Covid on the Coast: Pandemic Governance and Protests in Fishing Villages in South Kerala,India

Abstract

In this article, we reflect on the consequences of COVID-19 interventions on coastal communities in south Kerala (India), and the responses of the local population to the latter. In particular, we map out the events which led to spontaneous protests in a number of fishing villages during the second wave of the epidemic in July 2020. We will show that whilst during the first wave of the epidemic, coastal communities remained supportive of government intervention, such an initial support begun to wane as the epidemic unfolded over time and became more aggressive and widespread. We argue that such a shift in fishing communities’ attitudes was a response not only to the consequences of a more forceful policy of containment of the epidemic but also to a sudden identification of coastal communities as the main locus of contagion in the district. We suggest that the consequent restrictive measures enforced on coastal communities were driven as much by epidemiological concerns as by a media-driven social panic built upon widespread negative stereotypes that have historically worked to marginalize, and even criminalize coastal communities in Kerala. We deploy the notion of bio-moral marginality to reveal ways through which the attribution of specific—and largely stereotyped and negative— physical attributes and moral dispositions to the bodies and behaviour of people belonging to fishing coastal communities constituted the ground upon which the social panic concerning the spread of the COVID-19 virus unfolded in south Kerala, thus leading to fishers’ militant response.

Introduction

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the southern Indian state of Kerala gained international recognition and praise for its successful interventions in managing and containing the spread of the disease. Whilst the world was clumsily struggling to cope with the fast spreading of the contagion and mounting casualties, the Kerala government appeared to have developed and implemented an effective strategy for reducing contagion, providing medical care to those affected by the virus and offering material support to its population. It also provided migrant labour in the state with free food provisions, appropriate quarantine facilities and more so that there was no repeat of the tragic exodus of labourers witnessed in many an Indian city. The success of the government in containing the pandemic has been attributed to the lasting legacies of the ‘Kerala model of development’: a strong and far-reaching public health system, an efficient system of decentralized governance, and popular mobilization in support of government interventions (see, e.g., Chathukulam & Tharamangalam, 2021; Choolayil & Putran, 2021; Isaac & Sadanandan, 2020; Ramakumar & Eapen, 2021). Moreover, whilst the failure to foresee the destructive force of the 2017 Ockhi cyclone and two devastating monsoon floods ¹ —in August 2018 and July 2019—had sharpened the state’s capacity to react rapidly to emergencies via an effective strategy of rescue, support and rehabilitation of affected populations (see, e.g., Raman, 2020), the 2018 Nipah virus ² outbreak had enabled the government to devise responsive health protocols and strategies directed to containing the spread of epidemics through case-based isolation, contact-tracing and community participation (see, e.g., Rahim et al., 2020). Without detracting from the undeniable success of the Kerala government’s actions in containing the spread of the virus in the state—especially during the first wave of the epidemic—in this article, we aim to explore the consequences of COVID-19 interventions on coastal communities in south Kerala, and the complex responses of the local population. In particular, we intend to discuss the events which led to spontaneous protests in a number of fishing villages during the second wave of the epidemic in July and August 2020. These short-lived protests disrupted hitherto widespread compliance and support to the Kerala government’s policies directed towards containing the epidemic.

Whilst during the first wave of the epidemic, coastal communities remained supportive of government intervention this initial support began to wane as the epidemic unfolded over time and became more aggressive and widespread. We argue that the shift in fishing communities’ attitudes emerged as a response not only to the (economic and social) consequences of a more forceful policy of containment of the epidemic but also to the sudden identification of coastal communities as the main locus of contagion in the Thiruvananthapuram district. We will suggest that the consequent restrictive measures enforced on coastal communities—from renewed bans on fishing and restrictions on fish selling, to the deployment of police commandoes to enforce the lockdown—were driven not just by epidemiological concerns but also by a media-driven social panic built upon widespread negative stereotypes that have historically worked to marginalize coastal communities in Kerala, as elsewhere in the world (see, e.g., Nadel-Klein, 2003).

A number of recent studies have underscored how the COVID-19 pandemic had its most devastating consequences on vulnerable or marginal communities (Bourgeron, 2022; Bratich, 2021; Buheji et al., 2020; Crane & Pearson, 2020; Haneefa, 2021; Manderson & Lavine, 2020 Singer & Rylko-Bauer 2021). We build on these studies to argue that, in order to understand the impact and responses to the pandemic on coastal fishing communities in south Kerala, attention should be paid not only to conditions of socio-economic precarity and vulnerability but also to the ways these conditions have been expressed through and compounded by what we name as bio-moral marginality. By bio-moral marginality we refer to, firstly, the attribution of specific—and largely stereotyped and negative—physical attributes and moral dispositions to the bodies and behaviour of people belonging to coastal fishing communities; secondly, to the processes through which this attribution then constitutes the ground upon which a social panic concerning the spread of the COVID-19 virus unfolded in south Kerala. The alleged inability of such communities to maintain appropriate standards of cleanliness and hygiene, or to respond in a disciplined manner to government medical advisories, made them the target of public fears, accusations and, eventually, repressive interventions. Similarly, elsewhere in India, it was the subaltern or marginalized communities—that is, those social groups whose everyday life is overdetermined by the intersection of (historical and cumulative) discriminations grounded on hierarchies of caste, religion, class, gender or sexuality—who, in the early wave of the pandemic, became the target of widespread rumours and allegations concerning their role as vectors for the spread of the virus.

While the embodied modalities of subordination and exclusion we discuss might be thought of as confined to the effects of an enduring legacy of caste-based discriminations peculiar to South Asia, we suggest that the concept of bio-moral marginality enriches more broadly the scope of critical epidemiology. It does this by directing attention to and revealing the relations drawn in popular imagination and public discourses between the material conditions and lifeworld of marginal communities—sex workers, rural migrants, the homeless, asylum-seeker—and their attributed moral dispositions (see, e.g., Carr, 2015). Taken together, they (re)produce generalized hostility and justify disciplinary, even punitive, interventions (see, e.g., Dhall & Boyce, 2015; Roelen et al., 2020; Van Hollen, 2010). Here, the post-pandemic ‘health of the nation’ appears to be constituted upon the extent to which the state and its agencies manage to contain and police the practices of those people and communities considered—for a variety of reasons—to be beyond the pale of modern lifestyles and bourgeoise decency (Evans, 2018; Kidambi, 2004). The approach we propose allows us not only to explore the material consequences of the COVID-19 epidemic on the livelihood of (socially, economically and culturally) marginal/ized communities, but also to discuss some ways in which such communities respond to existing or emerging modalities of bio-moral stigmatization (see, e.g., Lancione, 2016). In other words, bio-moral marginality addresses the multiple and overlapping dimensions and drivers of socio-economic marginality, and how these have contributed to the differential consequences and responses to the COVID-19 epidemic.

