Caste Solidarity and Religiosity among Mumbai Dalits during the Covid Pandemic

Abstract

This article explores patterns of caste solidarity and religious practices among North Indian Dalits in Mumbai during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing from ethnographic data, it demonstrates how respondents experienced specific vulnerabilities due to their ethnic and caste identities. Following this, solidarities based on caste emerged to strengthen social cohesion and offer a sense of future possibilities. Additionally, on account of the ontological insecurity caused by the pandemic, a renewed collective sense of religiosity emerged, helping local people to manage their precarious existence and mitigating pain. The article concludes by arguing that community solidarity and religious re-assurance mechanisms, given the absence of state support, were their only hope to cope with the pandemic and to navigate COVID-19.

Introduction

The global COVID-19 pandemic, sociologically speaking, adversely affected all of human sociality, defined as a dynamic relational matrix in which humans interact in ways that are ‘co-productive, continually plastic and malleable’ (Long & Moore, 2012: 41). The pandemic’s effects on human sociality resulted everywhere in multiple reconfigurations for individuals and social groups at all levels of interaction, private and public. Above all, it brought out new forms of solidarity in the face of such mortal threat and looming disaster. Modern scholarship, focused on individualism and individual agency, as reflected in abundant literature, has over time become quite critical about ‘traditional’ entities like ‘caste’ and ‘religion’, depicting them as problematic and often relating such concerns directly to worrying political scenarios in present-day India. Yet, such progressive writing tends to emphasise ideology, and specific values such as individualism, over human empathy and solidarity in times of crisis for less privileged communities. However, as Durkheim (1995 [1915]) seminally posited long ago, since humans do not merely exist as individuals, they inherently belong and are visibly and invisibly connected as social beings, in myriad ways that continuously shape different manifestations of sociality.

This article focuses on ethnographic evidence from urban India to argue, from ‘below’, so to say, that abrupt and somewhat modernist dismissal of ‘traditional’ social and religious structures and patterns may need re-thinking in light of evidence of local people’s community solidarity when faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, also in supposedly advanced urban localities. Such urban spaces were most affected by COVID in India and throughout the world (Jha, 2020). In India, about a third of the total population, in absolute numbers more than 460 million people, now reside in urban areas (United Nations, 2019). Urban India in general, and particularly the poor settlements in India’s urban spaces, are under-serviced and were evidently ill-equipped to face COVID (Khan & Abraham, 2020; Mishra & Rinju, 2020). The data on COVID also suggests that in India, Mumbai has been the worst-hit metropolis (Gettleman, 2020; Purohit, 2020).

Using ethnographic evidence, this article seeks to enrich the sociological understanding of the emergence of specific forms of sociality and social solidarity as well as the performance of certain ritualistic practices, particularly among North Indian Dalits living in a suburb of Mumbai. The article draws from wider fieldnotes for an ongoing doctoral project, which were gathered between 2019 and 2022, while the narratives and observations discussed here are primarily based on ethnographic records and rapport obtained from respondents following the lockdown in March 2020 and through April and May 2020.

The field site of two conjoint localities situated in Mumbai’s M-East ward on the eastern edge of Mumbai covered the suburbs of Govandi and Mankhurd. According to the latest available census of 2011, the population of the M-East Ward is roughly 800,000, and more than 70% of this population currently lives in slums (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, 2015). The Census of 2011 also showed that this ward had the second-highest proportion of Scheduled Castes (SC) residing in Mumbai suburban district wards, making it a significant location to understand the pandemic-inflicted sociality of urban Dalits.

In Govandi, a block from the municipal housing colony, called here Bharat Block (BB), and in Mankhurd, a ‘slum’ named Samta Nagar (SN) were selected for fieldwork, for reasons explained below. The names used in the article for places and persons are all pseudonyms to protect the identity of the respondents, who are second and third-generation migrants and circular migrants from Uttar Pradesh (UP). The specific caste locations identified them as Jaiswar, Valmiki and Pasi sub-castes among Dalits. The respondents lived in houses with residential spaces ranging from 120 to 150 square feet, with no indoor toilet facilities.

