CHAPTER 9

COVID-Cinema: Film and Media as Pandemic Archive in India

Anirban Kapil Baishya and Darshana Sreedhar Mini

Pandemic Media and Its “Ongoing Disasters”

Following the start of quarantine restrictions and lockdown on March 18, 2020, in the wake of COVID-19’s sudden emergence, discourses of collective responsibility for public safety became commonplace in India. Communication networks began to play a crucial role in such discourses not only to assuage public fears about the crisis but also to circulate information about government actions to handle it. As corollary to such developments, the Indian mediascape began to see the emergence of a wide variety of narratives disseminated through short films, short-form videos, diaristic accounts, documentaries, public service announcements, and feature films that used remote formats and mobile phone cameras to improvise on form and content. For instance, Doordarshan, the state broadcasting service, collaborated with the USAID and UNICEF to launch Duur Se Namaste (Greetings from a Distance), an entertainment-education series that circulated messages about COVID-19 vaccine promotion and navigating mental health issues among children in the postpandemic world.1 During the peak of COVID-19, Doordarshan’s FreeDish service had a dedicated channel streaming COVID-related informational videos in addition to a COVID bulletin twice a day in English and Hindi.

Alongside state-sponsored media, citizen journalists disseminated information to keep the population abreast of the latest developments, and community groups intervened on behalf of vulnerable groups by organizing relief packages and food. Across platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and WhatsApp, users tapped into the affordances of digitally networked communication to amplify stories and to mobilize support. Communication infrastructures, including cellphone networks and social media spaces, were crucial avenues in such relief efforts, facilitating distress calls, giving advice about medicines, and providing information about the availability of oxygen tanks and hospital beds. It is this proliferation of horizontal communication, rather than top-down, state-sponsored communication, that marked pandemic communication as a peer-to-peer landscape brimming with newsfeed updates and community expression.

The term “pandemic media” refers to an array of forms ranging from news programs and interviews focused on the virus, advertising that uses the pandemic as a backdrop, and film and television content that deals with the new arrangements caused by the pandemic. Global health crises have been at the center of disaster/survival film narratives since before the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Flu (2013), a South Korean film about a deadly virus unleashed on an unsuspecting public and the subsequent mission to find “patient zero” in an attempt to devise a vaccine, reflects global fears about newer strains of the flu virus. Films such as Contagion (2011) and Cargo (2017) also explore similar fears that have been building up since the SARS outbreak. The COVID-19 pandemic too has generated a fair share of narratives and texts in this pandemic genre. Among nonstate media production, the documentary emerged as a crucial way of capturing the pandemic moment. For instance, Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya’s The Great Abandonment (2021) captures the aftermath of the lockdown, which left migrant workers at the mercy of strangers. The camera acts as a witness here, documenting the plight of the migrant laborers who were left stranded and faced issues ranging from unpaid wages to police brutality as they walked back to their home villages from the bigger cities. Similarly, Lockdown: India Fights Coronavirus (2020), a National Geographic feature, captures the pandemic from the vantage point of frontline workers who were coming together to launch citizen-centric initiatives. Such media productions attempt to prepare people to take precautions and be alert to the spread of the virus, lending credence to Laliv Melamed and Philipp Keidl’s assertion that media during the pandemic were crucial “for governments, institutions, companies, retailers, and regular citizens to organize, manage, work, educate, entertain, and communicate.”2 Nonetheless, such film and media texts are marked by the uncertainties, anxieties, and tensions around virus-centered crises.

