Voices in the Times of Corona Virus: Understanding Disruptions at Urban Margins
By: Media Anthropology
Tags: Pune, Urban Studies, Ethnography, Covid 19, Coronavirus

Picture 1: Everyday Imagination of Coronavirus, as seen in my apartment block in Pune

Introduction

A crisis is often an anthropogenic product, such as the 2008 subprime meltdown or demonetisation on the one end of the spectrum, to a natural disaster whose effects reverberate through our everyday life, such as a flood or a biological virus like the COVID-19 (or Coronavirus as commonly known) now. Crises impact the socio-economically vulnerable the most, due to a paucity in securing resources to survive the collapse of the normal around the person. Measures which are suggested and implemented by the state are often top-down, with ‘damage control’ being the first response. Vulnerable communities on the ground are at the receiving end, as they are often not co-creators in the response process. The weaknesses are amplified manifold, as a single day out of work means having to go hungry for the poor. India is a large common economic market and migrants are an integral part of making everyday life work in the country. A very important aspect which this national lockdown of 21 days has raised is the migration angle, from Punjabi dairy workers in Italy to religious seminary students in Iran to the daily wage earner from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, who work in Delhi and Mumbai. They are however, thanked for their ‘sacrifice’ in addresses by political leaders as they are known to vote on polling day, unlike the middle classes.

It is opportune at this point, to ask about the role that ethnographers play in these times of unprecedented disruption and crisis. When the tides recede, our fieldnotes through text and images, capture voices of the ordinary as we navigate through these tense, information-saturated times and become a proto-history of the present with a small ‘h’. Ethnography is rooted in the specific lived experiences of people, smashing the statistics on the digital tickers on websites, as if waiting to be heard. The task of representation, thus, is politically charged. Ethnography during a crisis is an act of inversion of the hegemonic gaze, from the top-down to a bottom-up discourse, through research notes such as this intervention. The digital realm through social media feeds could be an alternative to voice concerns, acting as emergency shout-outs wherever there are supply shortages. However, would the vulnerable really be able to access Twitter, or would they have to ask someone to tweet on their behalf?

The Field Site

I am based in Devachi Uruli, a small urban village on the Pune Municipal Corporation edges, over the last few months. This village is hardly a few kilometres from the IT parks of the city and has every single facility which a suburb would possess, as the area has been absorbed into urbanity through gentrification, with BPO and IT workers starting to make their home in modern apartment complexes[1]. The village has about four building projects under construction, right from the intersection from National Highway 65 to the main market. it is the next suburb of Pune in the works. The village is a sacred geography with four temples and a masjid/dargah in less than a kilometre, and a cemetery as well, in a neighbourhood called Ganesh Nagar. The main market is adjacent to the Neo-Buddhist Dalit neighbourhood called Siddharth Nagar with plenty of Ambedkarite iconography. The caste-based social distancing is inscribed in the spatial setting of the village.

The market is a bunch of kirana (mom-and-pop corner stores) shops, sweet shops which are currently closed and about a dozen vegetable cart vendors on the footpath, as their traditional space has been sealed due to the ongoing lockdown. Pune was one of the earliest cities in the country to implement a lockdown. The vibrant ‘chowk’ or the nerve-centre of the market where there is the village bus stand, as well as the primary health centre, lies deserted due to the lockdown. The chai and vada pav shops run by local villagers at the bus stand that would be earlier thronged with young and old alike acting as the social nodes of the community, are now eerily silent.

The kirana stores are open, thanks to their status as vendors of essential commodities,making hay while the sun shines metaphorically as the ‘digital economy’ has collapsed, resulting in the transferring back of business to the traditional brick-and -mortar operator. All e-commerce sites have stopped delivering in light of this nationwide lockdown, which has impacted convenience to a major extent and has one thinking of what is truly digital in e-commerce?

The kirana stores are operated by well-heeled Guajaratis and Marwaris, a trend consistent with other parts of Maharashtra. The vegetable vendors on the other hand are local villagers, far less affluent. The dairy is run by a local resident as well. The egg and chicken meat vendors are manned by a Bengali Muslim migrant in line with other similar stores in Pune. The village bakery which makes excellent cream rolls is run by a local Muslim family. They play recitations of religious commentary in the background the entire day.

The cigarette shop is run by a migrant from Allahabad, who has taken to selling bananas during the lockdown as cigarettes are ‘non-essential’ commodities in a national lockdown. Bureaucratic categories and their articulation have severe manifestations on the ground, when it comes to survival. The Marwari kirana store stocks up on cigarettes and sells them at a steep price to select customers who can afford them. Need and luxury are joined at the hip.