Besides people’s widespread fear of the deadly nature of a virus that spread rapidly through physical contact, the state imposed aggressive mechanisms to control social interactions. Conducting fieldwork during the pandemic, I thus deployed three techniques to collect data, namely observation, casual conversations of short durations, and collection of narrations received via phone calls. All these conservations were originally in Hindi and were then recorded and translated by me into English. As I myself live in BB, some participants in this research are my neighbours. BB is a municipal housing colony with 18 parallel rows of tenements, each 11 in a row, facing each other and separated by a narrow gangway. I live in one of these rows, along with Jaiswar and Pasi neighbours.

During the pandemic, the residents’ miseries, including my own, deeply affected me, so while observing the respondents’ behaviour and daily social life, I was consciously part of this lifeworld myself. Also, I could listen to the participants’ conversations in the locality simply by being in close proximity to other people in this congested urban space. I became part of these conversations because of the sheer proximity of housing, lack of space in the locality, and also because the respondents know me personally. The resulting dialogues, casual conversations and observations provide highly pertinent details about how the respondents living in BB were coping with life and social relations during the pandemic.

In the case of SN, the information was not collected physically. SN is around 3 kilometres away from BB and I used phone calls to gather ‘research data’. I accessed community contacts and respondents known to me from my earlier engagement for the doctoral project to understand the social life in SN. As physical mobility was banned because of the lockdown, phone calls became the most important mode of communication to reach respondents. SN is a slum that came up in the early 1970s and most residents are Valmikis from UP. Initially, I contacted community representatives to learn about the effect of the pandemic in the locality, and they shared with me the protective strategies that the SN residents were undertaking at the time.

I followed up this basic information with some local youths to further understand the intensity and meanings of certain religious and ritualistic practices that were used as protective strategies during the pandemic. I did not research the extent of prayers but observed certain patterns of ritualised behaviour designed as protective mechanisms. Multiple methods were used across the two localities to construct fieldnotes derived from observation and personal conversations in order to build narratives that helped create a broader understanding of the effect of the pandemic on the urban social life of Dalits.

The article proceeds to discuss the urban precarity of Dalits during the COVID-19 pandemic and raises certain questions regarding local caste solidarity. It then turns to religiosity in times of pandemic, which allowed me to also research the role of women within this complex process of social change within metropolitan urban spaces. Taking cues from Pankaj (2020), this article not only describes the dreadful impacts of a public health crisis and the fear of death, but adds new insights into caste-based solidarities in moments of crisis, discussing deeper issues of the role of religiosity and ‘religion’ through ethnographic data and sociological analysis.

Urban Precarity, Dalits and Pandemic

The urban in India remains a powerful force in the popular imagination. Urbanity promised oppressed caste groups, especially Dalits, social membership and recognition, making claims for universal citizenship, which are formally guaranteed by the Constitution but not necessarily implemented in daily life. Whereas traditionally privileged castes may fear urban socialisation because of the risk that individualism may pose to caste status and communal solidarity (Waghmore, 2019), the seductions of urban life for deprived castes also include promises of material advancement and anonymity.

The proportion of Dalits living in urban areas is quite high and increasing. For instance, the 2011 census recorded a massive jump of 40% in the Dalit population residing in urban spaces during the preceding decade (Sahoo, 2016). It is well-known that the dynamics of Indian social life, built on the sociological foundation of caste, often force Dalits to occupy spaces either in slums or in resettlement colonies of cities and their suburbs. While the literature clearly demonstrates the spatial segregation of Dalits in urban spaces (Singh & Vithayathil, 2012), it also identifies that they face discrimination in the distribution of public goods (Sidhwani, 2015). Dalits in urban areas are relatively worse off (Chandrasekhar & Mitra, 2019) and have a higher poverty headcount ratio. All these indicators suggest that caste continues to restrict the social possibilities of poor Dalits in urban spaces.

Within this context, my observations from the field indicate that the pre-existing social and structural positionalities of migrant Dalits worsened with COVID-19, as the lockdown restricted their ability to participate in the economy, leading to economic crises for households and mental stress among people. All of those interviewed for my study were migrants with deep affective and material ties to their villages. The inability to meet family members during the crisis and lack of savings impacted their ability to help those in distress, negatively affecting their subjective well-being.