We focus on five fishing villages in the Thiruvananthapuram district, where we have been conducting research since October 2019: Puthiyathura, Marianad, Poonthura, Pulluvila and Anchuthengu. A questionnaire was used to collect initial data from 10 households in each of Puthiyathura and Marianad. The questionnaire covered a wide range of issues concerning the effects of COVID-19—from the social and economic impact of the lockdown on the livelihood of fishing households, to the scope and efficacy of relief interventions from the state government, local parish churches and other social organizations—and provided the basis for follow-up face-to-face semi-structured interviews in all five villages once the first lockdown was lifted. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted by telephone during the second lockdown, to cross-check and strengthen the information gathered from the questionnaires and the first round of interviews, as well as to collect more data on local responses to and evaluations of the more stringent government restrictions upon movement and sociality. As well as collecting relevant government orders and health directives concerning the COVID-19 emergency, we followed how the mainstream media—newspapers and television news channels, in particular—reported the events leading to the second lockdown.

On Bio-moral Marginality

Our concept of bio-moral marginality draws on McKim Marriott’s understanding of personhood in South Asia, whereby people belonging to different castes or communities are considered to be constituted and defined by specific articulations of coded substance. According to Marriott, a person’s moral dispositions, character and emotional nature—a person’s code—coincide with the same person’s physical attributes or substance (Marriott, 1976; Marriott & Inden, 1977; see also Daniel, 1984). People’s coded substances are not simply differentiated by virtue of belonging to a particular community or inhabiting a specific socio-physical environment, but are attributed differential value according to the logic of caste hierarchy. In other words, for Marriott there is something understood as intrinsically different and superior in the physical/bodily substance, as well as in the behaviour and moral disposition, of a high caste Brahmin. At the same time, a fisher or a Dalit—whose caste status, within the hegemonic logic of Brahmanical Hinduism, is deemed to be lower—would have a less refined or inferior bio-moral constitution, for instance, a ‘hot’ body ensuing from manual labour, non-vegetarian diet and consumption of alcohol, and a corresponding impulsive, hot-tempered and unruly character (Osella & Osella, 2002, 2008). Importantly, Marriott introduces the concept of the (permeable and partible) dividual to suggest that a person’s coded substance can be passed on to others, and at the same time absorb the coded substance of those with whom one interacts or exchanges (cooked food, in particular) (see Babb, 1981; Daniel, 1984; Marriott, 1976). Put simply, a person should avoid the absorption of ‘lower’ coded substance, while accepting, even welcoming the coded substance of those deemed to belong to a higher caste/community.

The shortcomings in McKim Marriott’s attempts (see, e.g., Marriott, 1989) to delineate an all-encompassing ‘ethnosociology of India’ built upon (pristine and timeless) ‘Hindu categories’ are all too obvious (for critiques, see Babb, 1990; Larson, 1990; Moffatt, 1990). Distancing ourselves from Marriott’s Orientalism, we read notions of (hierarchically ordered) coded substance through what Vivek Narayan defines as caste scripts (2021). Caste scripts, to use Narayan’s words, ‘characterize those assumptions, judgments, substances, and practices that encaste human experience and social meaning’ (pp. 275–276). In turn, by ‘encasted experience’, Narayan refers to ‘performative process through which the caste order ascribes values and attributes to human lives by blurring the boundaries between code, material and behavior’ (2021: 3ff). Read through the lenses of critical Dalit studies, Marriott’s coded substances must be located within wider discursive and material practices (caste scripts) which seek to naturalize, and thus legitimate, Brahmanical/Savarna caste order (see also Moffatt, 1990), firstly by ascribing different bio-moral dispositions to the (casted) social body, and, secondly, by attributing hierarchical value to these difference.

We also draw attention to critical research which has explored ways through which nineteenth-century racial sciences—themselves promoting notions of bio-moral difference between and within populations or ‘races’—not only were deployed to bolster social hierarchies in the colonies as much as the metropoles, ³ but were ‘appropriated by the indigenous elites to justify South Asian hierarchy on the one hand, and to assert parity with the European upper classes on the other’ (Guha, 1998, p. 428; see also Bates, 1995; Sebastian 2015). Colonial scientific discourse, that is, provided a novel, secularized language for the articulation and assertion of caste-based hierarchies and discriminations, expressed this time in terms of ‘natural’ (positive or negative) socio-cultural dispositions towards embracing colonial and post-colonial modernity (Natrajan, 2011; Subramanian, 2009, 2019). We can see such a logic at work in the management of the 1896 plague (see, e.g., Arnold, 1993; Kidambi, 2004), but also in the 1970s sterilization campaign which unfolded during Indira Gandhi’s emergency (see, e.g., Tarlo, 2003; Williams, 2014). In both instances, the main targets of coercive government interventions were predominantly poor, low caste or marginalized communities whose actual behaviour and moral dispositions were identified as the root causes of the problems faced by a modernizing India (Evans, 2018).

In colonial and post-colonial Kerala, and India at large, encasted discourses about the apparent perils of exchange (with those deemed as ‘caste inferiors’) have intersected with, and even morphed into modern scientific notions about hygiene, illness and well-being. For instance, Sanal Mohan writes that in Kerala, ‘even as late as the early decades of the twentieth century the [high status] Syrian Christians would invoke health sciences and notions of hygiene to support the segregation of Dalit Christians in the churches’ (2016, p. 75). Indeed, in the encasted popular imagination of post-colonial Kerala, coastal fishing communities appear as recalcitrant ‘caste primitives’, lacking the (cultural, social and economic) wherewithal necessary to engender processes of modernization and reform, and thus to constitute themselves as modern citizens (Arnold, 2013; Binoy, 2021; Narayan, 2021; Ram, 1991; Subramanian, 2009). Importantly, the negative stereotypes coastal fishing communities are the object of are not simply discursive practices of representation but performative acts which normalize and naturalize hierarchical values, whereby politics of exclusion and discrimination become inscribed in the everyday as both inevitable and necessary (Narayan, 2021; Paik, 2022). That is, the confluence of (encasted) notions of personhood and modern bio-politics constitute those who are deemed to lack the dispositions and/or resources to embody the biomedical underpinnings of modern citizenship as risky, unsanitary subjects (Briggs, 2004; Briggs & Mantini-Briggs, 2003; see also Carr, 2015; Ong, 1995; Onoma, 2017; Shah, 2001). Bio-moral marginality— the historical outcome of heterogenous discursive and material practices directed towards naturalizing caste inequalities—allows us then to reveal the encasting of the COVID-19 epidemic, whereby subaltern communities—Kerala fishers, the urban poor at large—were identified and feared as site of contagion, and thus became the object of moral panic and, as a result, of strong-harmed interventions. Here, the concept of bio-moral marginality enables us not only to shed light on the ways layered modalities of discrimination framed responses to the COVID emergency, but also to show how these constituted the ground for the articulation of protests.