In taking stock of such forms, we heed Lisa Parks and Janet Walker’s assertion that “disaster media help expose structural inequalities.”3 In their view, the “pandemic and its mediation are once again bringing structural inequities and hate speech and actions into relief as ongoing disasters in and of themselves and as actionable concerns.” While we do not focus on hate speech here, Parks and Walker’s conception of “ongoing disasters” is instructive. What might media representations and documentations tell us about the pandemic and the ongoing disasters it exacerbates? How might we conceptualize an archive of the pandemic that accounts for questions of not only trauma and disaster but also power? What lessons might looking back at the pandemic through a media lens hold for our understanding of the “compounding impacts”4 of the pandemic? We argue that the framework of ongoing disasters and compounding impacts itself forms a useful lens through which to approach pandemic media productions. Social inequalities among classes in India are one of the portals through which the reach of the pandemic was extended in the country. Ayesha Siddiqi’s argument about the role of the state “in not just creating the vulnerability but also the very hazard that drives disasters in the postcolonial world” is pithy here.5

Indeed, while COVID-19 presented an epidemiological crisis, its effects were compounded by class disparities and politicking. The lockdown saw many migrant workers stranded in cities with no food or basic necessities as the Indian government downplayed the pandemic’s impact. Consequently, millions of internal migrant workers walked back from metropolitan cities to their native villages because of the dire need for social security. Described as the “largest migrant crisis since India’s partition,”6 walking long distances to their villages was the only option for many of these workers—“help arriving late is no help at all[;] . . . who knows how many of us will be there to get the relief money,” as one of our respondents, a Bengali migrant who was part of the long walk, said.7 However, in the bureaucratic language of containment, stepping out of residential areas meant troubling the matrices of surveillance and control, of barricades and permits. In no time, the government issued statements labeling migrants as irresponsible for not taking the safety measures seriously.8 In this governmental discourse of safe zones and containment, the lack of resources and the precarious conditions under which many migrant workers lived and worked—what triggered the long walk in the first place—lingered unacknowledged in the backdrop. Exposing the fault lines of India’s fractured modernity, the long walk was both a symptom and an effect of COVID-19’s ongoing disasters—something that demonstrated that the effects of a disaster are “experienced differentially through pre-existing hierarchies.”9 In the media we examine in this chapter, the long walk emerges as both an originating moment and a form of representation. In the following sections we locate how film and other audiovisual media look back at the moment of the long walk, the infrastructural conditions that allow for such articulations to emerge, and finally what archival and ethical functions such media can perform.

Shifting Media Landscapes and the Collision with COVID-19

Despite entertainment being framed as an unstable industry during COVID, the pandemic accelerated industry shifts already in the process of stabilizing. The pandemic’s emergence coincided with a period of experimentation in online streaming, with global platforms such as Netflix trying to expand in India and Indian platforms such as ZEE5, Hotstar, Voot, MX Player, and ALTBalaji competing in the same market by commissioning and buying projects near completion. When the lockdown came about, many producers turned to such platforms as viable avenues for distribution. This shifting media landscape laid the ground for media production in and about the pandemic; digital streaming options became the natural hosts for the kind of media we examine here.

For instance, Netflix released pandemic-based narrative media as “YouTube specials.” Home Stories (2020), the streaming service’s first cross-platform content, showcases how media production happened during the lockdown. The four parts of the anthology film focus on different aspects of the lockdown: the feeling of being trapped and the subsequent psychological stress, one-night stands turning into lengthier stays, weddings over Zoom, and the handling of orders by a delivery person who makes vlogs. The tail end of the film gives a behind-the-scenes look at the production process: how these projects took shape and how participants were recruited. What is interesting in this example is the way global streaming platforms’ choices and strategies of scheduling what content to stream began to mirror those of local and national television as well as amateur filmmakers, incorporating COVID-19 narratives very early into the lockdown. COVID-19 forms the narrative backdrop of pandemic media, with stories chronicling and reflecting on the breakdown of a system whose innards, so to speak, had been exposed by the pandemic rupture. Broadly, we can identify three sets of films in this landscape. The first category includes documentaries such as 1232 KMS (2021) and Lockdown: India Fights Coronavirus (2020). Alongside these, we have a second category of feature films such as India Lockdown (2022), Zwigato (2022), and Bheed (2023). The third category is composed of anthology films, with three or more short segments helmed either by the same or various directors but conjoined by an overall focus or narrative on the pandemic’s impact on different segments of the population. This includes films such as Unpaused (2020), Home Stories (2022), Putham Pudhi Kaalai (2022), and Normal (2022).