Mahesh (aged 42, Jaiswar), an auto-rickshaw driver living in BB on the opposite lane of mine, is a second-generation migrant residing along with his nephew, while his parents, wife and two children live in UP’s Jaunpur district. Nearly a month after the national lockdown was announced, Mahesh ran out of savings. I overheard how the dramatic impacts took their toll on Mahesh’s physical and mental well-being. In this locality, as in slums in general, the sheer proximity of tenements, narrow gangways, the physical denseness of humans, and the space crunch within the house blurs private–public boundaries. Also, the unavailability of mobile networks forces individuals to stand on doorsteps or in public places to talk over the phone, making overhearing of conversations in slum localities an everyday affair. In such localities, pain is not secret and privacy is a luxurious concept. On one such occasion, Mahesh was first having a conversation with me and then rang his wife, narrating (fieldnotes, 20 April 2020):

I have run out of savings. Even using a public toilet has become costly. The person sitting there is now charging ₹5, while earlier he used to take only ₹2. I will soon catch a truck from here to reach home. I am gathering money for this. Your constant worries are blowing up my head.

The above narrative vividly displays Mahesh’s predicaments during the pandemic. Before the lockdown, his life had been quite stable, as he had his own house, part of which he rented to others. He used to send ₹8,000 every month to his family in UP, but the pandemic and lockdown resulted in him running out of savings. The combination of monetary crisis, health threats due to COVID, absence of social safety networks, and the sense of alienation on account of being away from the family, defined the contemporary social life of poor migrants like Mahesh across urban spaces.

A few weeks later, Mahesh boarded a truck from Bhiwandi, a place in Mumbai’s neighbouring Thane district, with his nephew and reached his village four days later. On 15 May, I called him to check whether he had reached his village safely. He shared how the truck owner charged ₹7,000 for both of them and told me that he was now in self-quarantine. He said that he felt ‘very relaxed and safe’ among his family members and planned to return after six months. While a few like Mahesh managed to return to their villages, this was not the case for many others, while Mahesh had been able to gather money for the fare from one of his Jaiswar friends residing in a nearby block.

In SN, there were multiple cases of COVID-19, mainly among sweepers or ward boys in municipal hospitals across Mumbai. I spoke to Jay (28, Valmiki), who lives in SN. He was initially a respondent, and later became a community contact for my project and also a close friend. Talking with him over the phone about the country’s general pandemic situation, he informed me that SN was facing a dire situation. The chawl’s residents were poor, with little connection or access to the government, and even civil society organisations were yet to make any help available. Jay then shared, in a phone conversation on 19 May 2020, that while his family could survive this distress, for most residents this was becoming difficult; they simply had to fight for themselves.

The caste-based nature of life and lowly-paid precarious employment in Mumbai was acutely being felt by the Valmiki residents of SN. Sweeping and cleaning jobs that are mostly given to Valmikis constitute ‘traditionally’ assigned caste-based occupations. While Valmikis may hope to alter this historical occupational pattern, even in cities, they do not always succeed. The welfare services or benefits that Jay alluded to are not favours, but simply basic rights that the lower-income and under-serviced citizens of the locality are officially entitled to, but barely manage to access. The failed promises of city life, aggravated by the state’s lack of effective welfare mechanisms, led to what Jay called the feeling of being left alone, experienced as a sense of alienation that took the specific dimensions of powerlessness and social isolation (Seeman, 1959).

While the pandemic caused havoc for all the urban poor, Mumbai’s lower caste non-Marathi migrants were worse placed due to the fragile nature of their social connections and political power. North Indian Dalits in Mumbai are usually loosely connected to local power circles because of their caste and North Indian roots. Pankaj (2020) suggests that such Dalits in Mumbai, seen as outsiders and ‘others’, were most severely affected by the COVID lockdown. Especially in SN, I observed how residents struggled to access ration food. I was informed that ration shop owners did not provide respondents with the due quantities of rice, kerosene and cereals to which they were entitled; so people incurred debts to meet daily food needs and faced increased stress levels.

Caste Solidarity in the Pandemic

Asking what possible alternative channels for support could help pandemic-affected Dalits navigate life in urban neighbourhoods, I observed that the much-discussed institution of caste appeared to be functioning in ways to help ‘rescue’ respondents during the pandemic. The vast scholarship on caste in India revolves around dominant notions of hierarchy, power, inequality, identity and politics (Berreman, 1979; Dirks, 2001; Dumont, 1972; Jaffrelot, 2003; Natrajan, 2011; Thorat & Newman, 2010). Caste, though, has other important dimensions, among them solidarity networks. These are central to the working and shaping of caste sociality in daily life, embedded in a sense of shared identity and providing a universal sense of meaning to caste members.