Fishing Communities in South Kerala

This study is located in the densely populated coastal region of Kerala. The state’s 590 km coastline is home to about one million people belonging to various marine fishing communities—differentiated by caste status as well as religious affiliation as Christian, Muslim or Hindu—with around 180,000 fishermen and their families living in 222 villages (Government of Kerala, 2016). Comprising more than 50,000 active seagoing fishermen in 42 fishing villages (Government of Kerala, 2021) and the highest number of active women fish vendors in the state, the coast of Thiruvananthapuram district is strongly associated with artisanal fishing. ⁴ The majority of fishers in Thiruvananthapuram district, and the adjoining Kanyakumari district of Tamil Nadu, belong to the Mukkuvar community ⁵ (Ram, 1991; Subramanian, 2009). They are Latin Catholics, classified as an Other Backward Class (OBC) on the basis of their historical socio-economic marginality. Apart from fostering grassroots community organization and trade unions, the Catholic Church plays an important—albeit at times controversial—role as an intermediary between fishers and state bureaucracy (Ashni & Santhosh, 2019; Kurien, 1995; Sundar, 2012; Subramanian, 2009). Most families within our study areas rely primarily on fishing (men) and selling fish (women) for their livelihood, or combine the latter with other sources of income such as driving three-wheelers and running small shops (Devika, 2017). This, however, does not exclude a degree of socio-economic differentiation driven, amongst other causes, by the remittances of those who have migrated to the Gulf countries of West Asia, participation to fish marketing and trade or access to salaried employment, as well as the relative success of more skilled or experienced fishers. In turn, socio-economic differentiation is reflected in local everyday politics, whereby wealthier or more entrepreneurial men can gain prominence in church parish councils, cooperatives and so on, and through these channels they can promote particular economic or political interests (see also Subramanian, 2009).

Despite the apparent success of the well-known ‘Kerala model of development’ (see Franke & Chasin, 1994; Isaac & Franke, 2000) which, in combination with the influx of migrants’ remittances from West Asia, has led the state to achieve quality-of-life indicators comparable to those of so-called developed nations, the socio-economic conditions of Kerala fishing communities have remained lower than those of higher-status communities in the state. Not only do fishers live in a crowded environment subject to the destructive effects of coastal erosion, they also rank below the state average with reference to access to health services and education, ownership of land and income (Devika, 2017; Kurien, 1995; Sathiadhas, 2006; Shyam et al., 2014). Regardless of state interventions, more than 50% of fishers’ households are deemed to be below the poverty line—as opposed to a state average of 11% (Ganga, 2019)—and they often suffer considerable indebtedness (Shyam et al., 2014). ⁶ The bulk of fishing income goes towards covering daily household expenses, acquiring or servicing fishing gear and repaying debts. Without regular and successful fishing—as happened during the COVID-19 emergency as the result of various restrictions, including bans on fishing and selling fish—income becomes uncertain or reduced, leading to increased indebtedness which then amplifies the precariousness of artisanal fishers’ livelihood (Campling et al., 2012; Devika, 2017; Parappurathu et al., 2019; Shyam et al., 2014). While artisanal fishing communities emerged as the outliers of the ‘Kerala model of development’ (Kurien, 1995; see also Subramanian, 2009), post-1991 economic liberalization has increased inequalities—on the basis of access to new fishing technologies and markets, for instance—and magnified even further the precariousness of artisanal fishers’ livelihoods (Devika, 2017; see also Subrahmanian & Prasad, 2008).

The socio-economic marginality of artisanal fishers is compounded by their historically low social status in Kerala’s casted hierarchy (Devika, 2017; Kurien, 2004; Ram, 1991; Subramanian, 2009). Until the early twentieth century, fishers were the object of blatant caste-based discrimination based on notions of ritual pollution, and regardless of their sixteenth-century conversion into Christianity, they continue to be marginalized by ‘forward’ Christian communities by virtue of their status (Subramanian, 2009; see also Mohan, 2015). Today, their low status is grounded in their relative poverty as well as in their alleged vulgarity and poor education, their intense and extrovert sociality, and their fiery responses to any encroachment on their autonomy (cf Osella & Osella, 2000). Inland communities, popular press, police and even state bureaucracy often stereotype coastal communities as beyond the rules of law and civility, and unable to uplift themselves, while fishers are deemed to be volatile—if not altogether violent and dangerous (see, e.g., Aswathy & Kalpana, 2019; Punathil, 2018). Fish-vending women—the ‘public face’ of the community, by virtue of their trade in markets and neighbourhoods outside coastal areas—are the object of further stigmatization, considered dirty and smelly, immodest and vulgar in their behaviour, and often standing accused of combining fish selling with prostitution (Aswathy & Kalpana, 2019; Busby, 2000). As in the case of Dalit women performing in popular Marathi theatre discussed by Shailaja Piak (2022), the alleged vulgarity of fish-vending women ‘attaches not to the task or even the art primarily but to the body of the person that performs it and thus forecloses [other] economic opportunities’ (p. 3). That is, the bio-moral nature of fish-vending women is represented and constituted as the opposite of the modest and respectable modern (savarna/upper caste) middle-class woman, the extrovert sociality of fish-vending women becoming simultaneously object of repulsion and attraction, of policing and reform.

In the 1980s, artisanal fishers came together under grassroots organizations and trade unions to oppose the introduction of trawling and large-scale mechanized fishing (see, e.g., Dietrich & Nayak, 2002; Kurien, 1991; Kurien & Achari, 1988; Meynen, 1989). ⁷ This political mobilization—supported by progressive sections of the Catholic Church and by seasoned activists from the state and beyond—lent artisanal fishers a collective voice, bargaining power and some recognition of the dignity of their work (Nayak, 2017). At the same time, fishing communities developed novel ways to organize fishing, to regulate fish sales and establish auction-based prices, to protect the work of fish-vending women, and more. However, while over the years they have been the object of state-led developmental interventions designed to uplift their socio-economic conditions (see, e.g., Kurien, 2004; Kurien & Paul, 2001), in post-economic liberalization Kerala they are marked out as a backward and uneducated community, unable or even unwilling to reap the benefits of market-led (and state-supported) ‘modernizations’ of the fishing industry and coastal economies at large (Devika, 2017).

