‘No Covid Here’: Pandemic Afterlives in a Delhi Informal Settlement
When I began doctoral fieldwork in 2022 in Unity Colony[1]—a low-income informal settlement (or Jhuggi Jhopdi Cluster) in south Delhi—just over a year after the pandemic’s second wave had ravaged the city (Ellis-Petersen, 2021), I expected to confront accounts of widespread death and devastation. Yet, during the first weeks of research, I was struck by how people talked about the disease. While some residents said that “here, people had immunity from the virus” or “Covid did not happen here,” others said that “it only happened in affluent localities” or spoke of it as an ordinary (sadharan) disease: “nothing special,” as one resident put it.[2] More rarely, a few questioned its very existence, suggesting that it was just a rumour (afwah), illusion (vehem), or a product ofpolitics (netagiri). In emphasising its muted impact in their neighbourhood and localising it to specific bodies and places, residents upended conventional wisdom that cramped settlements like Unity Colony were hotbeds for the spread of COVID-19. How might we understand this?
In this essay, I unpack these retrospective, somewhat disjointed expressions about the virus and its differentiated effects on bodies and localities in the city. By contextualising these claims and their associated justifications within a wider constellation of local discourses and experiences of embodied inequality, the essay aims to unsettle received tropes and polarised narratives around pandemic denialism. Where denialism entails an active mode of antagonistic engagement seeking to challenge what is widely considered true or real, residents in Unity Colony were less concerned with the ontological status of the virus or the disease. Instead, their reflections betrayed an almost indifferent dismissal—rather than paranoid denial—of the disease. Nonetheless, discourses about the virus and reflections on the pandemic period carried powerful critiques of socio-economic marginality, poverty, state neglect, and the ill-effects of toxic exposures in the settlement. In so doing, they revealed how people in this neighbourhood experienced the shifting thresholds between bodily capacity and fragility; the settlement and its outside; state and citizen; and biomedical and vernacular understandings of health and wellbeing.
Inhospitable Bodies
A common claim I heard in relation to the virus was that the bodies of residents in settlements like Unity Colony were immune to it. When I asked Dr. T, an informal health provider in the settlement, to explain why, he put it thus: “Because people here are mazdoor log (labouring people), they work all day and sweat, which makes the virus leave their body. Their immunity is good as a result. Those who live in kothis (houses/bungalows) and sit at a desk or laptop all day, they don’t have immunity, that’s why they get all these new diseases.” Dr. T’s theory about differentiated bodily sensitivities to Covid was shared by others. For instance, Dr. H, another practitioner, also attributed the virus’s limited spread in the settlement to people’s relatively high resistance. “People here have greater shamta (capacity). Immunity power is high. There must be something in the diet. Or maybe it’s because they do mehnat mazdoori (hard labour),” he said.
Several others in the neighbourhood held similar notions about the virus’s effect on their bodies. Articulations of medicalised notions like immunity were not restricted to Unity Colony’s health providers. Amit, a construction worker, and long-time resident of the settlement, said, “It [Covid] happened only to those who go from AC [air-conditioned] house to AC car to AC office, not to those who sweat and work hard, from whose sweat the virus is released—those who have immunity.” Meanwhile Geeta, a woman in her late thirties, said something slightly different: “Due to the backbreaking work (kamartod kaam) we have to do, the body becomes hard and tight (sakht). There is no place for the virus in tight bodies.” Her imagination of hard or tight bodies was one where the interloping coronavirus literally had no space to dwell.
Unity Colony was surrounded by some of Delhi’s most affluent residential neighborhoods. Its residents belonged to so-called lower castes and worked in low-paying, insecure jobs in informal sectors such as waste and sanitation, construction, and domestic work, among others. Many were daily wage workers. In several conversations about livelihoods, residents stressed the tremendous pressure that living and working in precarious conditions placed on their bodies, manifesting as exhaustion, chronic pain, and disease. Dr. T, for instance, attributed most health problems in the neighbourhood to “where and how we [he and his neighbours] live, the work we do, the food we eat.” Thus, while the embodied effects of arduous labour may have provided a measure of immunity from Covid, it exacerbated other vulnerabilities. In its simultaneous production of bodily robustness and fragility, the banes and boons of hard work gave it an ambiguous quality.
