Reimagining Dystopia in the Global South: A Study of Power and Resistance in Omar Gilani’s The Lost Children of Paradise

Abstract

This thesis critically analyzes The Lost Children of Paradise by Omar Gilani, reimagining its dystopian world through the frameworks of Desi Futurism, Islamic fantasy, and decolonial theory. It examines how Gilani challenges the dominant paradigms of Western speculative fiction by locating futurity within the socio-political, cultural, and religious realities of postcolonial Pakistan, thereby addressing a major gap in South Asian literary criticism: the limited engagement with Pakistani speculative fiction and its political as well as epistemological interventions. Using close reading as its primary method, the study investigates how the novel subverts linear, technology-driven notions of progress through decolonial aesthetics and epistemic disobedience, as theorized by Walter Mignolo, while also engaging regional postcolonial scholars such as Shabbir, Sadaf, Kanwal, and Kiran to situate the analysis within a broader South Asian context. The thesis highlights Gilani’s strategies of layered temporality, religious symbolism, linguistic hybridity, and the agency of minor characters, which collectively resist internalized discursive power formations and construct a narrative space immune to external colonization. These features demonstrate how Gilani destabilizes dominant modes of representation and knowledge, creating a counter-discursive space for imagining alternative epistemologies. Ultimately, the thesis argues that The Lost Children of Paradise is not merely a dystopian narrative but an alternative decolonial speculative project, significant for the way it reconfigures the role of Pakistani literature in envisioning futures rooted in indigenous cultures and resistant to hegemonic forms of global knowledge production, thereby contributing to broader debates in postcolonial and speculative literary studies.