The First Lockdown and the Politics of Anti-COVID Intervention

On 3 February 2020, the Kerala state government declared a ‘state calamity’ after a medical student returning from Wuhan tested positive for COVID-19 on 30 January. Three thousand people were put under home quarantine. As the virus began to spread across the state—with Pathanamthitta district as the epicentre—the government enforced strict quarantine measures for those either testing positive for COVID-19 or who had been in contact with a confirmed case, accompanied by a ban on public gatherings. Schools and colleges were closed down, and religious institutions—temples, mosques and churches—were asked to suspend all public worship. Meanwhile, provisions aimed at securing the welfare of the most vulnerable sections of the society were put in place. For instance, the government ensured the continuity of midday meals programme in schools via home deliveries of food parcels, and emergency shelter was provided for migrant labourers working in the state. By 15 March, the Kerala Health Ministry inaugurated the ‘Break the Chain’ campaign aimed at encouraging hand washing and the use of sanitizers to limit viral transmission. This was followed by the announcement of the allocation of ₹20,000 crore (roughly 2.7 billion US dollars) from the state’s purse to finance interventions to contain the pandemic, and to support the livelihood of the local population. These measures included an overall strengthening of healthcare provisions, distribution of free food rations, implementation of job creation schemes, and early disbursement of old-age pensions. On 23 March, the Kerala government declared a state-wide lockdown, accompanied by the enforcement of strict social distancing measures.

The lockdown measures implemented by the Kerala state and, later, by the central government of India, had significant implications for the livelihood of coastal communities. On 30 March, the state’s Fisheries Department issued a prohibitive order under the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1987, and the Disaster Management Act, 2005. The order stated the following:

Auction in fishing harbours, fish landing centres, beaches are strictly prohibited.

Public gathering of fishermen/fishers/fish vendors is strictly prohibited.

In the absence of auction, the price of landed fish must be fixed by Matsyafed authorities in consultation with the local Fisheries Department officials, Fisheries co-operatives and Harbour Management Societies on the basis of average price obtained during the previous week in each landing place.

Traditional fishing crafts are permitted to go for fishing. However, the trawlers and the mechanized vessels are strictly prohibited.

The order also entrusted District Fisheries officers to ‘sensitize the fishermen through concerned Fishermen Associations’ to comply with the regulatory guidelines and the Director of Fisheries to send ‘daily compliance reports’ to the government. (G.O.(Rt)No.201/2020/F&P)

The effects of this on artisanal fishers and their families were felt immediately. Whilst the state government allowed the operation of ‘traditional fishing crafts’—albeit with strict limits on the size of fishing crews—in villages such as Marianad, the church’s parish council imposed a month-long total fishing ban. ⁸ In both Puthiyathura and Marianad our respondents explained that during the lockdown they had lost between half and a third of their fishing days, with an equivalent reduction in income. As a result, fishers’ households accumulated considerable debts, and only half of the fishers had any hope of recovering income losses during the forthcoming monsoon season, when fish catches are normally large. Most importantly, however, the introduction of restrictions and novel regulations on fish auctions not only diminished fishers’ income further by fixing prices, but made it almost impossible for women vendors to access fish on credit. Those few women who did manage to acquire fish, found that the lockdown substantially restricted their daily vending rounds, thus reducing their income. Unsurprisingly, fisher men and women complained about the economic losses resulting from the lockdown and about the restrictions imposed on everyday sociality, as well as about the lack of clarity and consistency in the rules restricting fishing and regulating fish auctions. And yet, our respondents in both Puthiyathura and Marianad balanced the shortcomings of the lockdown against the material support, especially the extension of financial help and distribution of free food rations they had received from the state, local panchayats and Matsyafed [Kerala state-sponsored fishers’ cooperative]. Moreover, alongside disseminating information on COVID-19 prevention, churches distributed ₹2,000 (circa 28 US dollars) to every parishioner’s household. Local people expressed a high degree of satisfaction with the aid they received from these different bodies, and regardless of the economic losses they had suffered, coastal communities showed substantial compliance with both preventive measures and lockdown restrictions. In other words, during the first lockdown, interventions to prevent the spread of the virus and support the livelihood of fishing communities in the Thiruvananthapuram district, as well as the response and compliance of the local population appear to confirm the widely reported and commented upon the success of the ‘Kerala model’ of response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, when the resurgence of the virus led to a second lockdown (June–August 2020), the compact between state and coastal communities began to unravel.

The Second Lockdown and the Making of Fishing Communities as ‘Superspread Zones’

At the beginning of July, Poonthura—a coastal area in the Thiruvananthapuram City Corporation—and Pulluvila—a village in Karumkulam Grama Panchayath in the Thiruvananthapuram district—became the apparent epicentre of a dangerous ‘superspread’ episode. After returning from a fish-buying trip to nearby Kanyakumari (Tamil Nadu), a fish merchant from the Kumarichantha market (under Poonthura police jurisdiction ⁹ ) tested positive for COVID-19. Soon after, Poonthura and adjoining areas became the focus of a media-driven social panic, leading to drastic government action. The Kumarichantha fish trader appeared to have passed on the virus to ten other people through direct contact, while another 12 cases of contagion from unidentified sources were found in the village and nearby areas. The government responded swiftly, establishing containment zones in the affected coastal areas, thereby limiting mobility and public amenities. A draconian ‘triple lockdown’—enforced and monitored by the police—was declared for the whole of Thiruvananthapuram City Corporation. ¹⁰

As the crisis began to unfold, the Kerala Chief Minister singled out the ‘fish vendor of Poonthura’ ¹¹ as a dangerous ‘superspreader’, an accusation soon taken up by the local press. Under the title ‘Spreading like fire, crossing 100’, on 8 July the popular Malayala Manorama newspaper reported that out of 44 new COVID-19 cases in the district, 22 were inhabitants from Poonthura (Malayala Manorama, July 8, p. 3). The article continued, ‘It is a matter of anxiety (paribhranthi) that there has been a rise of people affected by the disease in Poonthura and reports of its spread to other coastal areas. Many local shops remained open even during the lockdown. It is also challenging to see people gathering in streets’ (p. 3). Similarly to the vernacular press, the English language The Hindu newspaper reported that, ‘Many of those infected are fish vendors who used to transport fish from the Kumarichanda market’ (p. 3). The virus was also beginning to spread in Pulluvila and neighbouring villages in the Karumkulam Grama Panchayath. Local social organizations demanded the implementation of thorough virus testing and contact-tracing in the affected coastal villages, as well as the establishment of quarantine facilities in these localities.

