Gender During the Pandemic: Issues at Stake

Abstract

The COVID pandemic exacerbated existing inequalities as well as those between researchers and the researched. This experiential note discusses the ethical dilemmas and practical difficulties that I as a feminist researcher and activist have encountered between 2020 and 2022. This was while in the process of my research as well as engagement with COVID-19-related advocacy work. I argue that, even as one was displaced from one’s status as a researcher, these skills were required in advocacy with various branches of the government. Formal research investigations involving fieldwork required that I attend to the needs of the ‘researched’ through humanitarian outreach and advocacy. Such a displacement of the identity of the researcher, I argue, points to the issues at stake in doing feminist research, even during ordinary times.

COVID-19 has been a distinctly unique experience for most of us and we were moved to re-learning to live as human beings, women and researchers studying gender. We were cut off from all our neighbours, friends and colleagues. As human beings, we felt exceptionally fearful, helpless as we saw people dying all round, and as women, we saw our care labour increase enormously as families stayed at home without school, college and office. Some of us lost people close to us or came close to losing people. We were angry and disgusted about what was happening and not happening. As researchers, we were moved into a reality where our research and ourselves, for a while, looked meaningless. For a year, we could not talk to each other without asking if everyone was safe and healthy in the family and among close friends. Yet, along with all this, it was also the period many of us were drawn to reach out, help and support our co-citizens without resources to not starve, to reach their homes, to reach hospitals and later and get access to vaccination, and to lobby, advocate and litigate for better facilities.

The devastating social, economic and political consequences of the COVID-19 experience, especially for the marginalised communities, have been analysed (Jain & Nabia, 2022) even as its long-term consequences on humanity are still unravelling, making it difficult to mark it as a ‘past event’. Such beginnings are critical to make sense of our collective experience as well as individual predicament, thoughts and feelings, formed during this period when boundaries of the private/personal and public/political got seriously frayed (Rohini Raman, 2021). Written and spoken from the midst of the unprecedented collapse of governance, both the analytical and experiential accounts are also pushing us to reflect on the meaning of social/national solidarity as well as the purpose of the government.

My experiential note, situated in this broader context, was written in response to a seminar ¹ on the theme of researching gender, COVID-19 experiences and disciplinary challenges. Taking it as an opportunity to reflect upon my personal/political experience during COVID-19 as a researcher who got drawn into engagement on the ground, I have decided to present such involvement as stories or episodes of the pandemic. This note forms a part of the process of reflection (Nagaraj et al., 2020; Suneetha & Davala, 2020; Suneetha et al., 2020; Srivatsan et al., 2022; Suneetha & Nagaraj, 2020) that I have been engaged in during and after the pandemic.

Like many others, I have been dissatisfied with the characterisations of such engagement as simple charity that has emerged out of feelings of individual guilt or misplaced heroism or as resulting in saving the state/government by containing the rebellion of the abandoned workers. Such an understanding fails to appreciate the important role that public charitable actions, empathy and care play(ed) in any republican democracy with immense divisions and inequalities of caste, class, gender, religion and region (de Grouchy, 1798/2017). In the neoliberal era when public charitable activities have been pushed to the domain of care of the self, dwelling on the public forms of care, albeit during the pandemic, I believe, might give us clues to the deficient form of fraternity that B. R. Ambedkar desired for the yet to be formed Indian nation (Ambedkar, 2014/1932).

My objective is to bring to the fore the stakes involved in researching/working on gender during the pandemic through a discussion of my own engagement. Methodologically, in order to do this, I had to begin by clarifying with care and depth, the following terms—gender, research, COVID-19 experiences and disciplinary challenges. What did one mean by gender—is it the relations between and among men and women across the social classes or is it the assignment of sex and gender at birth and is it cis-women that we speak of when we mention the term gender? Research—is it the research that results in academic reports, journal papers, policy documents with assigned authors or should it also include forms of documentation and analyses that inform many kinds of materials for public use but do not necessarily accrue any social capital to specific authors? The third term, COVID-19 experiences, derives its meaning from how we interpret the first two, like whose and what COVID-19 experiences counts in the reckoning. Fourth, the disciplinary challenges—this brings to the fore the challenges of analysing life and concerns within disciplinary boundaries, and also perhaps, the challenges posed by Women’s Studies itself becoming an academic discipline, just like other social science disciplines.

