Of Leadership and Encounters

Manu Joseph’s Miss Laila Armed and Dangerous is a novel that focuses on the society of today as the author perceives it to be. There’s a look at politics and the meteoric rise of a prime minister, there’s a shorts-clad group calling itself the Sangh. And in the middle of it all there’s a building collapse and threats of an impending terror attack. Miss Laila Armed and Dangerous is a satire, and at the centre of the action is an intrepid young woman, Akhila Iyer.

Akhila is, right at the start, rather brazen as she marches into the offices of the Sangh. A move that invariably gets her into trouble, but she was expecting that. The beating that followed, maybe not so much. And then, she’s right in the middle of a building collapse in Mumbai, crawling through a passageway in an attempt to reach a survivor. The survivor, in turn, starts talking about what sounds like a terror attack in real time. He tracks movements, names individuals, describes them, and creates an alarming picture of something about to happen.

There are many real-life parallels to the characters and events in Miss Laila Armed and Dangerous — and they’re thinly disguised and easily recognisable. The Sangh in the book is a motley crew of khaki-shorts-clad bachelors who are often and frequently disparagingly described as ‘patriots’. They are not particularly intelligent and they follow the prime minister in the book, Damodarbhai. Who is charismatic and vicious and constantly using his position to preach violence against every other community during his radio broadcasts and speeches. Despite that, the Sangh, and a great number of Hindus, follow him because of their bruised pride and lack of intellect. Or so the book repeatedly tells us in different ways.

As for Akhila Iyer, she’s in the business of creating videos that sting prominent individuals. Pseudo-intellectuals and activists who thrive on exploiting the poor and marginalised. Those who live in swanky, expensive houses and decry others for doing the same. Akhila has ‘Aryan’ features (because, what, she’s an Iyer, and Iyers are Aryans?) and her mother was a revolutionary, and she’s been in trouble more times than she can count, mostly because of her videos. And the Sangh is her latest target. There are references to the Nazis influencing the Sangh, and the supremacy of the Hindu religion, and all kinds of imagined bigotry squeezed into an incredibly small space. Akhila, despite her outspokenness and lack of fear, comes across as something of a lunatic as she sallies into residences and pretends to be part of a Nobel-prize committee, among other things. She enjoys recording the discomfort of her interviewees when they discover they’ve been conned. She declares to the Sangh on page 7, “I kind of like being an Indian Nazi.” Which makes her, apparently, very popular. Or not.

Then there is Laila, a young Muslim girl, the sole breadwinner in her family, mature and caring. Her sister, Aisha, adores her, and at 19, Laila has the compassion and understanding of someone much older. But then, she and her acquaintance, Jamal, come under the Sangh’s radar. More characters are introduced. Mukundan, a slightly befuddled intelligence officer struggling with his own ideology and conscience, and AK, who keeps the leader of the Sangh informed. All intelligence runs on the Sangh’s whims and fancies, and encounters are framed, faked or otherwise engineered to, eventually, make Damodarbhai look good to the confused, but apparently very jingoistic and foolish voter. Being a ‘patriot’ is unwelcome in the larger scheme of things is what the book suggests.

Nearly all of the other characters appear to be a little off in the head.

There’s a plethora of witticisms in Miss Laila Armed and Dangerous that are supposed to reflect the society the story is located in. Some of them are perceptive; others not so much. Humour is a little forced as the plot moves on, jumping from character to character and event to event in a jumble of suppositions and observations. The Marxists are mocked, activists driven by agendas are criticised — but the majority of the book’s ire is directed at the Sangh and its leaders, and Damodarbhai. Who, incidentally, was chief minister of Gujarat before he became prime minister.

Miss Laila Armed and Dangerous is less of a satire and more of a disagreement with… just about everything, really. Whatever thin plot lies between that criticism appears to be incidental. There is far too much crammed into the novel’s 210 pages — ranging from nationalism to caste and religion and the pride of the majority community, the 2002 riots, a certain encounter involving a young woman, and pseudo-intellectuals. Weaving all of this together is bound to be a daunting task.


Miss Laila Armed and Dangerous

Manu Joseph

Harper Collins

2017, pp 210

Rs 499