Image credit: UnsplashThe Politics of Isolation: Caste, Care, and Control amid COVID-19 in India
Introduction
In the summer of 2020 in a rural village in Telangana, India, a small but angry crowd donning cloth masks gathered outside the community isolation centre set up for quarantining COVID-19 patients (Dalit Human Rights Network, 2020; Ganeshan, 2021). The issue at hand? Patients from the Dalit communities of the village were not allowed into the isolation centre. Perceived as ‘untouchable’ and impure, they were asked to isolate themselves elsewhere so as to not contaminate other patients with their caste, even as the virus loomed in the air. Some suggested setting up a different centre but there were no resources, and others were quick to point out that it would be unjust. In another village, residents who had just returned from the cities where they were working as daily wage labourers found themselves cut off from the village’s water taps. These and similar incidents were widely documented in India during the pandemic as the fallout of intersectional vulnerabilities based on factors like gender, caste, and class were brought to the fore with renewed force. Rumours that migrant workers, comprised of Dalits and the lower castes, are carriers of the deadly coronavirus led to them being publicly shunned, pushed to live at the edge of the village, and being cut off from shared resources. Even in the face of disease and death, caste as a marker that distances and isolates appeared bolstered by biomedical paradigms for curbing contagion. Isolation centers and community resources became battlegrounds where longer histories of social isolation took on new life.
As a doctoral student in India working on the socio-political life of isolation in cultural and textual narratives, the ubiquity of terms such as ‘social distancing’ and ‘quarantine’ in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has been of particular interest to me. This piece is a reflection on isolation as a conceptual category, drawing on written and published accounts that portray experiences of isolation through the axes of culture, caste, and social exclusion. The piece posits isolation as a practice that is historically embedded in socio-cultural contexts and in turn shapes and is shaped by them. Isolation’s recurring presence within biopolitical paradigms of governance, but also its currency in diverse domains from the sociopolitical to the affective, make it a productive site for reflecting on notions of health and control, as well as practices undertaken in their pursuit. Beyond asking what isolation is, this piece explores how it discursively informs experiences of marginality and health in the context of the pandemic, particularly as it relates to caste and class in India.
Engaging Isolation as Concept and Practice
Colloquially, isolation is the separation of an entity or a thing from a particular environment. It is also taken to denote a sense of containment and restriction in movement, frequently imagined in terms of material space. It is additionally linked to affective and relational domains as in experiences of emotional isolation or loneliness, underlining the interlinkages between the personal, the emotional, and the social. Isolation is also a significant force in domains such as the medical, the punitive, and the political, where the question of biopolitics explicitly enters the conversation. I employ the term ‘biopolitics’ to refer to a framework of governance that circumscribes how states and other regulating institutional bodies control and organise the “reproduction, welfare and health” of populations (Marling and Pajević 2023, 1). While not by default a repressive force, the easy slippage between the domains of care and control regarding the governing of bodies is a central concern in biopolitical frameworks.
Isolation is intrinsically connected to methods of controlling and managing individuals and populations who are perceived as threats to public health, safety, or peace. Bashford and Strange point out that modern governments across the world have resorted to confining “‘problem populations’ (those categorised as the mad, the infectious, the deviant or the unfit)” to specific sites where they were “subjected to and subjectified by treatments that spanned correction, care and control” (2003, 1). It is integral to punitive measures, exemplified in the logic of incarcerations and the institution of the prison as Foucault (1975) points out. He observes how the partitioning of space in prisons was closely associated with that of hospitals which treated contagious diseases. As isolation was built into the therapeutic space, it eventually turned it into a political space that “tended to individualise bodies, diseases, symptoms, lives and deaths” (Foucault 1975, 144). The framework of isolation also structures psychiatric facilities based on the logic of controlling deviance and engendering conformity through separation and treatment. When those confined transgress the metaphorical and physical boundaries set around them, their actions are interpreted as anti-social acts of aggression and met with force and fear. They are also not afforded many rights that are typically available to the average citizen. All these endeavours posit isolation as an imposed state that can forcibly forge new desired subjectivities, aiding the biopolitical project wherein “control over human bodies, and therefore human behaviors and lives, is the means to a utopian end, in which these created ‘manageable subjects’ will be cooperative, productive, and reproductive” (Stapleton and Byers 2015, 2).
Isolation’s heavily medicalised history is crucial within an affirmative biopolitical paradigm as put forward by scholars like Robert Esposito (2008) wherein the focus is on the life-affirming potential of biopower rather than on its thanatopolitical tendencies as propounded by Agamben (1998). Preventive and regulatory methods such as quarantine have been deployed during plagues as early as the 14th century, where isolating a body becomes a strategy to maintain community health. The Epidemic Diseases Act (1897), put in place in the colonial era with the 1896 bubonic plague outbreak in Bombay, continues to impact aspects of public health in India as a legal framework to identify, contain, and isolate those who are contagious. However, the mapping and isolation of bodies in the context of diseases intersects with existing social marginalities and prejudices. Olivia Laing, for instance, has described how with the outbreak of AIDS in late 20th century New York, disease was weaponised to isolate not only the infected but anyone perceived to belong to particular communities, making them “objects of stigma” capable of materially and morally contaminating the general population (2016, 138). These concerns were amplified during the pandemic with certain populations, such as Muslims or Dalits, being blamed as ‘superspreaders’ through propagation of narratives of fear embedded in divisive political agendas in India. The use of isolation as an instrument of control in the guise of care makes it especially dynamic and potent at the intersections of power, marginality, and health.