Amidst growing anxiety about an alarming rise in COVID-19 cases, over the following days fishers and fish vendors continued to be blamed for the spread of the pandemic across the district. On 8 July, the television channel Mathrabhumi News hosted a discussion entitled ‘Poonthura on high alert’. ¹² Opening the debate, the anchor reported that the rate of infection in coastal areas was ten times higher than the current state average. Such a ‘scary situation’ (bheethippeduthunna) justified the strict measures ordered by the Kerala Chief Minister, in that in Poonthura, ‘there are high chances of people carrying the infection and going elsewhere’. The anchor mentioned that, while a ‘rapid action force’ might be deployed in the village, the district’s coastal area from Poovar (22 km south of Poonthura close to the district’s border with Tamil Nadu) to Shankhumukham (6 km to the north, close to Thiruvananthapuram airport) were witnessing a similar rapid spread of the virus. While admitting the possible unreliability of infection statistics, a medical doctor who participated in the discussion criticized coastal inhabitants’ ‘lack of alertness’ (jagrathakkuravu) about COVID-19 precautions, concluding that, ‘if Dharavi [Mumbai’s biggest slum] can successfully resist COVID-19, so could Poonthura’. The same day, Asianet News reported an ‘extremely serious situation in Poonthura’, calling it a ‘superspread zone’ which made it a ‘centre of anxiety’ (ashankakendram).

The following day, Poonthura remained in the news. In response to what Malayala Manorama called the ‘threat of social spread’ (p. 1), the state government deployed 25 armed police commandoes in the village. The commandoes held a ‘flag march’ around the village, warning the local population via a loudspeaker that, ‘those who get out of their home unnecessarily will be caught with the help of the commandos and sent to far off quarantine centres’ (p. 1). The Thiruvananthapuram City Mayor was reported to have requested the coastal police and Coast Guard to stop Poonthura fishers from going back and forth to Tamil Nadu during their fishing expeditions. In the meantime, Kerala Kaumudi openly criticized those coastal villagers who increased the social spreading of COVID-19 in densely populated places such as Poonthura by ignoring social distancing norms in fish auctions and markets. The article argued that Poonthura fish-vending women brought ‘fish and Covid’ to the doorsteps of Thiruvananthapuram households, creating fear and panic in the city. Poonthura had been sealed off from the rest of the district, and the article reported that the city Police Commissioner had confirmed that villagers who left their homes unnecessarily would be removed ‘to remote quarantine centres’.

With an increase of COVID-19 cases in the state as a whole, on 10 July, the Malayala Manorama suggested (p. 1) that the ‘super-spread’ in Poonthura was spilling over to other parts of the district, ‘causing great concern’. Kerala Kaumudi reported that the chief minister had deployed 500 police personnel in Poonthura, and the Poonthura Corporation Ward had been declared ‘a critical containment zone with strict control on people’s movement and closure of shops after 11 am’. The newspaper warned that the whole of Thiruvananthapuram was moving towards a ‘superspreading’ situation, and the state government was likely ‘to introduce the triple lockdown in the city’ (p. 2). However, regardless of the introduction of stringent containment measures and a total ban on fishing, COVID-19 cases in Poonthura continued to rise. ¹³

In the meantime, a virus testing facility was established in Poonthura’s primary health centre, and the government announced a programme of sanitization of all the houses in the village, as well as the provision of 5 kg of rice to all resident families. These measures, however, appeared to do little to assuage the mounting tension in Poonthura, where the local population felt themselves to be under siege, unable to buy food as all shops remained closed the whole day, without access to adequate local quarantine facilities, and experiencing what they considered as unwarranted harassment from the police. These concerns led to open protests, which received widespread media attention for several days.

On 10 July, the television channel Mathruhumi News announced, ‘In COVID superspread zone Poonthura, people are in the streets arguing with the police in violation of lockdown norms.’ ¹⁴ Local people, it continued, ‘cannot accept or internalize lockdown rules’, especially those concerning limits on grocery-shopping time, and police enforcement of the same. The reporter repeatedly mentioned instances of ‘lockdown violations and people not wearing face masks’, showing images recorded earlier in the day of a local woman protesting vocally against the lockdown rules, while bystanders whistled and clapped in support. The same report moved on to show a clip—looped several times during the news—in which local people followed a health workers’ car, shouting protests against the workers’ arrival. On the same day, another television channel, Asianet, opened its local news programme under the headline, ‘Protest in Poonthura, people demand relaxations in lockdown restrictions’ ¹⁵ the news anchor asked the reporter broadcasting from Poonthura whether the evolving situation in the village amounted to ‘a plain violation of the triple lockdown’. The reporter responded by explaining local people’s concerns and reasons for the protests: unworkable restrictions on food shopping, ban on fishing and lack of adequate facilities for people in isolation at home or in the quarantine centre. Importantly, many complained of ‘false reporting about Poonthura’, whereby COVID-19 cases from other areas were attributed to the village, thus inflating local contagion numbers. Whilst the government appeared to respond to these protests by extending shop opening times and allowing fishing and selling of fish within the locality, Asianet carried a full-length interview with Kerala Health Minister K. K. Shailaja, who severely criticized the protests in Poonthura. Shailaja teacher, as she is popularly known in Kerala, adopted an admonishing tone, asking Poonthura people ‘to stop dragging Kerala towards a big disaster’, and inviting ‘all the citizens to advise these people’. ‘We do this work [to control COVID-19]’, she continued, ‘in a very adventurous way, and they [Poonthura people] should realise it…This is not a joke, and the [local] leaders should drive it home amongst their followers’. She warned against undermining the collective efforts to controlling the disease ‘at the last moment’, thus leading ‘people to slaughter’ (janangale kolakku kodukkaruthu).

Kairali News presented a more sensationalist reporting of the events in Poonthura, under the headline, ‘Lockdown violation in Poonthura, people protest, clash with police.’ ¹⁶ It repeatedly talked about a ‘situation of tension’, resulting in local people confronting police and health workers. It showed protesters sloganeering, with some men and women shouting and then engaging in arguments with bystanders. Standing away from the scene, the reporter noted that ‘people were not wearing any masks’. Citing the words of police personnel present at the scene, the reporter commented that, as ‘there is no other way to convince these people’, the police had contacted local religious leaders to press people to abandon the protest and return home. Nevertheless, Kairali News acknowledged ‘real issues’ behind what it described as the ‘tense situation’ in Poonthura. ‘They struggle with the sea to make a living’, it told its audience, ‘so naturally they are likely to respond in a robust manner…. the misunderstanding [about the lockdown] among the people might require some awareness generation’.