Pratheesh Prasad’s Normal is a good example of this subgenre. The different segments are connected using television static that acts as a narrative bridge but also symbolically stands in for the pandemic’s interruption of normal, everyday life. “Ayana,” the first segment, showcases the aftermath of the suicide of the eponymous young woman and how her friends cope with her death in the midst of the lockdown, while her father denies her partner a chance to have a last glimpse of Ayana’s body despite braving an interstate journey in the midst of lockdown. Another segment, titled “Mussels,” exposes the disruption to education in the context of Zoom classes. The segment focuses on two students who come from socially underprivileged backgrounds and remain missing from online classes despite being provided with smartphones. Rather than attend online classes, the two children use the smartphone to capture their local realities on video. This segment is metatextual insofar as the children’s experimentation with filming emulates the very conditions under which pandemic media was produced. Films such as these not only present how existing social inequalities took new forms during the pandemic but also comment on the forms of documentation and information dissemination that characterize pandemic media.

In fact, documentation and the documentary form are an integral part of this landscape of pandemic media even when we deal with fictional and dramatized narratives. Ranging from a series of found and sourced documentary material, including images of burning pyres and shots of health personnel handling emergency medical situations wearing their personal protective equipment kits, these films collectively form an archive of narratives about the pandemic. By examining such productions, we locate the different layers of truth claims as well as aesthetic and stylistic choices to demonstrate how disaster imaginaries and virus-centered crises are not merely plot elements but are also active agents in the life cycle of pandemic media.

Visualizing Migrant Suffering: The Long Walk in 1232 KMS

Vindod Kapri’s 1232 KMS involved the director traveling with migrant workers who left on bicycles to Saharsa, a village 1,232 kilometers away from Ghaziabad, a city in the National Capital Region. They discuss with the filmmaker their plans to cover two hundred kilometers a day, which makes it a five- to six-day journey (if they are not stopped by the police first). Like many media produced during the pandemic, the film uses text to temporally mark an entry point for the viewer to understand the filming process. In this case, the text at the beginning of the film reads “This documentary follows a group of migrant workers on their way home during the COVID-19 pandemic.” The text dedicates the film to “The million faceless workers who build our nation.” The film uses date stamps as the group of migrants cycle their way to Bihar, accompanied by Kapri in a car. Incorporating interviews with the migrants as they cross rivers, hitchhike rides with lorry drivers, and are provided food and sleeping space by conscientious people they meet on their way, 1232 KMS interrogates why many migrants opted to risk death rather than stay put in the cities. When asked why they decided to cycle over a thousand kilometers, one of the migrants states, “I was so helpless that I couldn’t do anything, . . . so we thought, instead of waiting there and dying, it’s better to move.” In its visualization of migrant suffering, the film showcases checkpoints, barricades, and other state-instituted systems to surveil and manage the movement of migrants. For instance, when the migrants protest against the lack of food and basic amenities, they are detained to ensure that they don’t leave before medical examinations.

