Caste Contagion: Radical Archives and Biomedical Futures amid COVID-19 in India

Abstract

In February 2021, India was emerging scathed and scarred from its first wave of COVID-19 infections and deaths. I met my interlocutor, whom I call Dr. amit, at a community health clinic in a low-income neighborhood of northeast Delhi. a doctor friend connected me with Dr. amit, after learning about my ethnographic research on the lives of Dalit (“lower-caste”) doctors and how Indian public health systems enact and embody the grammars and logics of structural casteism.1 unfolding within the casteist realms of the COVID-19 pandemic in India, my fieldwork reveals that Indian doctors are deeply caste-conscious. this is often in opposition to the staging of modern science and biomedicine in India as “global” and, therefore, cutting-edge, liberal and democratic. When I introduced myself and my research to Dr. amit, he mused, “the real story of this mahamari [pandemic] is the untold saga of Dalits and public health.” He added, “If you really want to access Dalits’ medical records ... more than hospitals, you should go to Dalit literature. We have expressed our real pain there.” as I contemplated the doctor’s vital words, he smiled and passed me a thin book lying on his desk among the medical textbooks. titled When I Hid My Caste, the text contained english translations of short stories by Marathi Dalit writer Baburao Bagul. reading through those stories, I could immediately feel the force of Dr amit’s powerful words redoubled by the storyteller’s prose. “My story will now live a freer life than I do.” With these words, Baburao Bagul unleashed his radical stories into the casteist world.2 In directing me to such phenomenological traces of Dalit livingness and pain, Dr. amit expanded the terrains of my ethnographic fieldwork, moving beyond a physical site laden with implicit and explicit foreclosures of “lower-caste” experience toward radical archives and affective testimonies of Dalit survival, endurance, creativity and critical consciousness expressed through anti-caste literature. the doctor also highlighted Indian biomedicine’s blackening and blurring of the caste question and the creative labor needed to liberate Dalit bodies from the rationing regimes of modern science. Importantly, in prescribing stories, Dr amit was also placing the evidentiary diagnostics and grammars of modern biomedicine in question, allowing for anti-caste stories