“… Both hope and solace are precious commodities here. Women keep them tightly held to their bodies, braiding them in their hair, hiding them from the powers that are hell-bent on depriving them of it. But they trade in them generously among each other, holding each other, wiping tears, sharing their stories with each other.”
Natasha Narwal - September 2020, in a letter written from Tihar Jail

Care is an emancipatory and resistive act, an event, process, and project. In an oppressive state, in prison, in protests, at home and away from home, in a pandemic and in lockdowns, it is performed by each of us daily — yet also in unequal and disproportionate measure by marginalized, exploited, and oppressed people, as a necessary feature of survival. It is also, now, largely written about and studied by those privileged enough to find in excess the very care that one needs to survive the violences of law that does not care for the right to receive care.

Care is split between the romantic, aesthetic presence in the neoliberal virtual (and textual) vocabulary of inaction, and the liberative (often oral) organization of solidarity, ingenious citizenships, and survival strategies of those most vulnerable to a cis-heteronormative, Hindutva, and capitalist state. It is written of and described in poetic language by the privileged liberal writer, activist, and scholar, a grammar of romanticism, presenting a care aesthetic and a love of purity and abstraction. For the marginalized, care is a rigorous and unspoken practice present in the daily work essential for livelihoods, for upkeep away from state institutions that provide limited social services; care, for the historically exploited, is firmly rooted in the soil, the labour, and the body.

So, what is care? In Helena Hirvonen’s words, it “involves personal service, a form of bodywork, and emotional commitment to the needs of another human being” (Hirvonen 2). Within the structural and infrastructural boundaries of the homes and homelessnesses disregarded and disabled by rushed COVID-19 emergency protocols – policies that are suited to the nuclear family and the cisgendered, documented, Brahmin citizen in India – the claustrophobia of boxed-in walls invokes an insecurity not entirely distinct from the grief of distance, of mourning those ailing, resisting, and lost, afar. The deprivation of touch and untouchability occur together, with Muslims and members of oppressed castes, once again the majority of those in prisons and refugee camps, left vulnerable to the pandemic’s worst effects, expected to perform more care in private, without support or access to resources. Lives lost in the dark, unaccounted for in data, are of no concern to the institution’s apathy, irrelevant to its grand design of expansion and development.

In this liminal space, care ceases to remain ‘care-work’, but becomes a fragment of human (in)security. It attains, as per Julia Twigg, a “boundless, undefined quality which is a key to understanding its nature as gendered work” (146). Caregiving in a pandemic is a spectre that fuses the embodied and disembodied need for healthcare, and healthcare is in its nature, an intimate process; now, the distance and precaution of telemedicine, online medical services, ICT, the separation and the many COVID-safe texts, letters, and calls sent, questions this paradigm of intimacy in healthcare.
Death and statistics numb the body – its own care mechanism, an acknowledgement that we are not capable of understanding the death of over 5,477,000 people (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, 2021). But what would it mean to care for those who are lost, and those who have lost? Does such care, in its very essence, demand accountability, protest, and solidarity? Does it care for those who die from COVID-19 in overcrowded prisons? And more importantly, how is such care practiced?

1. “The heart of justice is truthtelling.” - bell hooks

In holding a duty of care, we first acknowledge care’s duties of archival and truthtelling. To care is to tell impossible stories (Hartman) with an intention of honesty (North). The journalist, the reporter, the photographer, the historian, and the artist practice care by practicing their task of keeping record in difficult times. Most times, a caring archive is an archive of care, with its own place-based memory, history, and ethics. The Muslim women at Shaheen Bagh, the Sikh farmers at the Tikri border, the trans sex workers in Tamil Nadu, and people across India who tended to the sick or mourned the death of a loved one, each simultaneously practice and archive care.

Care finds form in songs that record stories, in ‘Hum Dekhenge’ (1), ‘Azaadi’, (2) or ‘Sab Yaad Rakha Jaayega’ (3) . Care is in the remembrance of names of killed transgender people by Grace Banu, the names of Tara, Akshay Dev, Rajathi, Sangeetha, Annayah, Pandiyamma, Dakshayani, Panimalar, and many others, lost in botched surgeries and murders, while the demands for equal treatment, police sensitization, curriculum integration, and horizontal reservation remain unheard. An archival of care during the pandemic is also an archival of silences – loud ones that scream (even as they whisper) stories of loss and courage. It holds impossible stories, and it accounts.

2. “Justice is different from violence and retribution; it requires complex accounting.” - bell hooks

Care is also a function of justice. Governments and institutions can care by providing holistic social welfare and protection in a timely fashion, robust and transparent. In India, the lack of such provision, the regular feature of an increasing divide between private and public in the COVID-19 pandemic has only served to reinforce the conviction that we are no longer hopeful for a judiciary that will sniff out injustices in the coming wind, a legislative that will listen to the voices of the dying, or an executive that will help without policing; it is community knowledge now, that systems built to maximize profit cannot prioritize care.

