Governing Corporeal Movement in India during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Pablo Holwitt

doi:10.1177/1357034x211036490

Abstract

This article explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the relationship between bodies, risk and mobility. Drawing upon ethnographic data from India, it is argued that measures taken by the Indian government to contain the spread of the pandemic link mobile bodies to the notion of risk which has profound consequences for the way in which people access and engage with public spaces in Indian cities. In this process, a new type of body – the risky mobile body – is produced. At the same time, these measures run into problems due to the volatile nature of knowledge about bodies and diseases that they rely on. While the mobility of the COVID-19 virus is a subject of public debate, the fluidity and open-endedness of mobile bodies makes them difficult to regulate. This mismatch between governmental logics and unknowable bodies constitutes a significant challenge for the fight against the pandemic.

Highlights

This article explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the relationship between bodies, risk and mobility
The COVID-19 pandemic presents governments and societies around the world with a difficult task: How can one enable the mobility of people and goods while disabling the mobility of a virus? To this end, various technologies and practices of regulating human bodies are deployed that aim to minimize the risk of infections
As a result of these profound measures, the meaning of mobility has changed dramatically on a global scale, creating a paradoxical situation that gives rise to numerous questions: While bodily mobility is generally a cornerstone of contemporary life, the mobile body poses a threat to society

Summary

Regulating Risky Mobile Bodies in India

Official numbers of people infected with the COVID-19 virus started to rise in China and several European countries in February 2020, prompting governments of those countries to impose restrictions on their citizens’ mobility. At the beginning of the nationwide lockdown in March 2020, the Indian government advised citizens to always maintain a minimal spatial distance of three feet to other people since most medical experts agreed that the COVID-19 virus was unable to cover a distance of more than three feet outside a host body This measure is essentially a strategy of establishing a mode of ordering bodies in space with the aim of minimizing the risk of infections. It resembles previous measures taken to fight the spread of infectious diseases by targeting ‘pathogenic spaces’ where ‘the moving body is put at risk by its very proximity to the blood, sweat and discharge of currently or previously inhabited bodies’ (Newman et al, 2016: 157) One example of this strategy are new queuing practices that were quickly implemented after the start of the nationwide lockdown to ensure that social distancing rules would not be violated when people left their homes to buy essential goods like food or medicine. I will draw upon two particular works by Latour and Mol that help to understand the predicaments of measures against the spread of COVID-19 in India

Producing Competing Knowledges about Bodies and diseases

Uncertain Bodies of Knowledge

Conclusion