Literature highlighting this solidarity aspect shows how dominant castes have been using caste solidarity to maintain their traditional dominance. For instance, Jefferey (2001) explored the use of caste identity and solidarity by Jats of UP to help them retain caste dominance and reproduce spatial inequality. Against this, oppressed caste communities are prominently shown to use caste solidarity and identity to challenge the hegemonic positions of dominant castes and to stake claims to resources and citizenship. Waghmore (2013) explores the role of caste solidarity and positive engagement with caste by Dalits to achieve inter alia political mobilisation and collective action against caste incivilities, as well as strengthening efforts to civilise Indian society. Similarly, in her ethnography of Khatiks in Bhopal, Ursula Rao (2009) moves from political questions of caste solidarity to emotional engagement and festive culture in urban spaces. She explores how elites among the Khatiks attempt to ‘reinstate the Khatik identity in the urban discourse’ through positive engagement with caste’s affective and emotional dimension (Rao, 2009: 483). Hence, the particular ways that caste performs and operates are also effective through emotions of belonging, rather than just rejection and denial. This, in turn, generates new supportive bonds among its members, revolving around key emotional categories like trust, empathy and acceptance.

The present section highlights the role of caste during the pandemic in the field. Pankaj (2020) demonstrates how a communal form of solidarity among North Indian Dalits in Mumbai during COVID and lockdown helped them generate group solidarity and mutual aid for caste members. In the context of COVID-19, Mishra and Rath (2020) argued that ‘in a social crisis, social solidarity is a powerful response to absorb shock’ (p. 6). In the following paragraphs, we see at close range the development of communal solidarity along caste lines to cope with and navigate COVID-19, as this article adds further insights into such patterns of solidarity through ethnographic data and sociological analysis.

I clearly observed an intensification of the solidarity and emotional dimensions of caste in both field localities following the pandemic and lockdown. Solidarity means that caste is becoming an intense group phenomenon, where daily affairs depend on or revolve around one’s caste collective. The emotional aspect of caste functions by providing a sense of security and containment of the emotional distress of group members. Both helped to develop a sense of assurance of collectivity and future continuity for my respondents, strengthening a sense of caring for fellow beings in trouble, a collective spirit based on compassion, focused on one’s own group.

On 24 April 2020, around 7 am, I was at an open space in BB, an alley for residents to access the service road to get some fresh air. Houses in poor localities lack ventilation, so that stepping out for fresh air is common practice. Earlier, there used to be a municipal hand pump, which was now defunct; the space had been transformed into a public area where block residents gathered to chat or relax. After a few minutes, my neighbours Ajay, Suresh and Sanjay, all Jaiswars in their late 40s, joined a group and started discussing ways to get back to UP. They saw me, and I talked with them, discussing the probability of moving to their native place through any form of transportation.

Ajay then dialled a travel agent who promised him a transfer to his native place while Suresh and Sanjay stood listening in anticipation. Ajay then discussed the probability of transporting seven people to UP. After a few minutes, he told the travel agent that he would call after some time. Ajay then informed Suresh and Sanjay that the agent was demanding ₹3,000 per person and that his truck would leave from Bhiwandi the next day. He then gave the names of three other residents of the chawl, all Jaiswars, and suggested to Suresh and Sanjay (fieldnotes, 24 April 2020): ‘All are our own, all are Jaiswars. We should help each other in times of distress. Patels, Brahmins and Thakurs are all helping each other, passing information among themselves. We, too, should do like this’. They then, for another five minutes, discussed the ways and means to mobilise the money if people agreed to board the truck. I suggested a few options to them and we dispersed.

This episode reflects that the pandemic, among others, demanded public spirit beyond caste lines. While Ambedkar (1989 [1936]: 56) rightly noted that ‘caste has killed public spirit. Caste has destroyed the sense of public charity. A Hindu’s public is his caste’, this scenario was experienced by my respondents when they saw the upper castes in BN create social closure, practising exclusivist solidarity. Now, the realisation struck that helping oneself and one’s caste fellows was the need of the hour. At this moment, the sense of charity, spirit and the public became caste-centric. As mentioned above, my respondents lacked embeddedness in the local realms of power because of social positionalities. There were no universal forms of solidarity to which they could appeal. They realised they had to rely on in-group social solidarity, benefitting from activating a community-based relationship that involves some binding obligations (Scholz, 2008). A private act of thoughtfulness thus becomes a public act of assertion of the power of social communities, especially in a scenario where state mechanisms fail to act effectively.

