance, pre-coded for
compliance through its very design. This escalation represents a qualitative
shift in dystopian imagination. Artificial systems in Escape do not
simply classify or monitor human subjects; they generate them. Identity markers
such as gender, difference, and embodiment are no longer socially regulated
categories but technologically engineered outcomes. The cloned male body,
endlessly replicated, exemplifies a posthuman subject stripped of contingency
and agency, produced according to systemic logic rather than lived experience.
In such a world, resistance becomes nearly unthinkable because deviation itself
has been technologically foreclosed. Together, Leila and Escape
chart the trajectory of dystopian power from surveillance to synthesis—from
watching bodies to manufacturing them. This trajectory signals the collapse of
human agency under artificial regimes that operate with the cold efficiency of
algorithms and the totalizing reach of biopolitical control. These novels warn
that when artificial systems assume the authority to observe, classify, and
ultimately create human life, agency is no longer merely constrained—it is
rendered structurally obsolete. The dystopian futures they envision are not
warnings of distant possibilities but allegories of a present in which
surveillance, automation, and algorithmic rationality increasingly dictate the
terms of human existence.
The Collapse of Agency in Algorithmic Worlds
In Leila and Escape, the erosion of human agency emerges not
as a consequence of overt coercion alone but as the result of a far more insidious
transformation: the infiltration of artificial systems into the very
interiority of the subject. These dystopian worlds are governed by regimes in
which power no longer operates solely through external enforcement but through
the subtle reprogramming of consciousness itself. Artificial
systems—algorithmic, bureaucratic, and techno-scientific—do not merely restrict
action; they colonize thought, desire, and self-perception, producing subjects
who become complicit in their own domination.
In Leila, the collapse of agency is orchestrated through the
internalization of purity logics. The Council’s algorithmic classification
systems reduce identity to data—religion, lineage, ideological
compliance—transforming individuals into sortable entities within a vast
administrative machinery. Over time, these classifications are absorbed into
the psyche of the population. Citizens begin to monitor their own behavior,
relationships, and even thoughts, anticipating the gaze of surveillance
systems. This internalization marks the apex of disciplinary power: individuals
no longer require constant supervision because they have assimilated the
regime’s evaluative criteria. Agency, under such conditions, is hollowed out
from within, replaced by reflexive obedience masquerading as choice.
Shalini’s resistance is therefore rendered all the more radical. Her search
for her daughter is not merely an act of defiance against an authoritarian
state; it is a struggle against the internalized voice of the system that
insists upon her guilt, impurity, and worthlessness. By refusing to relinquish
memory, maternal attachment, and moral conviction, Shalini confronts the
deepest victory of algorithmic governance—the conversion of subjects into
self-policing instruments. Her resistance exposes the fragility of a system
that depends upon psychological compliance as much as technological control.
In Escape, the crisis of agency deepens into an ontological abyss.
Here, agency is not merely constrained by surveillance or ideology; it is structurally
undermined by the technologization of identity itself. Through cloning and
artificial reproduction, individuality is reduced to replicability. Bodies are
produced according to systemic templates, eliminating unpredictability,
difference, and self-determination. The space for self-creation—historically
rooted in embodied experience, relationality, and choice—collapses under the
weight of technological determinism. Agency, in this dystopia, is not
suppressed after the fact; it is precluded at the point of origin.
The posthuman subject that emerges from these worlds is neither fully
autonomous nor entirely enslaved. Instead, agency becomes a contested and
precarious terrain, continuously negotiated within techno-social structures
that shape possibility itself. These subjects exist in a liminal state—capable
of resistance yet structurally disadvantaged, conscious yet constrained, human
yet profoundly mediated. Both novels thus reject simplistic binaries of freedom
and domination, offering instead a nuanced vision of agency as fractured,
conditional, and perpetually under siege.
Ultimately, Leila and Escape expose the terrifying efficiency
of algorithmic worlds in which power no longer needs to crush dissent because
it has already colonized the self. In such futures, the collapse of agency is
not announced by violence but by normalization, not enforced by chains but
encoded into systems. The novels stand as urgent warnings that when artificial
regimes penetrate subjectivity itself, the struggle for agency becomes nothing
less than a struggle for the survival of the human
Conclusion
Prayaag Akbar’s Leila and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape offer
profound insights into how artificial systems—whether conceived as surveillance
infrastructures, algorithmic governance, or reproductive technologies—can
reconfigure the very essence of identity in dystopian futures. These narratives
illustrate that dystopia is not merely a fictional spectacle but a diagnostic
lens for understanding the socio-technical architectures shaping contemporary
life.
Through Leila, we witness a world where identity is algorithmically
policed, ecological collapse becomes a mechanism of social stratification, and
subjectivity is reduced to data categories. In Escape, we confront an
even more radical posthuman dystopia where technology has transformed the
biological foundations of identity itself, rendering gender obsolete and agency
precarious. Both texts serve as urgent reminders that technological futures are
not predetermined; they are shaped by the social, political, and ethical
choices made in the present. Fiction, in its speculative capacity, thus becomes
a vital site for contesting the artificial architectures that seek to define
who we are and who we might become.
Works Cited
Akbar,
Prayaag. Leila. Simon & Schuster India, 2017.
Bharatsinh,
Zala Krupaba, and Devang Rangani. “Dystopia and Identity: A Critical Analysis
of Leila as Science Fiction.” Shodh Kosh: Journal of Visual and
Performing Arts, vol. 4, no. 2, 2023.
Mandal,
Sankha Shubhra. “Representation of Biopolitics and Climate Change Crises in
Prayaag Akbar’s Leila.” The Golden Line: A Magazine on English
Literature.
Padmanabhan,
Manjula. Escape. Hachette (India), 2015.
Sharma,
Tamanna. “Gender, Technological Dominance and Resistance in Dystopia: Manjula
Padmanabhan’s Escape Through Feminist Lens.” International Journal of
Research in English, vol. 7, no. 2, 2025.
Binani,
Mansi, and Swati Singh. “Social Ecofeminism in Escape by Manjula
Padmanabhan.” Shodh Kosh: Journal of Visual and Performing Arts, 2024.