After initial negative reporting, the strength of feelings expressed during the protests found its way in the media. They started to highlight apparent shortcomings in government interventions in coastal areas, eventually adopting a more sympathetic stance to the concerns of fishing communities. On 11 July, Malayala Manorama returned to the Poonthura incidents with a banner headline entitled, ‘Governance failure in lining up help: Frustrated, people on the streets in Poonthura’ (p. 3). Reporting that around 250 people had gathered in a demonstration against food shortages created by the partial closure of provision shops, it cited the Poonthura parish priest who called the protest ‘a natural reaction.’ It also reported that, amidst growing fears about the spreading of the virus through social contact, the Kerala chief minister had clarified that the current lockdown made all public gatherings illegal and that the police could intervene to enforce the rule of law. However, police had refrained from doing so, recognizing an ‘exceptional situation’. Meanwhile, the Indian Medical Association (IMA) condemned Poonthura people’s ‘bad behaviour towards health workers’. The same day, Kerala Kaumudi appeared with an article entitled, ‘Caution and care thrown to wind’ as Poonthura residents protest (p. 3). The article reported that Kerala Health Minister Shailaja Teacher had revealed that ‘people with vested interests’ instigated the protest by spreading rumours about an inflated count of infected people in Poonthura. She warned of an impending ‘catastrophe’ if protests continued, claiming that ‘the disease was spreading from the coasts to elsewhere’.

By 12 July, the Poonthura protest fuelled heated exchanges between the Left Democratic Front government, and the Congress-led United Democratic Front opposition, leading to an inevitable politicization of the pandemic. Observing the return of ‘peace in Poonthura’, Malayala Manorama reported that the government had responded to ‘the needs of the local people’. Under the triumphant headline, ‘Awake at last: COVID treatment facilities, 40 tonnes of rice, essential provisions’ (p. 3), the newspaper explained that, while the government had allocated 5 kg of rice to ‘8110 Public Distribution System ration-cardholders in Poonthura’, the Kerala Chief Minister had distanced his party [CPI(M)] activists from the protest, which he attributed to ‘a conspiracy by the opposition’ (p. 3). This claim was denied in the same article by the local parish priest who countered that ‘his people’ were simply trying to get access to food supplies. Indeed, the opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala [Indian National Congress party] was reported to have declared that the same fishers who had received public praise and recognition for their search and rescue efforts during the 2018 monsoon floods, were now ‘insulted’ by the chief minister.

With time, public concerns about the alleged prevalence of COVID-19 in Poonthura were extended to the whole coastal belt. On 12 July, for instance, The Hindu wrote that ‘COVID-19 is threatening to engulf Kerala’s coastal belt, as densely populated fisher colonies with their crowded living environs… should be seen as one large community cluster, because coastal living conditions are the same everywhere’ (p. 1). The entire coastline of Kerala was now under suspicion of spreading the virus to the whole state, with calls for strict ‘control measures’. Crowded living conditions ‘everywhere on the coast’ became a cause for public concern. Newspapers and news television channels also reported a dramatic goodwill gesture in Poonthura, whereby health workers were ‘welcomed with a shower of flowers’ when they arrived in the village (Malayala Manorama 8 July, p. 3), and the chief minister thanked ‘the people of Poonthura’ for such a public gesture. The Kerala Kaumudi also published a photograph of the minister responsible for Thiruvananthapuram opening temporary hospital facilities in Poonthura in the presence of the local parish priest.

As the Poonthura protest faded from news headlines, reports about the ‘severe spread’ of COVID-19 along the coastal belt continued unabated throughout the months of July and August. On 18 July, the government announced a ‘complete lockdown’ of the coast, having identified five ‘big clusters’ of contagion, including ‘extremely severe’ spread in Poonthura and Pulluvila villages. Suddenly, Pulluvila appeared in the COVID map, while other fishing villages in the district (such as Anchuthengu and Perumathura) were also marked out as ‘hotspots’. The coastal belt was portrayed as a place like Mumbai’s Dharavi—an inner city township often referred to in derogatory terms as ‘Asia’s largest slum’—in which crowded habitation and lack of sanitation facilitate rapid and extensive spread of the pandemic (Mathrubhumi News, 29 July). ¹⁷ Meanwhile, after initial hesitation, the Chief Minister had confirmed that ‘there is social spreading of the disease in the state capital’ (Kerala Kaumudi, p. 1), with Poonthura and Pulluvila as the ‘main spots’. Inevitably, strict containment action followed, leading to a full lockdown of the coastal area from Anchuthengu to Pozhiyoor. Amidst growing confusion about the size and scale of the contagion in the district, Kerala Kaumudi’s headlines reflected a mounting apprehension: ‘Anxiety of social spreading’ (18 July); ‘COVID tightens its grip’ (21 July); ‘More than 1,000 cases in one day’ (23 July) explaining an ‘extremely complex situation’; ‘COVID still keeps its grip’ (27 July). With the monsoon in full swing, coastal fishing villages had other problems to deal with. Adding to the predicaments of stringent restrictions on fishing and fish sales during the usually profitable monsoon season, a number of high waves incidents destroyed several houses and roads along the coast. Eventually the virus abated, and by mid-August lockdown in the Thiruvananthapuram district was lifted, except in ‘critical containment zones’, which were located especially on the coast.

Before and during the second lockdown, coastal fishing communities in the Thiruvananthapuram district became the object of intense public scrutiny and government interventions, fuelled by a growing panic about the sudden social transmission of the virus. For a time, in their reports, popular vernacular newspapers and television channels mobilized (either explicitly or implicitly) widespread stereotypes about fishing communities, to blame the latter’s practices, dispositions and lifestyle for the spread of the virus, as well as for an apparent lack of compliance with medical advice and government regulations. Indeed, contrary to public representations, fishing communities not only voluntarily made available local public structures for setting up emergency treatment centres but mobilized a network of mutual support to provide relief for the most vulnerable households—from distributing provisions, to organizing transport to treatment centres and hospitals—and local youths placed bottles of sanitizer, buckets of water and soap in public places to encourage hand washing (see Crane & Pearson, 2021). Such a spontaneous mobilization against the spread of COVID-19 did not find room either in the media or government reports. As coastal communities found themselves unable to voice their grievances with media and government agencies, they made themselves heard through protests which eventually resulted in more sensitive news coverage and supportive interventions.

Living Under Lockdowns

After Poonthura, a number of popular protests took place in other fishing villages which were being targeted by COVID-prevention measures, as well as by the media’s negative stereotypes—Anchuthengu and Pulluvila in particular. As far as we could gather from direct observation and follow-up interviews with local inhabitants, these protests were largely spontaneous, organized by the villagers, without any explicit support from religious or political organizations. Most significantly, women appeared to be prominent in all of them. A common thread of complaints appears to run through the protests, from loss of livelihoods and perceived lack of adequate government support and health provisions, to overly aggressive policing of the lockdown, and most importantly, extensive limitations on people’s movement.