Not immediately, but a few weeks later, Ajay, who is relatively well-off, paid the fare of Suresh and Sanjay, and another two families, both Jaiswar. They all boarded a truck and reached UP during the third week of May. Only Ajay came back to Mumbai, while the others are still in UP at the time of writing. Clear-cut further evidence of community solidarity was that the two families were transferring only half their rent during their absence, as both families lived on rent, while the other half was paid by Ajay to their respective landlords.

Caste, as a category of belonging and especially social belonging (Dhanda, 2020; Rao, 2009), is reflected by all those I spoke to through the use of phrases such as ‘all are our own’ and ‘we should help each other’. This shows how caste identity was perceived as a category of belonging to develop in-group solidarity, while mechanisms of public welfare were ineffective. As shown above, Mahesh also took money from one of his caste friends to reach his native place, illustrating how caste identities played a key role in exchanging information and pooling resources.

The same goes for the burden of sharing pain. Ramesh and Mohan, both Jaiswars in their late thirties, work in a garage in Mankhurd. On 4 May, I was near the entrance of my house and we chatted for some time regarding the COVID-19 situation in Mumbai. Mohan looked tense and kept trying to call his family on the village mobile phone. Ramesh then put his arm on Mohan’s shoulder and said, consolingly (fieldnotes, 4 May 2020):

Our people have faced much more serious difficulties than this virus. You call people in your village and ask them what kind of atrocious life they have experienced. This time shall pass soon. I know you are tense, so am I, and everyone else. But we need to console each other. That’s the way forward.

After this, Ramesh and I tried to console Mohan. Ramesh explicitly invoked caste as a sign of solidarity and used the collective historical memory of Dalit suffering to produce emotional energy in Mohan. While reinforcing group boundaries, this also promoted the optimistic imagination of future possibilities. Ramesh clearly felt a sense of social commitment towards Mohan. Caste identity made Ramesh take responsibility for promoting the well-being of his caste members, consoling Mohan and taking care of his emotional needs. This affective dimension of caste and emotion formed a non-religious mode of coping with the pandemic. But there are further important observations, more directly related to religiosity.

Ritualistic Practices During the Pandemic

The previous section showed how social cohesion, developed around the axis of caste identity, helped to build solidarity and provide emotional support and material access to caste members. However, these functionalities of caste did not completely alleviate the social anxieties caused by the pandemic. The immediate bodily threat to the self and the family remained a precarious presence. In this context, certain ritualistic practices seem to have assumed a central role among Dalits in answering existential questions.

The role of what has been called ‘religiosity’ during the COVID-19 pandemic elsewhere in existing research has been extensively explored (e.g., Bentzen, 2020; Boguszewski et al., 2020), but such studies suffer from two shortcomings. First, existing studies rely on survey data rather than ethnographic accounts. Secondly, they tend to focus on more advanced countries and emphasise particularly global evidence of the rise in prayer as a result of the crisis (Bentzen, 2020: 1). Recent studies exploring religiosity in the global south, such as Meza (2020) on Colombia, still depend on survey data instead of providing small-scale local ethnography. While Counted et al. (2022) found in Colombia and South Africa that the relation between hope and well-being was moderated by religious coping, the present article provides first-hand ethnographic accounts of the relationship between religiosity and COVID-19, focusing on the effects of the pandemic in an under-serviced locality of suburban Mumbai.

The available literature suggests that a greater level of personal insecurity is positively associated with higher religiosity (Carreras & Verghese, 2018; Immerzeel & Tubergen, 2013). The increased chance of infection susceptibility caused a sense of ontological insecurity in the field, a term first developed as a sense of ‘being’ by Laing (1965) and later used by Giddens (1991) for his theorising of modernity. Here, we are specifically concerned about the perpetual condition of the bodily threat posed by the pandemic, when life in under-serviced localities with no room for social distancing made the poor extremely vulnerable. Laing (1965: 42) suggested that an ontologically insecure person lives in circumstances where ‘everyday life constitutes a continual and deadly threat’. This would engender a sense of anxiety, even panic. Here, I use ontological insecurity as a social fact where there is a perceived perpetual threat to lives because of the pandemic.