Isolation and Social Marginality
In the Indian context, notions of isolation are entwined in cultural narratives about safety, touch, and distance, with local histories and culturally situated semantic frameworks puncturing how it is understood and experienced. In this regard, the question of caste becomes especially crucial as it already involves notions of social distancing, purity, and inter-caste isolation (as the introductory anecdotes highlight). In the stratified caste system in India, people are divided into the hierarchically organised castes of Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras at birth. Dalits are considered outside the caste system and therefore the most despised, not even worthy of being considered a part of the lowest caste. B. R. Ambedkar elaborated on social isolation as something fundamental to the caste system, exemplified in castes keeping themselves separated from each other by practices such as bans on inter-caste marriage or dining together (1982, 58-64). Guru and Sarukkai posit that caste is “constituted by certain social conditions such as isolation and dissociation” which are “produced and reproduced historically” (2019, 196). Caste unfolds as a comprehensive mechanism that systematically marginalises lower castes and Dalits, subjecting them to physical violence, spatial segregation, and multiple modes of institutional and social exclusion that is consolidated through mechanisms of isolation.
The weight of terms such as social distancing, as opposed to physical distancing, therefore require more attention in the Indian context: its practice, while possibly necessary during a pandemic, differentially impacts individuals and communities who are already isolated and have little social security in the best of times. Social distancing is an exceptionally fraught term as it is imbued with histories of violence perpetrated onto lower castes and Dalits based on notions of their bodies being polluted, consolidating the practice of untouchability. Subhajit Naskar, writing during the 2019 pandemic, commented, “caste prejudice is clearly regenerated by social distancing regulations as lower caste Indians are historically separated and isolated by centuries old untouchable practices coupled with endogamous norms by the higher castes” (2020, 47). Even access to isolation centres during the pandemic became punctured by questions of caste identity.[1] This compels a conscious rethinking of the metaphors that are allowed to inhabit cultural and political narratives, especially in times of crisis and othering.
Further, isolation as a preventive act of care can take on the force of a discriminatory act of control in the absence of discerning regulations. The collection No Lockdown on Caste Atrocities published by the Dalit Human Rights Defenders Network (DHRDNet) records over fifty crimes based on caste that occurred during the pandemic, many of which were aggravated due to the exigent social circumstances induced by the pandemic itself. Evidently, the practice of isolation as a means of protection and prevention within the biomedical understanding of contagion took on pre-existing histories of social isolation and distancing when it came to socially marginalised groups. There is little that deterred it from becoming a tool for ostracisation and control and not only a form of care.
The question of having the privilege to isolate oneself gains prominence here, as lower castes and Dalits do not have the spatial means for self-isolation in hundred-square-feet homes or in densely crowded make-shift settlements. Self-isolation that is chosen is then made possible through access to resources and social capital, making it an act of privilege. In this context, the right to medical care and the right to life can be expressed in terms of a right to isolation itself that can potentially protect and save lives. Moreover, caste-based labour such as sanitation and cremation work in India, which did not have any respite during the pandemic, exposed Dalits, who have traditionally been assigned such work, to extreme vulnerabilities without any sanitary gear or other protective measures. This added to the exploitative conditions they already laboured under. Their perceived impurity and their proximity to the virus isolated them, marking them as doubly unsafe, even as they buried the dead of all castes at great risk to their own lives.
The exodus of migrant labourers in India across hundreds of kilometers back to their villages as the country went under lockdown in March 2020 also emphasised how urban centres that rely on the manual labour of marginalised populations for their upkeep do not become a home for them, in contrast to migrants of other higher classes who are able to ‘stay’ in the city. In public discourse, the lockdowns in India have themselves been debated as a disproportionate response to the pandemic which wielded isolation as purportedly a tool for protecting communal health while punitively pushing those on the margins to be on the move in order to survive. Further, isolation protocols could not be followed in such journeys prompted by urgency, helplessness, and lack, drawing the state’s ire. The people had no home in which to stay, but were “desperate and dying” (Caduff 2020, 483).
Conclusion
The COVID-19 pandemic presented isolation as a significant conceptual category and practice that unravels the entangled nature of the social, political, punitive, and medical, making visible assemblages that have always been implicit. Its historical significance and contemporary interpretations also highlight the easy slippages between the domains of care and control with regard to the governing of bodies, particularly as it reconfigures experiences of marginality. It unveiled the underlying fault lines that uphold and structure modern democratic states whose systems of governance not only exacerbate but also necessitate the perpetuation of inequities, re-entrenching existing marginality, and reconfiguring the politics of life and death. Deep-rooted prejudices based on caste and class which were often unthinkingly legitimised through isolation practices during the pandemic of 2020 continue to mark the post-covid age.
Even as it tenuously exists between the binaries of care and control, isolation also invites the forging of new pathways to critically evaluate our contemporary condition(s) with sensitivity to experiences of social marginalisation. It prompts us to ask in what ways our experience of pandemic isolation might have shaped our ongoing negotiations with biopolitical mechanisms and frameworks as we consider not just how to protect ourselves, but also “who else suffers” (Butler 2004, xii). How do we deploy these understandings and develop a lexicon to acknowledge and respond with nuance to diverse social positions and their situated complexities in a deeply inequitable world? These are concerns that pertain to the broader politics of our life together that we must reckon with in a world where crises have become ordinary.
[1] See Ganeshan 2021, “Caste a hindrance in setting up isolation centres in Telangana, activists allege”: https://www.thenewsminute.com/telangana/caste-hindrance-setting-isolation-centres- telangana-activists-allege-149607
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