Public Talk: India’s Second Covid Wave: Reflections on a Longer History of Epidemics and Erasures

The lecture will explore India’s recent COVID surge from the perspective of a past of epidemics and their politics in India in the colonial and post-colonial contexts. It probes a longer history of disease outbreaks and their containment at various scales that involved the power of experts, uses of medical knowledge, and the state power in India.

These changing approaches to epidemics offer insights into state priorities, and a growing marginalization of vulnerable populations as India’s modernization projects and quest for productivity have deepened. It has implied a diminished access to care and inequitable health priorities that preceded the COVID Second Wave and situate the human crisis of pain and loss that unfolded.