Architectures of exclusion: reading Bengaluru’s post-liberalisation elite residential spaces and urban stratification through the lens of Prayaag Akbar’s Leila

This paper examines how historical caste and class hierarchies are reorganised within elite residential architectures, such as gated communities, that have proliferated since the IT (Information Technology) boom in post-liberalisation Bengaluru. Drawing on Swati Chattopadhyay’s theorisation of how master-slave hierarchies were spatially enforced through colonial architectures in Small Spaces (2023), this study identifies three processes that produce spatial inequality within Bengaluru’s contemporary upscale residences: privatisation that consolidates caste and class privilege, exclusionary infrastructural practices that lead to spatial othering and affectual stratification, and the invisibilisation of informal labour in the domestic spaces that this labour sustains. This empirical critique is extended through Prayaag Akbar’s novel Leila (2017), employed as a spatial heuristic that deconstructs how the idioms of progress, security, and aesthetic refinement function as the primary mechanisms through which stratification is covertly naturalised. In this manner, the paper extends critical urbanism scholarship into the private architectures of everyday life, foregrounding domestic spaces as political sites where caste and class hierarchies are most effectively reproduced and concealed.