In reflections about Covid, a string of ideas—labour, sweat, tight bodies, and immunity—came together to depict the bodies of those who lived in the settlement as inhospitable to the virus. According to this logic, hospitability was inversely related to immunity. Rhetorical expressions about immunity were based on assessments about the extent to which external circumstances and internal effort had conditioned bodies to be able to neutralise the threat posed by the virus or not. The labouring bodies of residents in the settlement were contrasted with the softer, weaker bodies of the city’s elite. These labour-based “biologised forms of difference” (Sargent, 2021), determined by class- and caste-based hierarchies, took on a moral quality by simultaneously calling out socio-economic inequality and asserting collective self-worth against undeserving elites. At the same time, they risked reproducing elitist narratives about the poor that naturalised bodily difference and reinforced tropes about certain bodies having a greater capacity to endure hardship.
Notably, the settlement’s mostly non-English speaking residents used the English word for immunity. Further, the term came up almost exclusively in conversations about Covid and no other health problems. The term’s selective adoption perhaps reflected the lasting influence of biomedical and global/public health phraseology around immunity (particularly via ideas like “herd immunity,” “natural immunity,” “vaccine-induced immunity” etc.) and its widespread circulation through the marketing efforts of pharmaceutical companies selling “immunity boosting” substances during the pandemic. This lexical legacy of the pandemic therefore enabled perceived biological differences to be articulated through a combination of biomedical and vernacular concepts.
Inhospitable Places
Crucially, these were bodies in place. A second set of responses pointed to the hostile material conditions in the settlement that made life difficult even for a microbe. Personifying the virus, Manju, a middle-aged woman, told me, “It [the virus] came, saw, and went away…It saw the filth (gandagi) here, it saw that there are already so many problems, so it left us alone.” Manju’s sardonic comment was not the only time the settlement’s milieu was seen as a deterrent for the spread of the virus. Dr. A, another health provider, mobilised an image of the settlement as being inhospitable to all forms of life, including the microbial. “Here, no being, however big or small, can survive in peace. Pollution, filth, smoke, heat—all these kill viruses like corona.” He further speculated that these conditions may have prepared people’s bodies to withstand such “foreign viruses.” Additionally, he pointed out that these conditions frequently lead to symptoms such as coughs, runny nose, breathing difficulties, stomach issues, and headaches. Thus, he concluded that it was almost impossible to know whether someone had Covid or was simply suffering from one of these more common ailments.
The underlying commentary in such remarks seemed to be about the absurdity of disease epidemiology’s quest to classify and categorise in an environment where the normal and the pathological, the acute and the chronic were so intricately woven in everyday life. Indeed, residents often complained about how open drains, heaps of hazardous and noxious waste, and contaminated food and water had ruinous effects on their health. Further, unventilated dwellings, nutritional deficiencies, and harmful fumes from inefficient cooking fuels, along with Delhi’s catastrophically poor air quality, made them susceptible to all kinds of respiratory problems. The frequency and intensity of illness episodes that shared Covid’s signature symptoms therefore made it difficult to discern one from the other. For the settlement’s residents, the ordinariness and chronicity of harm from living and breathing in the toxic atmosphere of the settlement made obsessing over a new disease—one they associated with foreign-returned elites who brought it into the country—futile.
Through such discourses, the pandemic offered a consideration of the relationship between the settlement and its outside. Setting up an implicit opposition between the city and the slum, one of my interlocutors said, “Corona happened in Delhi, but not here.” While the settlement was considered inhospitable to the virus, supposedly more “sanitary” spaces in the city—affluent neighbourhoods, cremation and burial grounds, and government offices—were seen as hotbeds of both contagion and paranoia. One resident told me how people used to joke that “the virus roamed only in government offices,” suggesting that the pandemic’s severity was trumped up by government officials who erroneously deemed it deserving of an overblown response.