While 1232 KMS was released on the streaming platform Disney+ Hotstar in 2021—a year after the first lockdown—its temporal status as something emerging from within the disaster is inscribed within its narrative and visual text in various ways. Like many documentations of the pandemic, 1232 KMS features a long shot of lines of migrants sitting on the roads with social distancing protocols in place. Other on-the-go shooting strategies exude similar temporal clues. The bottom of the frame in many shots has a dark band, since the footage was shot from a moving vehicle as Kapri interviewed migrants while they were cycling. One other way in which the film frames itself as a documentation of migrant plight is by strategically using the speech of Prime Minister Narendra Modi announcing the lockdown. The soundtrack of the speech, accompanied by drone shots, as he refers to the lockdown as a “type of curfew” places the event as the ur-moment of migrant suffering. Indeed, despite claims to the contrary, the preparedness of the administration in instituting the lockdown came to be questioned in the aftermath of the pandemic, considering how migrant workers were suddenly rendered aliens in spaces where they lived and work. 1232 KMS includes footage of migrants directly addressing the camera, explaining why they decided to walk back. “We are poor and vulnerable. We have built your houses, but why are we now being treated as pariahs?” asks one of the migrants who recounts how hardworking laborers were perceived as troublemakers when they demanded that they be sent home. While such articulations are indeed archival, the film makes an argument about class formations and navigates the disaster through editing choices—as the respondent speaks, the camera lingers over an empty kitchen, exposing how the state’s hurry in imposing the lockdown neglected to consider support for the socially disadvantaged.

Some instances in the film offer documentation of empathetic acts by ordinary people trying to help out migrants: a home guard decides to find the replacement for the punctured tire of one of the cyclists, and truck drivers decide to give them rides with the full knowledge that they could be stopped or fined for having helped the migrants. The last segment of 1232 KMS showcases the migrants reunited with their families and bookends the film with the migrants traveling back to the cities after seven months as they get back to their daily grind of work. The film ends with the text “350 laborers lost their lives during the lockdown. The Indian government claimed in the parliament that it didn’t have any official statistics that could confirm laborers’ deaths.” This resonates with Siddiqi’s critique of perspectives that distinguish between “physical hazard and social vulnerability,” which lend to the easy assertion that “disasters are ‘too powerful’ and overwhelm society.”10 While the epidemiological fact of the pandemic was indeed overwhelming (and its contagious spread was unmanageable), the narrative of 1232 KMS suggests, through editing and shooting strategies, that the physical hazard posed by the virus was directly impacted—and compounded—by the social vulnerability of the working class.

Fictional Reverberations of Slow Violence: Bheed and Zwigato

Some of the strategies noted in 1232 KMS resurface in a nondocumentary context in the 2023 fictional film Bheed. Like 1232 KMS, the narrative in Bheed begins with a voice-over and text that temporally situate the film’s events. The text reads “13 days after the first lockdown, when rumors were spreading faster than corona, when more migrants braved the roads than all the sanitizers and masks, it is their story.” The film begins with shots of migrant workers walking alongside the railroad tracks and deciding to sleep near the tracks as it gets darker. Crosscutting between the sound of the train and visuals of the sleeping people, the following text appears: “16 migrants are found run over by a train.” Us, the viewers, are placed in the long walk, this time referencing an actual tragedy.11

While clearly fiction, Bheed is interspersed throughout with such archival intimations that jolt its viewers into a reckoning with pandemic events. News reports of the tragedy act as a sound bridge as we are transported to events set a month later near the Delhi state border. As police batons beat migrants attempting to catch interstate buses, we are shown news crews reporting on the migrants. The film focuses on Surya Kumar Singh (played by Rajkummar Rao), a police constable in charge of one of the checkpoints for crowd control, and the dilemma he is faced with when he realizes that there is a breakdown of state machinery and the migrants are left with no food. With this central framework, the film spirals outward to examine other nonepidemiological ramifications of viral contagion. For instance, in its focus on casteism, the film demonstrates how casteist practices are reified even in times of crisis. The film depicts characters from different social backgrounds: an upper-middle-class woman in a child custody battle who is oblivious to everything else happening around her, a father-daughter duo who hitchhike and try to get past the checkpoints to get to their village, and an upper-caste security guard so bigoted by his caste superiority that he chooses to starve rather than take food from Muslims. The film also refers to the misinformation campaigns that accompanied the lockdown, including WhatsApp messages and rumors that Delhi’s Tablighi Jamaat was responsible for the mass spread of COVID, instigating violence against the Muslim community.12 This panoply of characters and references makes Bheed an interesting collage of parapandemic violence. That is, in this narrative the COVID-19 pandemic functions as the spark that precipitates the surfacing of other equally virulent crises—casteism and religious bigotry, for example. While Bheed is not a theoretical text by any means, in its choice to remediate events that transpired in India during the pandemic, it resonates with Yarimar Bonilla’s assertion that “disasters should not be understood as sudden events, but rather the outcome of long processes of slow, structural violence.”13 From this perspective and in the narrative of both documentaries such as 1232 KMS and fictional films such as Bheed, the “disaster” of the pandemic exceeded its epidemiological connotations.