We have already seen that, during the first lockdown, fishers’ livelihoods were affected severely by the disruption of fishing and constraints imposed on the selling of fish. The consequences on incomes of fishing households were somewhat cushioned by the extension of material support from both government and local parishes, as well as by access to various modalities of formal and informal credit. From July onwards, however, the disruption of fishers’ livelihoods was more intense, in that a series of bans on fishing coincided with the arrival of the monsoon, a time of hazardous but extremely economically rewarding fishing. A feeling of increased economic precarity was all too apparent in the conversations we had with fishers during the second lockdown. ‘You know we are fishermen, we don’t have other jobs and life other than this’, Michael, a 45-year-old fisher from the Poonthura Corporation Ward, told us. ‘We can only continue our family life as a result of what we do and earn from our fishing job at sea. There is no other way!’ Maria, a 51-year-old fish-vending woman from Anchuthengu, continued, ‘For a coastal person, there is no life without fish. We have never experienced such difficulties, even at the time of Ockhi cyclone. People at home are struggling now. What do we do with this 5 kg rice the government gave us? Even for a rice meal, we need other ingredients to go with it and for that we need money, right? Current [electricity] bills, and other expenses are mounting, we have been facing massive difficulties [in a higher tone]. This is very difficult time for all of us.’

The economic hardship engendered by restrictions and bans on fishing was compounded by the feeling that lockdown rules had been implemented without taking into consideration actual seasonal work practices. Fishers from Pulluvila, one of the lockdown areas, explained that ‘In aani–aadi [monsoon] season we go fishing from the Vizhinjam fishing harbour, now the government say that we are not allowed to go there, and from here [Pulluvila] we can go only one day a week. Who takes these decisions? We go today, we may not get enough fish even to match our costs, and we may not cover this cost the next day’ (Silvadason, a 47-year-old fisher from Pulluvila). Even when fishers from COVID-affected areas were allowed to resume fishing from the Vizhinjam fishing harbour, their condition remained precarious. Indeed, during the second lockdown, seven of the ten respondents we interviewed reported very high (50%–75%) levels of income loss this time, two others high (30%–50%) levels and one extremely high (>75%) level. Not a single respondent was optimistic about recovering the losses, and the monsoon days were almost over by the last week of August when the interviews were conducted. Seven households had to borrow substantial amounts of money (up to ₹10,000, or more in one case) and two others had defaulted on repaying old debts. This time, nobody received any direct assistance from the church, though some families were given food aid from the Kerala Catholic Youth Movement (KCYM). Although respondents said there had been ‘no intervention’ from the church, they refrained from criticizing it openly. All the respondents reported having received free rations from the government, though six of them noted that these services were not easily accessible, due to lockdown and containment measures. A comment we often heard from fishers was, ‘We don’t want any aid, just let us do our work!’.

Just as important in many a fishing household’s economy has been the loss of income due to restrictions on women selling fish. As the lockdown unfolded in coastal ‘containment zones’, restrictions on women’s trade changed, moving from a complete ban, to the permission to sell fish within the women’s own tightly restricted locality, and, later, women in possession of a ‘COVID negative certificate’ were allowed to resume sales beyond the area of residence, but only for a few hours per day. ‘I used to sell fish daily worth ₹15,000–20,000’ a 49-year-old, experienced fish-vending woman from Anchuthengu told us, and now it has been reduced to ₹2,000–3,000.

Unable to sell fish at the roadside or local markets, some women fish vendors tried their luck outside their containment zone. Given the media panic about the ‘super-spread’ of COVID-19 in coastal areas, they experienced unfriendliness, even open hostility, ‘Markets are not yet open, therefore we have been selling fish on the road side, but when we go to the individual houses to sell fish from the door as we used to do, our usual houses don’t buy fish, others are reluctant, as they say that Corona is spread through people from Poonthura’ (Leeanamma, a 43-year-old fish-vending woman from Poonthura). Whilst other respondents also reported heavy-handed harassment from the police—fines were issued, fish-carrying baskets were confiscated or destroyed—once they tried to enter the city, a major problem faced by women vendors was a change in the fish market. Women found it difficult to buy fish for re-selling, as the majority of daily catches were now going to ‘big merchants and bulk-buyers’ who monopolized fish auctions. And when women could buy enough fish to re-sell, they complained that it was at a higher price than usual, reducing considerably their possible income.

Unsurprisingly, it was women fish vendors who led some of the protests against the lockdown and COVID-containment measures. A number of other issues agitated those men and women who participated in these apparently spontaneous demonstrations. Alongside complaints against bans on fishing and fish selling which diminished their livelihood, local people talked to us about their concern with the lack of adequate or prompt medical interventions in their villages, as well as a generalized confusion regarding COVID testing and self-isolation. Others complained of harsh treatment when they had to seek medical treatment in local hospitals, as well as of daily police harassment. Most importantly, everyone resented the ways coastal communities had been scapegoated and vilified for the spread of COVID-19 in the whole district, often on the basis of what local people knew to be inflated infection figures or totally unproven rumours about instances of contagion.

On 24 August, various bans on fishing and restrictions on movement between villages were lifted, and life returned to a degree of normality. It is certainly difficult to estimate the extent of the economic losses the COVID-19 emergency brought onto fishing households. What is certain, however, is that over the course of the two lockdowns, fishing communities’ perception of and response to government interventions changed considerably, moving from acceptance and support, to a degree of resentment and even open protest.

COVID-19 and the Politics of Bio-moral Marginality

We have seen that the two lockdowns during the COVID-19 emergency underscored and amplified the precarity of artisanal fishers’ livelihoods. Various fishing bans and restrictions on fishing days, as well as reduced bargaining power at fish auctions, substantially reduced the income of the majority of households who rely on day-to-day catch and sales. Throughout the emergency, little or no recognition was given to the critical importance of the monsoon fishing season for recouping losses, reducing indebtedness and providing opportunities for small savings cushion for fisher households. Whilst we have no hard data to quantify the actual losses suffered by fishing households, all our respondents reported a substantial diminution of their income and increased indebtedness (see also Bennet et al., 2020; Fiorella et al., 2021). Most importantly, the lockdowns brought to the fore the marginality of fish-vending women, whose voices and interests were sidelined in decisions about the introduction of emergency measures for fish auctions and fish selling. Regardless of the centrality of women’s activities within the economy of fishing households, women found it increasingly difficult to buy fish on credit for resale, and when they did manage to do so, they made little money, but suffered harassment and overt hostility. Indeed, their livelihood might suffer a more permanent decline, in that the COVID-19 emergency has witnessed the emergence of new players and methods of selling, and transformations of the fish market which might in future exclude women altogether. Wholesalers have gained a more dominant position in fish auctions, and many young men—especially those who returned to unemployment from labouring jobs in the Gulf countries of West Asia—have started home deliveries of fish, booked by clients through the phone or via social media. ¹⁸ One way or another, women’s access to the market might now become restricted, to the point of being economically unviable.