To care therefore, is to firmly identify and acknowledge the presence and nature of violence. The pandemic’s violences are not simply the spread of the disease and its associated symptoms, comorbidities, and fatalities, even though these might be its most visible bruises. They are the administrative and bureaucratic violences - of forms to be filled, officials to be spoken to, bribes to be given and received, the quiet cruelty and negotiation of the value of the body of a loved one, the cause of death on a death certificate quietly morphed, a single digit in the larger statistical ledger of a neglectful state, a ledger dripping in red. They are the communal violences that typecast the horrific, terrorist-like, unhygienic, and spitting Tablighi Jamaat (4) , and not the super-spreader Kumbh Mela(5) . And it is the structural violence that denied a sick and struggling Stan Swamy a mere straw and sipper cup, until he succumbed to COVID-19 (6).

To care and resist, thus, is to identify these violences not as exceptions, but as the norm, as sustained patterns in a state of crisis where the practice of care, of a single act of kindness towards a prisoner, a Muslim, a woman, a Dalit, is itself exceptional, uncertain, and extraordinary. Only by acknowledging that such abuse indeed occurs can one know where their care must be directed. Our energies are in short supply, and must be spent wisely.

3. “Healing is an act of communion” - bell hooks

As we try to heal in a pandemic, we are stuck with the knowledge that no form of care is solitary. The binaries of private-public, personal-collective, normal-political are destroyed as care refuses to remain isolated to the self; it spreads through songs of resistance, through calls to memory. It highlights questions of visibility and invisibility, as some deaths and suffering are hypervisibilised, as others, such as COVID-19’s effects on women, persons with disabilities, and those with chronic illnesses, are deemed passing strifes, and collateral damage in the larger quest to please a majoritarian need of “freedom” from lockdowns and the “oppression” of masks. While multiple countries released disability-specific COVID-19 policies, these have rarely been implemented to their fullest, and even fewer continued as sustained institutional offerings. Effective, sustainable care, we have learned, is a collective community practice.

Umar Khalid in his Prison Diaries states:

“ Certain experiences leave me lonelier even amidst prisoners—I am talking about the internalised prejudice and bigotry against Muslims. Jail has brought me face to face with bigotry and prejudice against Muslims like never before.” (7)

This loneliness in question is crucial to our political imaginations – it is a loneliness felt in excess by the marginalized by virtue of their exploitation by the privileged. It is highlighted by COVID-19’s normalization of solitude and individual existences, and the expectation of space. To survive loneliness, therefore, requires other perdurances – the braiding of hope into hair, the writing of memory into letters, and the work towards justice through the radical act of storytelling.

Protest spaces, in this regard, are canvases to practice collective storytelling, remembering, and grieving, in a pandemic of isolation. A right to protest, while derived from Article 19 (1)(a), (b), and (c) of the Indian Constitution, does not however constitute institutional provisions of care. Protestors are sub-class citizens, and a right to protest does not include a right to food, water, livelihood, welfare, healthcare, or safety. In essence, what we are provided is the right to suffer in public, to be a spectacle, to wait as we are fired from our jobs, evicted from our homes, typecast as terrorists, starved. A caring organization that welcomes dissent would fund protests, make space for it, provide care for it. But a government, by its very nature, can only surveil it, police it, and ultimately, listen to it.

This, beyond all else, is why care is a necessary, democratic, and collective project and act, particularly in a pandemic. By caring, by choosing to feed those around you, by choosing to protest, to stand in solidarity, to unionize, to be a caregiver, to mourn, to create art, to resist oppressive systems, you remember those who have died. By singing songs of memory, providing healthcare, eldercare, childcare, by archiving or studying the humanities, and most of all, by loving freely, you reimagine, feel, and craft a world that departs from the private greed and desire for collection, expansion, and development that drives the violence of the capitalist state.

 In the words of Saidiya Hartman, “Care is the antidote to violence,” and now more than ever we hold our ability to care tightly, along with hope and courage. We hold it along with our lost, close to our chests where it's warm, hide them, keep them secure and away from those who come looking to verify their veracity, safeguard them, and say ‘Hum Kaagaz Nahin Dikhayenge’ (8) . And when we need to, we, as Natasha Narwal wrote, “trade in them generously… holding each other, wiping tears, sharing their stories”(9) , and doing the one thing we have learned from our lovers, our mothers, our chosen families, our memory-keepers – we remember.

Works Cited:
 Hartman, Saidiya. "Venus in Two Acts." Small Axe 12.2 (2008): 1-14.
Hirvonen, Helena. "Doing gendered and (dis) embodied work. Care work in the context of medico-managerial welfare state." Nordic Social Work Research 4.2 (2014): 113-128.
North, Polly. "Diaries and silence." Archival silences. Routledge, 2021. 208-225.
Twigg, Julia. The body in health and social care. Macmillan International Higher Education, 2006.