Biopolitics, Nostalgia and the Making of Nations: Exploring the Nexus Between Race, Citizenship and Gender in India Following Covid-19

Abstract

Writing about the structural and political state of affairs in India post the lockdown that was replete with chaos, injustices and inequalities, author and actor Arundhati Roy concludes her article in the Financial Times with the hope that like previous pandemics the coronavirus pandemic too will “force humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew”. Like the rest of the world, India too awaited for its transition into a new order—its population having retreated from mobile realities into small pockets of isolation limited to “immediate family” units and individual dwelling spaces. However, when it came to choosing between “carcasses”, “prejudice”, “hatred”, “avarice” and walking through the transition with “little luggage”, the Indian nation state chose the former, thus widening socio-cultural and economic divide between castes, classes and ethnic minorities. To this divisive politics should be added the gender gap that became ever-widening with daily reports of domestic violence and abuse among both upper- and lower- caste and -class women. Using the framework of cosmopolitics including the tropes of cosmopolitan memory (as a mnemonic resistance against Hindutva rhetoric), empathy and cultural ambidexterity as opposed to national memory and dominant state narrative, in this chapter I propose a “decolonial cosmopolitan” turn that the Indian political and cultural counter-resistance movement could head towards in a post-covid-19 era. I will examine this move as a way in which the repressed and marginalised can oppose majoritarianism and the nation state’s tactics of using biopolitics/necropolitics as a way of sustaining brahmanical homogeneous hierarchies.