Religiosity for the purpose of this article is taken as ritual practices that members of two different caste groups performed. The pandemic-affected environment at the time of the field research did not allow me to observe other forms of religiosity or dwell deeper into the respondents’ religious life. The particular aspects of religiosity I identified were performed as ‘protective strategies’, a religious coping option to protect oneself and the family from COVID-19.

To demonstrate this from the field, I recall a telephone conversation on 13 April 2020 with Babita, a Valmiki woman aged 25 from SN. After talking with her for a few minutes to understand the COVID situation in her chawl, she said that she noticed forms of protective strategies that respondents are adopting, apart from suggested medical and government measures, to avoid getting infected. Babita then informed me that residents practise numerous religious (dharmic) beliefs and narrated the following observations:

Valmikis are lighting lamps (diyas) made of soil clay or wheat flour and keeping them on the doorstep in the evening. Households with two male children use two diyas, and households with more than two male children lighten five lamps. These diyas use ghee and not oil, keeping in mind the purity and importance of ghee in the Hindu religion. Lighting diyas will keep negativity like corona away, so people are using them.

Babita also reported that Valmikis apply wet turmeric powder on their children’s feet, usually in the evening. Further, a member of the family also applied a handprint of wet turmeric powder on the door and outer walls. Both practices were undertaken, Babita said, to protect oneself and the immediate family from being infected. While lighting diyas is a Hindu ritual/cultural act, Babita also put the application of turmeric into the religious category. Babita, like others in the chawl, was not aware of the source that had led residents to follow these practices. She said that they just began.

In the first narrative, we see the gendered nature of the practice, as I was told that only households with male children adopted this practice. When I asked Babita’s opinion on the gendered nature of this practice, she quipped humorously that ‘nothing ever happens to a girl child’. When I spoke to Babita again during the third week of May, to ascertain whether this practice was still being followed, I learnt that applying wet turmeric on the children’s feet had stopped, but lighting diyas was still being followed by a smaller number of households. Further, Babita informed me that even those Valmikis who professed rational views and had declared themselves as ‘educated’, ‘non-Hindus’ and ‘modern’ before the onset of the pandemic now mostly used these protective strategies. In a phone conversation on 13 May 2020, she said that this was shocking for her, but there was social pressure:

If everyone in the chawl is practising it, you need to do it, too. Otherwise, you will be seen as someone who does not follow the rules of the community (samaj) or thinks (s)he is over-smart. Further, there will be a notion of guilt, suppose if something unfortunate happens in the future. And yes, who will take such a risk when this is a matter of life and death?

Babita suggested that educated persons, non-Hindus and modern Valmikis, also followed these practices, as they did not wish to be seen as transgressors within the community. Thus, communal pressure seems to inform the moral duty that may undermine individual autonomy and the ethics of cosmopolitanism, even in a metropolis. The respondents’ stated inability to escape the collective practice asks us to engage with aspects of the modernisation thesis, arguing for a transition from the sacred to the secular (Giddens, 1991). The secular demands un-constrained individuals, but can we have unfettered, autonomous individual agency when faced with the moral authority of the collective?

One may also observe that while religiosity is intensely social, performing or non-performing certain acts defines them as either moral or immoral and thus implies certain values. Babita’s narration highlighted the functioning of social control through a pang of guilt that made individuals follow the collective practice. This form of social pressure has moral dimensions, too, ‘perhaps not even verbalised’ manifestations of law and religion, as the Japanese socio-legal scholar Chiba (2002: 19) has perceptively emphasised. Western scholars have identified the visible phenomenological experience of tension and remorse, observing that guilt arose from a negative evaluation of things done and concern about specific behavioural transgressions (Lewis, 1971; Tangney & Dearing, 2002). This guilt-prone behaviour reflects concerns about future uncertainty, which are both religious and secular, so that following the community action becomes, in a way, like a double insurance policy, as it looks also like a form of religious reassurance (Immerzeel & Tubergen, 2013).

On 19 May 2020, I received a call from Jay to inform me that someone I had interviewed in December 2019 had tested positive for COVID, was getting treatment in a municipal hospital and that the whole chawl was very worried. Despite this, he said, instead of wholly believing in medical science, the residents, including his own family, were following ‘religious things’. When I asked him to explain the details, he responded that during the last two days, he had noticed that Valmiki women in the chawl were applying a much longer vermilion line than usual on their hair parting. His mother was following this, too, despite his resistance. She and other women were doing this to protect their family from COVID. His mother, Shakuntala, aged 44, interacted with me numerous times during my fieldwork. I asked her to confirm Jay’s description of the new practice and why she followed it. She said (phone conversation, 19 May 2020):

Some women received calls from their natal homes, some from their relatives and some from their in-laws. They were asked to apply longer vermilion. Nothing is greater than life. What if something unfortunate happens to my family in the future? People might think it is foolish to do, but it is less foolish than to lose lives.