Second, one also needed to unpack the ‘us’ or ‘we’, the Subject, the presenters and participants, our/their location and function during the pandemic years. Most of ‘us’ did not remain what or where we were, during the pandemic. We got dislocated from our own spaces and places—from our secure locations as teachers/researchers/authority figures during those two years, having had to reorient our work relationships through virtual means. In fact, many of us got drawn into unforeseen and unprecedented activities where our resources were used for different objectives, where our training, skills and capacity as researchers were demanded for purposes other than teaching in the classrooms, conducting and producing research papers and reports with some semblance of autonomy and control. There were always things to be documented, lists and detailed notes to be prepared and shared, proposals to be written, posters and booklets to be produced and workshops to be conducted, short press statements and sharp analytical pieces to be contributed to the newspapers and so on. Academic research had to be done amidst this chaos. In any case, as researchers we were ‘out of place’.

By expanding, stretching and adjusting the meanings of research(er) and the research through this small methodological clearing it became possible to discuss my experience as a case study—of an engaged researcher during the pandemic wherein informal and formal research, documentation and overall engagement with COVID-19-related work flowed into each other, forming a seamless narrative. My formal research included a cluster of small studies that investigated the migration trajectories and COVID-related experiences of informal workers, transgender people and students in the city of Hyderabad as well as a study of underage couples who had eloped and were brought to the Sakhi centres or the one-stop crisis centres in three districts of Telangana.

The following account of my experience of researching/working on gender is presented in the form of short stories or episodes, in each of which I try to delineate the stakes involved in doing gender-related research during the two years of the pandemic and the ways it is linked with the cultivation of empathy and sympathy. Each of these episodes involves a set of events and processes beyond one’s control and the collective thinking that went into dealing with the situation.

Episode 1

I begin with the very first engagement that came my way in April 2020. It brought the question of gender in the form of the ‘subalternisation of men’ of Tabligi Jamat, who were stigmatised and demonised as proto-criminals spreading COVID infection by design. Towards the end of March and the beginning of April 2020, the Tabligi Jamat devotees who had returned to Hyderabad and other towns in Telangana from the Delhi congregation were asked to come forward and undergo medical tests by the Telangana government. Most of them did so voluntarily, though some were reluctant due to extreme fear and stigma surrounding COVID-19. The Telangana government actively participated in the creation of this fear and stigma through its media campaigns about Tabligis spreading COVID-19 (Krishna, 2020).

My involvement began with a call from a local human rights activist, close to Tabligi Jamat, who wanted me to speak to the brother of a suspected patient, holed up in the designated COVID-19 hospital ward for more than a week, without any diagnosis. He had returned from the Tablig meeting in New Delhi. In fact, his test results varied from day to day. His brother and mother, I was told, were waiting outside the hospital for three days with dread in their hearts, and needed to be assured. The rights activist was very upset as he heard that the food was being thrown at the patients who were COVID-positive; the isolation and uncertainty were driving the patient and his family crazy. A few phone conversations with the patient’s brother, mother and other people followed. By then, the suspected patient was ‘released’ into a COVID quarantine facility in the old city.

In two weeks, suspected patients without symptoms, who had already spent four weeks in quarantine, started reaching out. The quarantine centres were set up and being maintained by Muslim religious charities in three big empty mosques (Indian Express, 2021) in three central locations, after some persuasion and pressure by the political representatives from All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM). Nearly five hundred local and foreign ‘suspected patients’ were kept under lock and key. They were cooking for themselves with the help of the local community but were restive. COVID-19 protocols were shifting day by day and there was a lot of fear all around. No one knew when they would get ‘released’ from these mosques. The government itself did not have any timeline as to when such suspects could be released back into the community.

Since there was nothing much any of us could do at this point, we decided to talk to as many such patients and write a detailed note with their concerns and pass it on to those AIMIM party representatives we were familiar with. This detailed note enabled them in negotiating with the government and fixing a timeline for the release of these men, under doctors’ supervision. Most, except foreign-origin patients, got released by the end of April.