The focus on “slow, structural violence” is seen even in films that do not directly document the pandemic but use its tremors as a starting point or a silent backdrop. This is most prominently seen in Nandita Das’s 2022 film Zwigato, which explores the life of Manas, a former factory floor manager in Bhubaneswar who was fired from his job during the pandemic and forced into food delivery gigs while his wife Pratima takes up odd jobs. Manas, taking on a new job that requires smartphone access and familiarity with apps, is confronted with a new world where ratings rule and customer satisfaction regimes render platform workers an extension of the impersonal interfaces governed by predictive algorithms. For instance, high-end housing societies prohibit the use of lifts by delivery workers, who are pejoratively referred to as “delivery boys.” In doing so, the film taps into the class and caste inequalities that mark out the working class as service providers whose value is limited to serving the rich. The film also underscores the plight of migrants when Manas corrects a placard that reads “Wo majdoor hai, isiliye majboor hai” (He’s a laborer, that’s why he’s helpless) by changing it to “Wo majboor hai, isiliye majdoor hai” (He’s helpless, that’s why he’s a laborer). While arguably “postpandemic” (if we can even imagine such a world) in temporality, the film’s use of the pandemic as the point of origin of the character’s crisis showcases its long temporality—that is, the fact that the mediated “event” of the pandemic may have been localized in a particular time, but its differential impact drew from past inequalities that now extend, exacerbated, into the future.

A Monument to Ongoing Disasters

What lessons might this heterogenous body of films hold for us today as scholars of disaster media and as survivors of the pandemic? Disaster, as Susan Sontag reminds us, “is one of the oldest subjects of art.”14 But these films are not the same as the spectacular science fiction films Sontag had in mind when she wrote about “the depiction of urban disaster on a colossally magnified scale.” While those kinds of films imagine potential disaster, the pandemic films discussed here image or make manifest (narratively and visually) ongoing disasters. Documentary films such as Kapri’s 1232 KMS and Abraham and Madheshiya’s The Great Abandonment chronicle an unfolding crisis in real time, recording migrant pain and pandemic suffering. But there is an affectual archive embedded even in fictional narratives such as the one we encounter in a film such as Bheed. While not direct documentation, fictional narratives can still evoke a connection to the media event of the pandemic through cross-references and dramatization of real events. In fact, while films such as Bheed, Zwigato, and Normal do not directly record the crisis in its own unfolding time and space, they build an abstract space of representation through such citational and anecdotal practices. The kinds of events we encounter in these films are sometimes references to identifiable events (e.g., the train track tragedy in Bheed); at other times they cannot be tied directly to singular examples but are irrefutably part of a cluster of collective experiences of the pandemic that exist in public memory (individuals unable to attend relatives’ funerals, people losing their livelihood, etc.). The anecdotal, as Melamed reminds us, has its “own materiality as a historiographic format” and “brings things nearer to us spatially, lets them enter our life.”15 The archive of the pandemic in its mediated form oscillates between such anecdotal fragments as well as indexical documentation.

