In the promotional art for almost every contemporary Indian dystopian thriller, the female protagonist is sold to us as an icon of unbridled rebellion. She often stands covered in soot, with a jagged cut on her cheek, staring directly into the camera. She looks dangerous and confident, but as soon as you stream this series, a predictable state reveals itself. She is allowed to pick up a gun, scream at a bully, or burn down a detention center, but only under one non-negotiable condition: She does so because someone stole or threatened to hurt her child.
When popular culture tries to portray a woman dismantling an authoritarian state, it reaches a creative limit. It is impossible to imagine that she fundamentally hates the regime, because her radicalization is rarely ideological; it is closely linked to their reproductive biology.
Indian streaming platforms seem to have discovered a profitable formula for stories set at the end of the world. Series like “Leila,” “Ghoul,” and “Betaal” have often been cited as bold exercises in subversive storytelling. But when popular culture tries to depict a woman dismantling an authoritarian state, it reaches a creative limit. It is impossible to imagine that she fundamentally hates the regime, because her radicalization is rarely ideological; it is closely linked to their reproductive biology.
The sacred womb: motherhood as an ideological prerequisite
In her 1976 memoir Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich drew a sharp distinction between two realities that are consciously conflated in patriarchal culture: motherhood, which denotes the intimate biological experience of creating life, and motherhood, which functions as a coercive political institution designed to police and claim it.
The institution dictates that a woman’s highest social loyalty belongs to her offspring. Rich revealed the core strategy of patriarchal governance: the state not only controls women from the outside, but recruits their physiology to do the policing from within. When a fictional protagonist attacks a fascist regime just to retrieve her kidnapped child, the patriarchal gaze sees her not as a sovereign citizen who rebels but rather quietly transforms her rebellion into domestic obligations.
Check out the opening sequence from Netflix Leila. Shalini (Huma Qureshi) sits by her swimming pool and smokes an illegal cigarette with her husband Riz, a Muslim. Minutes later, government enforcers breach the gate, slam Riz into the concrete, and drag her half-Hindu, half-Muslim daughter, Leila, away. Shalini, on the other hand, is taken to a shuddhikaran (purification) facility.
For the Guardians of Aryavarta, a Savarna woman’s womb is communal property, and Shalini’s true crime was not just loving a Muslim man; it resulted in an upper caste group being excluded from the accepted marriage economy.
The ashram scenes capture a crushing cruelty: rows of women in rough gray saris, their heads shaved to take away their agency, forced to drink cow urine while chanting slogans for Aryavarta, the totalitarian, dystopian state in which the show is set. However, note what the regime is actually punishing Shalini for. It punishes them for “endogamous treason.” For the Guardians of Aryavarta, a Savarna woman’s womb is communal property, and Shalini’s true crime was not just loving a Muslim man; it resulted in an upper caste group being excluded from the accepted marriage economy.
The state did not lose Shalini’s loyalty when it built the slums; It lost it that afternoon when it emptied their swimming pool.
Because her motive for defying the state remains tied to her child, Shalini’s rebellion remains limited. She climbs the 30-meter-high concrete walls that separate elite sectors from open-sewered slums, but never sees caste apartheid as a systemic evil because her political outrage never transcends kinship ties. The state did not lose Shalini’s loyalty when it built the slums; It lost it that afternoon when it emptied their swimming pool.
Reproductive Futurism: Fight for the Child, Never for the Citizen
This excessive fixation on the maternal rescue mission is based on what the American academic and literary critic Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism.” In No Future, Edelman argues that the current political order is held hostage by the figure of the child. The figure of the child is deployed as an ideological shield through which every draconian surveillance law passed, every ghetto wall erected, and every civil freedom erased is rationalized by an inviolable refrain: It is for the safety of our children. And this helps explain why contemporary dystopian novels consistently locate women’s political awakening within the family rather than beyond it.
The greatest irony of the Indian feminist dystopia is that its heroines fight the fascist regime with its own emotional currency. In Leila, the dictator Mr. Joshi justifies the persecution of citizens’ bloodlines in the present to protect the genetic sanctity of tomorrow, while Shalini wages her lonely war solely to protect her own private future.
In a media culture in which a woman’s social validity expires the moment her reproductive window closes, the childless woman becomes an unthinkable figure as a heroine. Since the state has no control over her uterus and therefore cannot exploit her through a kidnapped heir, the novelist finds it difficult to imagine her as a politically compelling protagonist.
On Indian screens, a woman without children is transformed into either a mute extra scrubbing the yard or a sadistic overseer with a cane. To exist in a speculative Indian future without reproducing is to become invisible.
One only has to look at the background images of these shows to see who is excluded from this rule: the quiet childless women in the Shuddhikaran camps or the fearsome camp guard Guru Ma (Arif Zakaria), for example. It is telling that a cisgender man was cast in the role of this archetype of sterile, punitive femininity, as if even the idea of female authority, divorced from motherhood, must ultimately be relegated to a male body.
Guru Ma (Arif Zakaria) in Leila. Photo credit: Open Air Films LLP
On Indian screens, a woman without children is transformed into either a mute extra scrubbing the yard or a sadistic overseer with a cane. To exist in a speculative Indian future without reproducing is to become invisible.
The Biological Cage: Dissent as Transactional Art
This pattern is not unique to Leila. In Patrick Graham’s Ghoul. Radhika Apte plays Nida Rahim, an interrogation officer of the National Protection Squad. The series introduces Nida through an act of frightening autonomy: she turns her own father over to the secret police because he taught anti-government literature to his college students. It’s a brilliant setup for a truly difficult protagonist: a young, brainwashed woman from a targeted minority community who chose government security over filial loyalty, only to slowly wake up to the machine she serves.
Nida Rahim (Radhika Apte) in Ghoul. Image source: Blumhouse Productions/Phantom Films/Ivanhoe Pictures
But watch what actually awakens them in the damp concrete corridors of this detention center. Does Nida watch naked, hooded prisoners being tortured and experience a crisis of conscience? Not at all, instead she finds out that the regime has quietly murdered her father in his holding cell, and with one quick plot twist, a story about an ideological mutineer shrinks into a standard Bollywood revenge title. She summons a mythological demon, not to free the camp’s political prisoners, but to settle a family score.
Film narratives often prioritize the rehabilitation of women’s anger in maternal care, overlooking the potential for protagonists who exist outside of this domestic framework. If the goal is to move beyond the maternal savior tropes, the focus must shift to characters whose political motivations are not tied to their reproductive status.
This is not to say that motherhood cannot be a site of political resistance. However, a pattern is emerging when speculative media outlets view the womb as the only legitimate source of women’s political agency. The current landscape of Indian speculative fiction often relies on the maternal figure to justify rebellion, thereby limiting the scope of women’s dissent.
Film narratives often prioritize the rehabilitation of women’s anger in maternal care, overlooking the potential for protagonists who exist outside of this domestic framework. If the goal is to move beyond the maternal savior tropes, the focus must shift to characters whose political motivations are not tied to their reproductive status. This raises necessary questions for the genre: What possibilities arise when women stop organizing their resistance around family preservation? What forms of political agency become conceivable when maternal devotion is no longer the necessary companion to female transgression?
Senior Suri is a PhD student at the Center for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research lies at the intersection of digital culture, film studies, and popular media, with a particular focus on the ways in which these platforms mediate and reinforce gendered power dynamics. She is particularly interested in the way contemporary digital landscapes and cinematic forms shape cultural discourse.