The solitary laundry in Devachi Uruli is owned by a local villager named Rakesh. My conversations with him are mapped in the discussion section of this article.

The Method

I have been practicing participant observation and jotting down textual and photographic fieldnotes on my digital archive of the present at changethinker.com on Devachi Uruli, since December 2019, as a part of a personal project on understanding digital transformation along the urban margins. I have, therefore, mapped the baseline prior to the national lockdown in the area. This means the period since Section 144 was imposed in the area, then the norm of social distancing was introduced, and finally the national lockdown was announced, I have conducted unstructured interviews with the laundry, kirana shop employees and the vegetable vendors on Days One, Four and Six and before the national lockdown set in as well. These interactions inform the debate regarding the lived experiences of the people going beyond stories on media. Participant observation in the market area during the lockdown have enabled me to gauge the rhythms of change throughout the various stages of the COVID-19 outbreak. The sampling method is non-random purposive ‘snowball method’ as each voice is a window into the crisis. The attempt of the paper is to recover/uncover voices of the ‘subaltern’ in this crisis context, rather than arrive at any generalisations.

Discussion

The COVID-19 impact on the local lives started much before Janata Curfew and the official 21-day national lockdown began. It was a Sunday evening, after a couple of days when Section 144 was applied in Pune. I could see Rakesh, a stocky tall man in his late thirties ironing away shirts. I have always interacted with him as a local business-owner and have chatted over the last four months regarding his aspirations for his laundry and how he wants to modernise the layout of the shop to match the best in the malls. This evening however,[ I could sense worry. I asked him, what had happened. He said:

“I usually get 90 to 100 pieces to iron in a day, now as people are staying indoors its down to 10 pieces. It is hard even to make 500 rupees per day which is mandatory running expenses. I have a school going kid. I must buy milk. The bike needs petrol.”

When I met Rakesh again on Day Six of the lockdown, I was surprised to see his shop open, as this shop was shuttered for more than a week. I asked him, how he was open that day, to which he answered,

“I open my shop when there is less visibility of cops, during the lockdown. The business is really down.”

He sounded helpless. As we were chatting, a police van emerged at a distance and he scampered to shutter his shop, as I collected my ironed clothes which were with him for more than a week.

The vegetable vendors are less well off, although they themselves were complaining about the lack of supplies and were apologetic about charging more. A lady vendor quipped,

“Although there is this lockdown, we have to be here for business. I have a large family to support”

In a span of 500 metres, there was a concentration of a dozen vendors vying for attention, and hardly any buyers, in light of the lockdown.

The bakery on the other hand was a hub of activity as were a couple of kirana stores. One of the kirana stores were enforcing social distancing in a proper manner as shown below:

Picture 2: Social Distancing in front of a Kirana Store on Day 4 of the lockdown

Day One of the lockdown was a washout, with only one kirana store open, and a handful of vegetable vendors. Day Four was better with a lot more vendors plying their ware. By Day Six, the lockdown had been internalised, and India’s tremendous capacity to absorb the absurd shone brightly, as in our business-as-usual scenario, we are used to “chalta hain” or ‘it’s okay’ in the face of acts of minor violence which punctuate the everyday life of/in India.

My previous ethnographic work after the demonetisation fracas in 2016/2017 in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Pune also revealed similar echoes of a top-down intervention, carried out in the name of initially eradicating corruption and various changes in the objective henceforth, (the intervention was not thought through very well) as corresponding impact sent hordes of urban poor back to their villages, as cash was not available and they operated on a cash-only economy. As millions suffered, the voices of the poor were subsumed under the jubilant chants of nationalist rhetoric. At the current juncture, the suffering of the marginalised has been buried within the pandemic narrative. Due to the crisis context, fieldwork becomes perilous as ‘the body becomes a site of resistance’ (Dutta et al, 2020) in the face of top-down technocratic interventions.

Conclusion: Imagining Alternative Digital Sites of Articulation

As fieldwork in a pandemic is a health risk for the ethnographer, what are the other modes that researchers can employ to capture relevant voices from the crisis? Can Facebook feeds in the vernacular be a relevant proxy for voices from communities impacted by the crisis? English is a class in India, indicating privilege. Hence, vernacular social media feeds could be explored for the same. Which other modes of the digital could be employed to understand the implications of this crisis, for instance, on auto and cab drivers, as particular communities of practice which are well-versed with digital tools, such as Watsapp for calls. Whether the digital will truly augment crisis ethnography is a topic for further research and debate for scholars in the days to come.

Limitations

Fieldwork in Devachi Uruli was performed until Day 6 of the 21-day national lockdown in India.