The nature of this indeterminate pandemic archive is primarily ethical. The production and release of these films is subject to business and industry logics (as the experimentation with streaming platforms and content format demonstrate), but that in itself does not negate the ethical function of these media as narratorial and memorial objects. Pandemic media of the kind we have discussed here are perhaps close to the kind of memory practices envisioned in memory and witness studies. Memories, as Marita Sturken reminds us, are political and emerge in public discourse in negotiation with technologies of remembering—“photographs, films, television shows and digital images” included.16 In relation to COVID-19—a bioethical disaster leading to mass death on an unprecedented scale—the importance of such remembering becomes abundantly clear. While official government narratives cannot completely erase the biological fact of pandemic death, they do try to downplay the scale of its social impact. Memorial forms such as film offer a strong counter to those narratives and an opportunity for analysis and critique. If global disasters such as COVID-19 are both portals to and catalysts of other ongoing disasters, the ethical work of survivors is perhaps best encapsulated in the cliché “never forget.”

Notes

1. 1.  Darshana S. Mini, “Indian Pandemic Entertainment Aesthetics and Infrastructure,” in Media Industries in Crisis: What COVID Unmasked, ed. Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks, and Noa Lavi (Routledge, 2024), 118.
2. 2.  Laliv Melamed and Philipp Dominik Keidl, “Pandemic Media: Introduction,” in Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Toward an Inventory, ed. Philipp Dominik Keidl et al. (Meson Press, 2020), 12.
3. 3.  Lisa Parks and Janet Walker, “Disaster Media: Bending the Curve of Ecological Disruption and Moving Toward Social Justice,” Media+Environment 2, no. 1 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.13474.
4. 4.  See the Introduction in this volume.
5. 5.  Ayesha Siddiqi, “Disaster Studies and Its Discontents: The Postcolonial State in Hazard and Risk Creation,” in Why Vulnerability Still Matters: The Politics of Disaster Risk Creation, ed. Greg Bankoff and Dorothea Hilhorst (Routledge, 2022), 91–92.
6. 6.  Darshana Mini and Anirban Baishya, “Reimaging the Migrant in the Time of the Pandemic,” in COVID-19 Assemblages: Queer and Feminist Ethnographies from South Asia, ed. Niharika Banerjea, Paul Boyce, and Rohit K. Dasgupta (Routledge, 2022), 34.
7. 7.  Rahul, migrant from West Bengal, interview with authors taken in Trivandrum, May 2, 2023.
8. 8.  A. C. Choolayil and Laxmi Putran, “The COVID-19 Pandemic and Human Dignity: The Case of Migrant Labourers in India,” Journal of Human Rights and Social Work 6, no. 3 (September 2021): 225–36, https://doi.org/10.1007/s41134-021-00185-x.
9. 9.  Yarimar Bonilla, “The Coloniality of Disaster: Race, Empire, and the Temporal Logics of Emergency in Puerto Rico, USA,” Political Geography 78 (April 2020), 102181, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102181.
10. 10.   Siddiqi, “Disaster Studies and Its Discontents,” 94.
11. 11.  Rajendra Jadhav, “Train Kills 16 Workers Laid-off in Coronavirus Lockdown,” Reuters, May 8, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-india-idINKBN22K0DM.
12. 12.  Anirban Baishya, “Hate in the Time of the Virus: Covid-19, Fake News, and Islamophobia in India,” Items: Insights from the Social Sciences, July 28, 2022, https://items.ssrc.org/covid-19-and-the-social-sciences/covid-19-fieldnotes/hate-in-the-time-of-the-virus-covid-19-fake-news-and-islamophobia-in-india/.
13. 13.  Bonilla, “The Coloniality of Disaster.”
14. 14.  Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” Commentary, October 1965, https://www.commentary.org/articles/susan-sontag/the-imagination-of-disaster/.
15. 15.  Laliv Melamed, Sovereign Intimacy: Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence (University of California Press, 2023), 28.
16. 16.  Marita Sturken, “Memory, Consumerism and Media: Reflections on the Emergence of the Field,” Memory Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 75, https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698007083890.