Abstract

A filmmaker, a novelist, a short-story author, and a comics writer, Samit Basu has acquired mainstream popularity thanks to House Arrest, a Netflix comedy broadcast in 2019. By focusing on The City Inside (2022), an antidystopic novel, this article sets out to investigate the strategies employed by the writer to tackle and challenge the main issues that affect current-day India (as well as many other countries in the world), namely social and religious inequalities, fundamentalisms, different forms of governmental control, fake news, and climate change. Set in Delhi in 2030, the narrative was written in the wake of the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (12 December 2019), which discriminated against the Muslim (and other) minorities. The writer does not seem to aim at providing readers with a mere cautionary tale: the India he portrays is too realistic to be purely fictional. As this article will demonstrate, resistance to power comes hand in hand with awareness and independent thinking, which are exactly what the author wishes to stimulate