Heightened Vulnerabilities
Many, however, believed that the state’s elevated response to the pandemic was not an error of judgment but meant to serve instrumental purposes. They accused the government of using artificial shortages to jack up prices, being in cahoots with corporations that profiteered from vaccines, and failing to regulate hospitals that exploited patients. Given their low estimation of the virus’s potency, people in Unity Colony held that the government’s measures to curtail the virus through lockdowns, testing, and quarantines had been excessive and coercive. While outright criticism of these measures was rare, the psychological imprint they left often manifested in the community’s sense of heightened vulnerability to arbitrary state action.
For instance, consider these comments by Subhash, a local resident, referring to the exodus of working-class migrants from cities: “If the government (sarkar) can drive us away in the name of the pandemic, it can make up any excuse and drive us away at any time. Who will save the jhuggi (settlement) from being demolished if we are away?”Subhash’s anxieties were rooted in Unity Colony’s status as a settlement slated for “redevelopment”—a term which, for the poor, has become euphemistic for mass evictions given Delhi’s track record of exclusionary urban planning (Bhan, 2016). In an era marked by a resurgence of slum demolitions—referred to by some as “bulldozer raj (rule)”[3]—his fears underscored a pervasive sense of residential insecurity. Subhash’s blunt observation highlighted the state’s capacity to fabricate crises, like pandemics, to minimise public backlash against forced evictions. Pandemic-related measures, while ostensibly temporary, became yet another reminder of the fragility of attachments that bind vast majorities of the urban poor to the city.
The pandemic also hardened social fault lines between residents of the settlement and those outside. A woman who worked in the household of an affluent family told me how, fearing the risk of contagion, the family had coerced her—through physical and verbal abuse and threats of dismissal—into living and working in their home. Others who worked as hawkers, domestic workers, or waste workers in surrounding gated localities were often violently ejected from them on suspicion of carrying the virus. Unity Colony residents I met pointed to the remnants of an illegal, makeshift wall erected by a government housing complex that blocked off their access to the main streets. These practices reinforced pernicious ideas of slum-dwellers as ‘unsanitary subjects’ (Briggs, 2005). As Satyogi (2021) argues, fears of biological contagion latched onto and assimilated practices of caste-based segregation. In such a scenario, residents fell back on local networks of care and support, chief among which were the neighbourhood’s many informal health providers. As hospitals and clinics outside were seen as threatening spaces, rife with the potential for material and symbolic violence, local providers’ role in attending to the sick took on greater significance.
Despite its seeming unimportance in public discourse, the pandemic’s legacy could be discerned in its subtle reconfiguration of social and intimate relations in the settlement in ways that revealed tensions between the social and the spiritual, the economic and the interpersonal. Vijay and Kalpana’s stories are illustrative. Vijay, a middle-aged man who lived in Unity Colony with his mother, brother, wife, and son, had worked as a driver for a wealthy family for several years, until he was let go during the pandemic. In April 2020, his father, who was visiting their family home in Bareilly, suddenly passed away. Due to harsh lockdown restrictions, Vijay was unable to undertake the death rituals befitting of the eldest son that were meant to secure his father’s safe passage into the afterlife. His mother continued to blame him for this dereliction of filial duty. Unemployed and having internalised his mother’s disapproval, he suffered from a sense of failure to fulfil his responsibilities as head of the household. He would tell me that his father’s unsettled spirit haunted him, and that until he could somehow find closure in that respect, his economic luck would refuse to turn. Despite its effects having kickstarted multiple disruptions in his life (the inability to cremate his father, the termination of his employment etc.), in our conversations, Vijay rarely traced his misfortunes to the pandemic.
Kalpana’s challenges highlighted the insidious effects of gender-based divisions of labour. She had worked as a masseuse for several years in nearby localities. Seeing herself as a healer, she described her work as opening up “jammed nerves” that caused health problems. Because of the close physical contact required in her line of work, she was out of work during the pandemic. She described how, despite her unemployment, her total hours spent doing work had increased during the pandemic months, as she was tasked with household chores that were otherwise more evenly distributed. This left her with chronic back pain and a growing dependence on painkillers. She told me how she had been against pharmaceuticals in the past, preferring “natural” modes of healing (like the one she offered), but had reluctantly succumbed to their lure since her intense back aches began.