The build-up to and unfolding of the second lockdown reveals, in turn, how the socio-economic marginality of artisanal fishing communities is amplified by the (performative) work of stereotyped representations of their bio-moral dispositions, which has the effect of naturalizing marginality itself. The media and government agencies were quick to assume that coastal communities would be the natural breeding ground for contagion—overcrowding, poor housing, lack of hygiene and inability or unwillingness to follow lockdown rules working together to lead, inevitably, to ‘superspread’ episodes and social transmission of the virus. In reality, this had not been the case—in that the virus spread from the popular and busy Kumarichanda fish market to coastal communities, and not the other way around. ¹⁹ And yet, labelling the whole coast as a dangerous ‘superspread’ area not only shifted the blame for poor public health from government neglect to the social practices of fishing communities but also justified the implementation of strict containment measures, enforced even by the deployment of armed police commandoes—a response unimaginable for Thiruvananthapuram’s densely populated middle-class neighbourhoods.

Indeed, the social panic created by these stereotyped representations, implicit in the media report and government response alike, not only led to heavy-handed policing of coastal communities and victimization of its inhabitants—fish-vending women in particular—but made government agencies deaf to the growing concerns of the local population. Faced with a fast-growing and vicious pandemic, even the most robust health infrastructure, such as those put to work by the ‘Kerala model’ of disease control, are bound, inevitably, to fall short of plans and expectations. Here we are not implying that the Kerala government failed its citizens. With somewhat scarce resources but substantial popular mobilization, the measures it implemented to control and contain the pandemic have been far more effective and successful than those introduced elsewhere in India, as well as in many a ‘western’ nation (Bourgeron, 2022; Bratich, 2021; Crane & Pearson, 2020). Rather, we argue that the bio-moral marginality of coastal fishing communities not only informed the social panic drummed up by the media, but overdetermined, at least for a time, government responses and actions.

The Left Democratic Front government treated with some suspicion the protests which took place in a number of coastal communities, a move informed by a perception of coastal communities as ‘traditionally’ swayed by the Catholic Church and its allegiance to Congress politics. It is certainly true that the opposition parties coalescing in the United Democratic Front tried to turn the fishers’ protests into political fodder for their campaign in the Kerala state legislative assembly election, which took place in April 2021—and saw them utterly defeated by LDF candidates. Indeed, the UDF had already tried a similar move in December 2017, when it attempted to gain political capital from fishers’ protests against government failings in forewarning coastal communities of the arrival of the devastating cyclone Ockhi, which eventually led to substantial loss of lives amongst fishing crews who had gone to sea unaware of the impending danger. What is significant about the cyclone Ockhi mass protest which took place in Thiruvananthapuram on 11 December 2017, though, is the way in which the media generated widespread panic in the city by predicting inevitable disorders—even riots—from the protesting fishing communities. And the following day, it was with some surprise that the media acknowledged that fishers’ legitimate anger had not turned to violence: The huge protest had been combative but peaceful. Just one year later, in a true media reversal, fishermen were widely celebrated across the state as ‘super-heroes’ for their courageous and selfless intervention to rescue people stranded by sudden and devastating floods. ²⁰ And yet, as we have seen, by 2020 these same ‘super-heroes’ were represented once more as villains, this time the reckless and dangerous ‘super-spreaders’ of contagion. Indeed, such an apparently contradictory oscillation—which we saw at work when the media were quick to praise fishers who, the day after protesting against health worker, greeted with them with flowers—underscores the ways through which fishers can be tolerated, even celebrated, only as long as they perform their own abjection by turning themselves into docile subjects responsive to the pedagogical interventions of the state (cf. Mamdani, 2002).

It is certainly true that fishing communities the world over experience multiple forms of economic and social marginality, often reviled and romanticized in equal measure by inland society (see, e.g., Avni, 2017; Jentoft & Davis, 1993; Ounanian et al., 2021; Pollnac & Poggie, 2008). However, unlike their Scottish counterparts discussed by Jane Nadel-Klein (2003), the lifeworld of Kerala coastal communities is seldom, if at all, romanticized in popular culture, thus underscoring the depth of the bio-moral marginality experienced by Kerala’s fishing communities. Here, the concept of bio-moral marginality is a crucial tool for understanding the multiple nodes and modalities of (political, economic and cultural) exclusion faced not only by fishing communities in coastal Kerala but also by other subaltern communities in India—the urban poor and migrants, for instance—who had to endure the discriminatory, or even overtly repressive politics of the COVID-19 epidemic. Intersecting with and naturalizing wider modalities of (political, economic and cultural) exclusion, the encasting of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of lacks or shortcomings in the bio-moral attributes of the subalterns allowed for shifting the blame from failing state responsibilities and infrastructures onto a rhetoric of community ignorance and unhygienic dispositions.

Whilst such a move echoes a familiar rhetoric of neoliberal governance holding individuals responsible for what are, in fact, societal or state failures, at the same time the politics and aesthetics engendered by and engendering bio-moral marginality discussed in this article evoke historical experiences of social abjection which continue to constitute the ground for social mobilization. Reflecting on the consequences of the COVID-19 emergency in coastal areas, a fish-vending woman from Poonthura who had been admitted to a local hospital, told us:

Since we were there due to COVID, we have done all cleaning and other work for Karakonam Medical College [a local hospital located at the border between Kerala and Tamil Nadu]. But the people on duty there don’t consider us humans. Look at the photos [on her mobile phone], how the food and waste are put together. Yesterday we collected all the waste and put it in bags, separately. Now they have put the food they give us beside the waste, like what we do for the dogs. This is how they treat us! We have many such stories to say.

Whilst these words lay bare the work of bio-moral marginality in attributing (encasted) hierarchical values to human life, they also underscore its continued significance in the lives of the subaltern. Whilst we do not wish to claim naïve continuities between colonial and post-colonial Kerala (see Arnold, 2020), we note nevertheless that the discursive and material centrality of bio-moral difference to the (re)production of caste hierarchies was all too evident to subaltern socio-religious reform movements—from those of Pulayas and Parayans, to those of Ezhavas—which animated the politics of late colonial Kerala (see, e.g., Mohan, 2015; Narayan, 2021; Osella & Osella, 2000). These movements articulated their critique of and militant opposition to the practices of untouchability and unapproachability through the deployment of a modern ethics of radical equality grounded in a notion of common humanity which sought to disrupt the naturalization of caste discriminations. It is precisely in response to such a politics of refusal that the discourse of bio-moral differences reappears, albeit in different guises, as the modern means to imagine and express inequalities and status hierarchies. From this vantage point, it is perhaps unsurprising that one of the most resented COVID-containment policy at the centre of the protests we discussed in this article was the implementation of strict lockdown measures limiting the movements of coastal communities. Indeed, the right to circulate freely in public spaces (sanchara swathanthryam) was and remains one of the most powerful expressions of assertive actions against caste discrimination. ²¹