Taking responsibility to protect one’s family through extra ritualised activities in the chawl typically fell on the women’s shoulders. This information was passed on and received by women only, reflecting the suggestion of Shachar (2001) that women act as gatekeepers of culture. The gendered nature of such practices also reaffirms gendered roles for men, who should be protected, and for women as bearers of the sole responsibility to circulate information, protect and sacrifice for their family and close male relatives, such as sisters tying a protective talisman (rakhi) on a brother’s wrist. Babita’s above-mentioned quip that ‘nothing ever happens to a girl child’ is a poignant reminder of such gendered perceptions and ritualised prophylactic practices within families, continuing to inform people’s social life and shaping it through deeply structured dominant gender norms.

The population of BB is much more diverse than in SN. I did not observe such practices being followed there by the Jaiswar families, perhaps mainly because most families had fled to their native place by the time of my fieldwork. Only two Jaiswar families remained present, and I was unable to interact with them or observe any religious activities. However, I did notice two Pasi households following a specific practice. In one of these Pasi households, Sanjana (aged 42) became a respondent for my study. I met her son Kamlesh, aged 25, who works as a cameraman in a local photo studio, one day after buying groceries. Kamlesh was also going home, and I noticed five packets of camphor in his hands and asked him why he had bought those packets. He answered (fieldnotes 22 April 2020): ‘Many people in our block are burning camphor during the evening to keep the family safe and healthy as protection against COVID. Camphor has powers’.

When we both reached our lane, I sat at the doorstep of my house to get some fresh air but also observed that when Kamlesh reached his house, he was asked by someone from inside to stop outside. Sanjana then came with two small pieces of cloth, asking Kamlesh to wrap the camphor in them. He did this and then tied one camphor wrapped in cloth on the window of his house and another on the door. That same evening, I saw another Pasi household doing the same. Two days later, I was sitting in the early morning on a bike parked opposite the house when Kamlesh was passing. We had a casual conversation about the probability of a lockdown extension and rising numbers of COVID patients in Mumbai. I asked him whether any other houses he knew used camphor as a protective agent against COVID. He responded that he was unaware of this, but that his own and Rohini’s household, another Pasi family, were using it.

In these narratives related to practices undertaken by SN and BB residents, we observe that lighting diyas and applying vermilion on married women’s hair parting are Hindu practices. Ghee, turmeric and camphor are considered sacred and auspicious substances among Hindus, are used as essential ingredients in all major rituals and have well-known purifying and health-improving effects. Exploring this further, we may notice an important keyword in the narrative of Kamlesh, highlighting ‘power’ (shakti), which identifies beliefs underlying these practices as providing somewhat magic protection as well as a sense of inner strength. The keyword ‘negativity’ (buraiya) in Babita’s above-cited narrative with reference to COVID further clarifies the protective functions regarding these substances and people’s belief in their efficacy. These accounts also indicate that apart from having supposedly inherent protective capacities against COVID infection, these practices were used as a form of coping mechanism to reduce people’s anxieties in an existential sense, becoming thereby also an empowering act for the residents. Employing these faith-based practices has practical causes based on experiential grounds to deal with urgent current social and psychological needs. The underlying religious sentiments, as narrated, help to develop a sense of ontological security for the self and the immediate family. Boguszewski et al. (2020), citing the earlier work of Durkheim (1995 [1915]) and others, suggest that the disciplines of sociology and psychology have long argued that religion helps individuals understand the meanings of suffering and cope with adversities. Arguing with Durkheim that religion is social and that religious belief rests on a definite experience further suggests that religion’s true function for believers is to make them act properly and help them live, so that they feel stronger. Most importantly, there is the need to feel strengthened to ‘endure the trials of existence or to overcome them’ (Durkheim, 1995 [1915]: 419). This role of religion in coping with adversities has been widely explored in the literature (Norenzayan & Hansen, 2006; Pargament, 2001). In an interdisciplinary analysis which also explores the nature of law and morality, Chiba (2002: 19) stated that the internal structure of such rule systems ‘may appear immature or confusing’. My research verifies the holistic nature of Chiba’s theorising of the complex inner nature of rule systems.