Post-pandemic, when her services were in high demand again, I often saw her wear a mask on her way to and from work, even though no one else in the settlement wore one. Curious, I asked her why she did so. “I work with people, breathing the same air. I can’t afford to get infection,” she replied (using the English term infection). “With Covid?” I asked. “Yes, or with anything,” she clarified. It seemed the pandemic had left its mark on Kalpana in two ways: first, her heightened awareness of susceptibility to “infection” from her affluent clients, momentarily reversing conventional geographies of blame; and second, her ongoing reliance on pain medication, which conflicted with one of her core beliefs about pharmaceuticals. Yet, much like her neighbours, she rarely brought up the pandemic in conversations. She too seemed to have assimilated its memories into the rhythms of everyday life (Das, 2007), leaving them as scarcely discernible echoes in her present.[4]
Conclusion
This essay has provided a mosaic of retrospective reflections about the pandemic from one locale in a city many consider among the worst hit in the world. While mass disease events underscore shared exposures, they simultaneously provide new opportunities for reflecting on and articulating differences. My interlocutors traced these differences in the city along bodily and spatial lines. Present to the dangers of essentializing these differences, they were careful to underline how these were a function of unjust economic and political structures and sustained exposure to toxic environments.
Residents’ tendency to selectively minimise the degree of viral threat shares a complex relationship with state-led projects of underreporting statistics and avoiding culpability in mismanaging the pandemic. On the one hand, it seemingly lets the state off the hook for its failures in controlling contagion and preventing death and disease. On the other, it holds the state accountable for its needlessly excessive and often violent biopolitical interventions that led to widespread suffering for the poor. Further, in the context of intensified socio-economic precarity during the pandemic, this framing of being non-virus-bearing subjects was perhaps rhetorically strategic and existentially necessary, as several residents’ livelihoods took them into the homes of affluent people.[5] Thus, in its afterlife, the pandemic became a lens to re-examine and rearticulate the thresholds between bodily robustness and vulnerability, inside and outside, state and society.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Alex Nading, Nolwazi Mkhwanazi, Yasmeen Arif, Timothy Campbell, and Esca van Blarikom for their helpful comments on drafts. I would also like to thank all the participants and organisers of the ‘Biopolitics of Global Health After COVID-19’ workshop at Shiv Nadar University. Last and most importantly, I am indebted to my interlocutors who patiently and generously shared their time and thoughts with me.
[1] Names of places and people have been pseudonymised.
[2] Conversations in Unity Colony were held in Hindustani—a widely spoken lingua franca in several parts of North India—and have been translated into English.
[3] A term which refers to the rise in the extrajudicial use of bulldozers to raze homes and “illegal” structures of those suspected by the state of criminal wrongdoing. Commonly, this form of state-led “vigilante” justice has been meted out to Muslims and other minorities.
[4] Veena Das has written extensively on the relationship between the event and the everyday. Rather than taking the former as discrete from, above, or outside the latter, Das has focused instead on their deep entanglements, showing how events are absorbed into and reconstitute everyday life in often imperceptible ways.
[5] I thank Esca van Blarikom for this insight.
References
Bhan, G. 2016. In the Public’s Interest: Evictions, Citizenship, and Inequality in Contemporary Delhi. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Briggs, C. 2005. Communicability, Racial Discourse, and Disease. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol 34, 269-91.
Das, V. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Oakland: University of California Press.
Ellis-Petersen, H. 2021, April 21. ‘The system has collapsed’: India’s descent into Covid hell. Retrieved from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/21/system-has-collapsed-india-descent-into-covid-hell
Sargent, A. 2021. Ideologies of Labor and the Consequences of Toil in India’s Construction Industry. Signs and Society, Vol 9, No 3, 300-323.
Satyogi, P. 2021. Perverse Economies of Intimate and Personal Labour: Resuming Domestic Work in Households after the Lockdown. Anthropology in Action, Vol 28, No. 1, 39-46.