The reason why the calls and this task were directed to me was my decade-long research in the old city of Hyderabad on various issues, including women’s religious education and mainstream political parties. Having known of my familiarity with and non-queasiness about interacting with religious men as well as my passable knowledge of Urdu, members of the activist network that were formed at this time thought that I would be suitable for this kind of networking, talking and liaisoning.

Soon, perhaps due to this exercise, came calls from Tabligi Jamat groups from Telangana locked down in other parts of the country—one batch in a mosque, 100 km from Patna (Bihar), another near Nanded (Maharashtra) and a third near Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh. Again, there was nothing much one could do except to talk and reassure them and pass on whatever contacts that the nationwide networks had started circulating. But that was enough for them. Elderly men confided in tearful voices of how they were unable to provide rations, firewood for cooking or even medication for their own and their wives’ conditions such as diabetes. They spoke of how the neighbours in their respective villages were scared to even look at them.

Members of a religious sect, known to be fundamentalist in their belief and reticent in their daily public conduct, reluctant to take political stance on any issue (Alam, 2020), were reduced to pariahs in the pandemic. These men, highly respected and venerable in their families and communities, were forced to talk to someone, who figured in their imagination as ‘a Hindu’ social activist, like me. In the ‘normal’ course of life and under ‘normal’ conditions, they would perhaps be reluctant to interact with, leave alone confide in strange women, but the pandemic-induced paranoia turned this hierarchy tops-turvey and them into a vulnerable group.

Episode 2

As the pandemic proceeded beyond the 21 days in which it was supposed to disappear, governments had to engage deeply with health care in which they had forgotten to invest. Telangana, like many other state governments, consistently refused to acknowledge the extent of spread and the deep impact that COVID-19 was having on its people. In this episode, I shall describe the kind of research that went into making a small dent in the ‘denial’ mode of the Telangana government on what it should be doing. Sometime towards the end of April 2020, in Hyderabad, many organisations and individuals, of varying religious, social and socio-economic nature formed a collective called COVID-19 Lockdown Collective to pursue the government to take concrete measures. Anveshi Health Group, a small collective of four people, mostly from social medicine/public health backgrounds, stuck at home at that time, acted as a think tank for this collective, providing research inputs on what could be pushed for. Collating all the information available based on reading as many research papers as it could, the group put discussions into intelligible language for common people. ²

The Lockdown Collective submitted its very first petition to the government on 25th April 2020 listing measures, including the immediate stoppage of propaganda against the Tabligi Jamat, asking for the opening of isolation centres, promising cooperation and, offering to help in burials/cremations. As part of its ground work for the two-month-long negotiations with the health minister of Telangana, it contacted the Municipal Commissioner responsible for the setting up of isolation centres in Dharavi who readily gave all the required suggestions. The collective also prepared several detailed proposals for the NGOs, who if permitted, were to run the isolation centres. Some were religious organisations and some were regular NGOs. After collecting the experiential accounts of people who ran the isolation centres for Tabligi Jamaat returnees in mosques (Times of India, 2020), it also filed a Public Interest Litigation about the same in the Telangana High Court regarding the immediate measures to be taken.

But, by August–September 2020, it was clear that this was not to be. To withstand the increased powers of the Central government under the epidemic act, the Telangana government decided to play it safe—by fudging the numbers on the COVID-19 bulletin, it deferred the isolation facilities even in Hyderabad for fear of ‘dis-repute’. It nevertheless allowed the private hospitals to open the same in hotels and resorts, primarily relying on the police and on a fear-psychosis, to drive its COVID campaign.