The ethnographic accounts of my research add to such understanding, in the sense that religiosity as perceived by North Indian Dalits in Mumbai is, therefore, also a form of private insurance against the vicissitudes of life, as well as a manifestation of religion as reassurance (Immerzeel & Tubergen, 2013), given that the secular public realm, the state and ‘the law’, did not offer any effective support. Undoubtedly, the pandemic raised questions of existence for many millions of other poor people who needed solace to act and help them live and overcome the trials of the pandemic. In the Durkheimian sense, these are sacred times, marked by heightened human realisation of being dependent on higher forces, thus recourse to ‘religious’ practices provided many people in SN and BB with deeper awareness about the temporal continuity and security of the self. When Shakuntala explained to me that ‘[n]othing is greater than life. What if something unfortunate happens to my family in the future?’, she referred to the deeply interconnected nature of various forms of religious (re-)assurance as a form of support in its most elemental form in this precarious social scenario.

This kind of basic religiosity, which may not even be the right term, and might rather be called some form of holistic prudence and common-sense reaction to a fundamental crisis, seems to have helped the local residents in SN and BB to mitigate pain and provide a sense of ontological security for the self and family from the challenges of the pandemic. Faith-based practices, of whatever kind, are known to be one of the modes to express and channel people’s religious sentiments arising out of social need. Pickering (2009: 193) suggests, therefore, that for Durkheim, ‘religion is essentially a social phenomenon, understandable and to be explained in terms of the social’. The scenario of the pandemic most clearly illustrated the social cause thesis of Durkheim (1995 [1915]), where a set of faith-based practices underpinning or fed by religious beliefs can develop among individuals to become a source of ontological security.

Conclusions

This article illustrated and analysed how North Indian Dalits in Mumbai experienced vulnerability following the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought to life a new form of social order, deeply enmeshed and based on the need for solidarity. The ethnographic accounts show how North Indian Dalits in Mumbai’s low-income settlements depended upon and were anchored by communal solidarity and religious support mechanisms to navigate the existential threat posed by COVID-19. The respondents lacked any state or institutional support to navigate the precarious environment created by COVID. This close-range ethnographic study, which also involved the author himself as an individual put at risk by the pandemic, shows how respondents fell back on their caste networks for emotional support and trust, along with performing certain faith-based cultural and ‘religious’ practices to gain ontological security. This shows how caste-based social cohesion helped to build solidarity and provided material access to caste members.

One of the major sociological questions that Émile Durkheim focused on throughout his academic work concerned what binds society together. He argued that mechanical and organic solidarity are major forms of action that bind people together in traditional and modern society, respectively. Mishra and Rath (2020: 1), using the case of COVID-19, argue for ‘the presence of mechanical solidarity in modern society during the lockdown period’. My research shows how local residents mobilised caste networks when public interaction was suspended and prohibited during COVID-19. This action constitutes a form of solidarity that tied them together to sail through social and mental pain. The respondents fell back on caste ties, a form of mechanical solidarity, when solidarity based on other means was not available due to the suspension of public life. The interdependence was thus based on likeness and primary ties.

This interdependence also included emotional security to deal with the anxiety that connected the original home spaces and the migrants’ residence in Mumbai among the Dalit respondents. However, these functionalities that caste performed could not completely alleviate the deeper anxieties caused by the pandemic, as the immediate bodily threat to the self and the family remained. In this context, what may be called somewhat exceptional ‘religiosity’ seems to have assumed a central role in answering existential questions, connecting social and religious structures and functions. The resulting ritualised practices are neither universally nor uniformly followed, nor are they necessarily connected to more intense worship of specific religious or holy figures. The focus remains on prudence, self-protection and self-preservation.

This article also observes that such observations apply especially to women, charged with the protection of their loved ones from peril through the help of symbolic and health-enhancing actions that may appear as a social duty as well as an act of religiosity. As confirmed by this study, the constant reconstruction of the interplay of caste solidarity and religiosity in volatile scenarios of crisis resulted in new forms of urban sociality as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This clearly shows that, depending on the respective scenario, forms of mechanical as well as organic solidarity continue to co-exist, and can be brought into action by individuals and communities during emergency situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.