“I find it amazing that people in the UK, France and America are watching Leila the online streaming model makes storytelling so much more democratic,” says Qureshi. “The real dystopia is when we try to sell utopia,” says Qureshi.

Qureshi echoes The Handmaid’s Tale’s author Margaret Atwood’s observation that sci-fi and its alternate worlds are fundamentally about the now. What’s going to happen? Where will we end up? What will be the tools of exploitation used to perpetuate cruelty and crimes against humanity? These are some of the questions Leila asks,” explains Qureshi, who’s from Delhi, the most polluted capital city in the world according to a recent study by Greenpeace.

“We have governments telling us climate change and pollution is not a problem, it’s not going to happen in our lifetimes, it’s not immediate. It’s a huge mountain of garbage, 65-metres high and it’s constantly smoking and catching fire, it was so difficult to breathe when we were shooting there – it was recently in the news that it will soon be taller than the Taj Mahal. “In episodes one and two we were shooting on a massive garbage dump, that’s a real-life garbage dump on the outskirts of Delhi. Qureshi flags another example of reality trumping fiction. I haven’t seen anything like this attempted in India before,” says the Bollywood actress who appeared in Anurag Kashyap’s bloody and breathless mafia films, Gangs of Wasseypur Part 1 & Part 2 (2012). “When I read the treatment, I was blown away. Huma Qureshi, who plays the lead character Shalini, was immediately drawn to the series, an adaptation of the acclaimed 2017 novel Leila by Prayaag Akbar. While it has drawn parallels with The Handmaid’s Tale thanks to its depiction of a draconian, patriarchal state suppressing women and restricting their reproductive rights, Leila’s central themes also include climate change and a deeply hierarchical society organised according to religion, caste and wealth. This is the premise for Netflix’s six-part original Indian series, Leila, which became available on the streaming platform in Hindi and English in June. Are Mafia dramas getting too close for comfort? However, Shalini refuses to submit, and is determined to do whatever it takes to find her daughter. Her luxurious life with husband Riz and daughter Leila, insulated from the water crisis by wealth, has been torn asunder. The republic’s authoritarian rulers are seizing children of mixed parentage from their families, interning the mothers, and forcibly reprogramming them to serve the nation and to purify their defiled minds.

It’s 2047, 100 years after India’s independence, and in the fictional nation of Aryavarta, water is scarce.

Prayaag akbar leila