Thus, the collective and its constituent members had to be content with spreading awareness through door-to-door campaigns and posters. The posters and other materials that the group prepared became the primary material for all the community health activists at the ground level. They were translated into multiple languages, adapted in audio format, printed in thousands and were adopted by some state governments too. ³

But there were many questions. The community health activists who were mostly Accredited Social Health Activists were not welcome in the neighbourhoods during the COVID. How were they to create awareness? How should they protect themselves, first? How does one isolate at home and what should the NGOs provide for the households to survive COVID and prevent further spread? It required field visits in the midst of COVID-19 to fully grasp what a ‘home’ meant. ³ The team soon understood that homes in urban spaces, for most people, were one-room tenements with bathrooms shared with others. Privacy of isolation in a room was impossible. Most of the older people spent their whole day sitting on the charpoy outside the house, talking to passers-by. Confinement to any closed space was seen as undignified and banishment. In an atmosphere riven with fear and suspicion, people needed more care and attention and ‘isolation’ was seen as the opposite of this. In the villages, we heard that no one from the Dalit wadas (hamlets) was receiving any care, whatsoever.

After looking at the situation and gathering what others were doing in other parts of the country, the collective decided to incorporate good nutritious food and vegetables that lasted 2–3 weeks for the COVID care kit to be supplied to the households with patients. Food, good food, was a sign of care and it was appreciated by people. It also helped reduce the fear as it went along with the common belief that ‘good food is the antidote to sickness’. It assured them that if you ate well, you could recover. This was widely shared among all the groups distributing COVID care kits and each group came up with their own combination of nutritious food.

While posters were useful to an extent, attempts at starting isolation centres did not work and the community health workers did not succeed in educating people—but the food in the COVID care kits worked. While much of COVID-related interventions were getting slotted as charity, the result of government failure, there are insights to be gained from collective efforts of this kind. For those of us who got involved for the first time at this level, this engagement was helpful in gaining a deeper understanding of why, in spite of such a huge calamity, the patients who suffered did not mobilise around the notion of health as a right. We had all hoped that the COVID crisis would at least have helped a move in that direction, but it was not to be.

The COVID crisis brought to the forefront the unjust gendered division of labour at home and in the society. Our minor forays into healthcare provisioning during COVID-19 gave us some insight of the cracks and fissures into which not only the majority of women but many other marginalised people fall, leaving them uncared for. While naturalised social roles of women prevented access to health care, assumptions about the disposability of those from marginalised castes and classes meant indifference and lack of care. In this overall atmosphere, nutritious food kits provided by peoples’ collectives functioned not merely as charity but as attempts at care.

Episode 3

What the COVID crisis brought into focus was various stereotypes against marginalised populations, one being transgender persons, especially trans women as they were most visible. They were assumed to be either ‘fake’ and not ‘true’ women. Transgender people of the city—predominantly hijras—depend on public places for their work—either through badhai ⁴ or through sex work. When the streets were ‘cleaned up’ during the initial months of the lockdown, a number had to return to their natal families and hide their chosen gender identity or stay in Hyderabad without any income. Trans people also had to struggle against the stereotype that they were spreading the disease. ⁵

At this time, a small group of allies and trans activists from the Women and Transgender Joint Organizations that I was then part of, took up crowdfunding ⁶ to provide a basic income of ₹3,000 per month to transgender people in and around the city of Hyderabad. But here was the catch. A lot of them did not have bank accounts in their own chosen gender and name. Their Aadhar cards and current identities did not match. Like many marginalised communities, most depended on a cash economy, avoiding most formal financial systems. Opening a bank account without the paraphernalia of address proof, Aadhar card or a PAN card was also difficult at that time, even though some were willing to attempt with birth-assigned gender. The cis-woman ally who was handling this disbursal from home had a million doubts while matching the names on the identity proofs and the names that were given to her, as she needed to account for the money transfers.

During this exercise that lasted a few months, those of us active in the group came in close contact with myriad issues that trans people wrestle with on a daily basis: the mismatch between persons and identity documents, between the place of residence and the address proof, the disconnect between the chosen families and natal families, the precarious support systems that get strained easily, the tensions between the haveli hijras (those who live within the traditional hijra households that go back hundreds of years in the old city of Hyderabad) and non-haveli hijras (who live outside these havelis and earn their livelihood through badhai and sex work). The minimal care made available to the non-trans people was also not available to trans persons unless they got admitted into the hospital under their gender assigned at birth. For a long time, the Telangana government did not start any separate ward for trans patients despite a High Court directive to do so. ⁷ When it did, the patients were left alone in the ward, without any attention. The COVID-19 vaccine and its possible effects on the trans bodies were not clear too, resulting in many not taking the vaccine (Shaikh & Raghuram, 2022).

Over these months of the lockdown, what this group understood was that despite the support that poured in for the trans people in Hyderabad, the clock of their lives was wound back by a few years. Even though the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2019 has been passed, the rules for issuing an identity card and linking it with other identification cards are still to be framed. The complexity of trans life, identity, the near impossibility of living life in the chosen gender vis-à-vis the state, the community, natal family, chosen family, partners and others was too difficult to be captured in the form of a transgender identity card.

While these were the political and ethical issues that the COVID-19 non-formal collective engagements threw up in terms of gendered experience, the formal research projects also presented many issues.

Episode 4

In the middle of 2020, in May–June, my colleagues and I at Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies were writing up a proposal for a two-year study on the theme of gender and urban migration. This was a follow-up to an earlier study on single women’s migration to the city of Hyderabad. We thought that we would follow up on all our single women migrants regarding their experience of COVID and what it meant to go back to their natal homes, after enjoying the autonomy for some years in the city. Situated as we were in the midst of the largest movement of migrant workers in the country, ⁸ it seemed to us that we could not but study their experience in this phase too, even if it just involved a tiny sample.

We decided to focus on Muslim embroidery workers from Bengal as they had reached out to some of us working with Lockdown Collective. This was when they were fleeing Hyderabad for Bengal. More interestingly, embroidery being a woman’s occupation/profession, we were curious to know how this evolved primarily as a male occupation. The project was to begin in July 2020 but we were not sure as the workers were still stuck in Bengal: it was clear that the pandemic was not going anywhere and the economy was not about to kick start any time soon. But by the first week of July, the workers started returning from Bengal as they found that in their native villages, there were no rations, no work and no other arrangements made for them. Cyclone Amphan that ravaged Bengal at this time had further devastated their ramshackle houses and livelihoods.

We were to investigate their migration trajectories and their COVID-19 experiences through interviews. But the major ethical question that confronted us was this—how do we conduct the study in the middle of a pandemic when the workers were on the verge of starvation. We realised it could not be done unless we addressed their basic needs, especially food. We decided to take on undergraduate interns, long-distance—an unusual step for us—and their job was to enable ration delivery and basic income transfers of ₹500 per person per month. It was only after three months of this provisioning of food and basic income that we started our actual interviews over the phone. Some of us—I for instance—could not bring myself to ask them about the food that they had managed to get during the last few months. It was not a question of language as on both sides, the Dekhani (the local more easy-going and flexible linguistic variant of Hindustani/Urdu) was passable, but much more due to the sensitivity around speaking about food.

The conversations with women proved to be very difficult. It was only because our team stood by them during the toughest times that the women could bring themselves to speak, in their native tongue, to one of the team members about skipping meals on a daily basis, making children eat whatever was available. These were workers who lived with dignity and self-respect, and who did not lack food before the pandemic. The pain was palpable in their voices even though they conducted themselves with utmost dignity.

The men, when we met them physically for a group discussion in January 2021, were full of analyses of the economy, of the past and the future of the embroidery work, of how they ended up here and how their children would not end up doing such work and so on. They told us that they could not shift to any other profession during the lockdown as none of them was used to hard physical labour, working long hours in the sun. They were used to ‘working in the shade’, unlike other men. Only one of them attempted to sell tea during the pandemic and said that he returned, unable to compete with scores of others like himself who had set out to sell tea and vegetables.

Then came the shocker. When we asked them about government support during COVID-19, they said something that threw all of us middle-class researchers gathered there—‘bechara sarkar, kya karega?’ (the poor government, what can it do?). They had no regular income, no provident fund, no pension scheme, no social security at all and most of them were school dropouts. Ration cards had been left behind in Bengal. All had begun working in their teens, and were informal and unorganised labour, completely free of the government, and hence did not think that the government owed anything to them. Most of them did not think that the government had to do anything for the workers. The proposed National Register of Citizens to compile an authentic nationwide list of citizens that preceded the pandemic had only added to their insecurities and anxiety. For us, the issues that stood out from this episode were that during the pandemic, no field-based research could be conducted without attending to the basic needs of the subjects.

Episode 5

This story begins towards the end of the year 2021. We began a small study of eloped couples that land up at the one-stop crisis centres in Telangana state, called Sakhi centres. Three young women project assistants who had received MAs during the pandemic from Satavahana University in Karimnagar had joined and after being trained, left for the field.

They needed to stay in Siricilla, Nalgonda and Mahabubnagar, smaller towns in the state. However, everywhere it was difficult for them to find a place to stay. There were no working women’s hostels that served decent food as they had closed down in the lockdown. The food served in the local hotels made everyone sick. A house owner who agreed to give a portion on rent made impossible demands—that they keep the door to the room open, the constantly blaring television notwithstanding, that they should not ask for adequate food despite the fact that they were paying her and that they should not talk when they were in the house as it disturbed her. In spite of this general hostility and other difficulties, the young women conducted their fieldwork in the Sakhi centres. The centre staff was in general cooperative, though not everyone was happy to see them.

During the days at these centres, the research assistants saw young adults who had eloped being brought in, scolded, sometimes hit by parents, looking browbeaten during counselling and sent back with their parents with a semblance of reconciliation. ⁹ The visible hostility towards these young adults, closer to their age, for things their friends might well be indulging in—falling in love, making out or having sex or running away—affected them deeply. After the first week, they returned to Hyderabad, shocked and stunned. ‘Everyone is blaming the young girls, why?’ they kept asking. My colleague Rohini and I exchanged notes with them, notes from our fieldwork experience on violence, asked them to relax by going to the movies, shopping and staying for a while in the city and then going back once they recovered.

At the end of each field trip, they came back with strikingly similar storylines that counsellors and local officers dealing with the elopement cases had—the pandemic has corrupted everyone by providing a cell phone, the young women were abusing access to the phone by talking to young men; rather than using it for educational purposes, they set up time with young men and eloped, especially with auto drivers who seduced them by playing their favourite film songs during the rides. Mobile phones and auto drivers constituted the two taglines or short phrases that summarise the content of most of the authority figures’ accounts of elopements during the COVID times. Angst against the mobile phones that became ubiquitous during the pandemic could not have been without reasons. Perhaps access to prohibited information about drugs, alcohol and so on became common during this time for young adults. But the issue was clearly not about mobile phones alone, as over the last 60 years, novels and movies have been similarly accused of leading young adult women astray.

The issue was and remains young adults’ desire for impossible romance, sometimes outside the bounds of caste and class. The young men involved too are mostly from similar backgrounds, a small step away from the caste/class of the young women. COVID-19 perhaps exacerbated the feeling of claustrophobia for young people, making them want to flee their households and account for more cases at the Sakhi centres. There were many cases of betrayal and abandonment and the young women usually bore the brunt of parental ire and societal disapproval. However, as POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act 2012) and the Child Marriage Act have criminalised any sexual activity between young adults below 18, the young men involved do land up in police custody. Neither POCSO nor the Child Marriage Act recognise consensual sexual activity or young women’s agency below 18 years of age. ¹⁰ While the law firmly says that it is illegal for minors to engage in consensual sex, it is a sociological reality. Young people at these centres were caught in this conundrum. While changes enabled by technology were loosening tight parental control over young women, they were brought back into the caste- patriarchal fold with authorities using these two acts. Often the Sakhi centres enabled this process, the legal and institutional framework affecting the possibility of young women’s agency in an adverse manner.

These issues that I have sought to foreground are not new but the stakes involved in researching gender got heightened during the COVID-19 crisis. The first of these is the power differences between the researchers and the researched not only in access to resources but also the ability to represent the reality of the research subjects. The second is the relationality and intersectional nature of gender that alerts us not to focus solely on women or women who are in consonance with assigned sex and gender. In the absence of such alertness, we would miss out both what happens to the subaltern men and subaltern women, including trans women. The third issue is the necessity of attending to basic needs, to whatever extent possible, when we do fieldwork with vulnerable populations, the modalities of which need to be carefully worked out. Fourth is that of the emotional cost of doing research on difficult themes, especially related to gender-based violence.