Who’s New to Social Distancing?

The coronavirus lockdown prevented the author from securing quality scans for all images in this essay. Better versions will be added once the situation allows.

The spread of COVID-19 in early 2020 has made it abundantly clear that pandemics are both epidemiological phenomena and social, cultural and political events. All of these elements are inherently spatial, as are the responses to the pandemic. “Social distancing” has been the breakout vocabulary of the “outbreak narrative.”[1] Individuals are here tasked with so spacing themselves as to reduce contact to a bare minimum in an effort to halt virus transmission (figure 1).

Figure 1. Social Distancing. World Health Organization, March 2020. https://www.thera.co.uk/content/uploads/2020/03/Social-Distancing.pdf

The call for social distancing has provoked different responses in different social groups. In pre-pandemic Britain social distancing was a product of an increasingly isolated society that had to be redressed by communities, and by the world’s first government Minister for Loneliness. As highlighted by studies of COVID-19 and homelessness, some groups have been exposed as precariously vulnerable to infection, living lives of both extreme isolation and of extreme dependence on forms of gathering. For others, the technologies being amassed by governments across the world threaten a surge in the capacities of the surveillance state that will long outlive the pandemic.

It is this strengthening of the state that has perhaps attracted most critical comment. The “lock downs” taking place across the planet (covering one-third of the global population in late-March 2020) mark for many the deepest intrusion of the state into everyday life, outside of war time, we are told. But history also presents numerous cases in which disease has legitimized and necessitated an autocratic disease state.

Histories of Quarantine
Italy, the hardest hit of the European states to date, has experience of quarantines both historical and modern. When the plague arrived from Germany in 1629, cities across north Italy frantically shared information on the disease as rumors swirled. When Florence went into quarantine, generous provisions of food, wine and firewood were delivered to homes but, in return, saw seemingly minor quarantine infractions punished with imprisonment. The poor, prostitutes, and Jews were specifically targeted.

In 1722 Daniel Defoe published a fictional but well respected account of the London bubonic plague of 1665-66 and the city’s response to the epidemic. The general goodwill was noted, but so was the state’s draconian controls over the city, including the insistence that those infected stay at home, with their families. The relevance of Defoe’s observations in 2020 London are readily apparent, with the book selling out in the UK.

Plague towns also influenced one of the twentieth century’s most important readings of how modern power and space intersected. In his lecture course in Paris of 1974-75, Michel Foucault had contrasted the ways in which early modern European states dealt with the two public health threats of leprosy and plague. Lepers were identified and excluded, either being expelled from the city or sent to quarantine leper colonies. The plague could, however, infect entire populations and thus demanded a different technology of power. The quarantining of the city was the result, dividing the urban form into sections that were placed under patrol, with infected persons either isolated or removed, and their numbers collated in the city hall.

Despite its exceptional nature, the plague town became a political dream of urban and societal control. As Stuart Elden has explained, rather than being exiled, the leper, or other victims of infectious but controllable diseases, would now be internalized in modern institutions, which would themselves be divided and surveyed like a plague town (not a panopticon). Instead of placing towns under permanent quarantine, the sick would now be placed under surveillance within the bounds of liberal freedoms. For Foucault, these became new mechanisms of controlling and socially distancing abnormal sub-populations which, after the plague bells had stopped tolling, become accepted as new norms.

While Foucault largely ignored the experience of colonial populations, European states experimented abroad with their quarantine desires. Building on the work of David Arnold, Tarangini Sriraman has shown how the Epidemic Act (1897, but recently invoked by Prime Minister Modi against COVID-19) was instituted by the British in the aftermath of the 1896 bubonic plague outbreak, which claimed 12 million lives. The act led to the creation of plague passports, certification, detention and, as with Florence in 1629, endlessly inventive forms of evasion and resistance. The colonial state hit back, however, with increasingly autocratic surveillance, and curtailments of free speech which would not have been possible in late-nineteenth century Britain.

Epidemiological moments are thus invaluable for understanding the extreme times and spaces of the colonial state. If we study these moments alone, however, we neglect a much broader history of the ways in which “social distancing” was hardwired into the politics and geography of the colonial state (not to mention the caste structures of Indian society which the state helped harden). In my research on twentieth-century colonial Delhi I have explored spaces that bridged exceptional moments of epidemiological, social, cultural and political risk with more everyday forms of exclusion. Drawing upon this work, here I give two examples of targeted populations for whom the experience of being distanced was neither optional nor new. These examples relay alternative genealogies of social distancing.

““social distancing” was hardwired into the politics and geography of the colonial state”

Spatial Distancing
The landscape of colonial Delhi provides some object lessons in the connections between political and epidemiological contagion. From 1803 the city hosted a British Resident, while remaining the capital of the Mughal Empire. Delhi became an epicenter for the uprising of 1857, and when it was retaken by the British the city structure itself was punished. Over one third of the built fabric was demolished, making way for a railway line and a 500-yard “glacis” of cleared land around the city walls, which would allow a clear line of sight for defensive gunfire should the city be attacked again (figure 2).[2]

Figure 2. The glacis border between New and Old Delhi. Source: Stephen Legg, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).

In 1911 the British announced the construction of a new capital to the south of Delhi. Henceforth the political threat would come from within, as anti-colonial nationalists stoked popular support against the British. Political and religious organizations attempted to swell support in the sub-city communities known as mohallas, while the British instituted the powers to effectively place the city under quarantine in times of political unrest or social unquiet, surveying the city through pickets and patrols compiling data from mohallas, to wards, to the police kotwali office. While the glacis outside the city walls lost its military use, its function changed from a political to an epidemiological barrier once the newly constructed Delhi reached its border.

The densely packed and ill-ventilated slums of Old Delhi desperately needed the space and air that the demolition of the wall and the use of the glacis would have allowed. The authorities, however, insisted on retaining both as part of a cordon sanitaire to protect the colonial elite in New Delhi from tuberculosis and meningitis. The growing realization that segregation was no barrier to contagion in two such interlinked cities did, eventually, lead to limited and faltering slum clearance. Other “diseases” would be more complexly addressed, not through dispersal but through concentration.

Civil Abandonment
The prostitute was historically perceived as a threat to society (disrupting families), to health (venereal diseases) and to civilizations (upturning claims to their civilized natures). In the mid-nineteenth century experiments with the registration and incarceration of visibly diseased women spread between Europe, Britain and its colonies. The blatant gender inequality of these acts led to their annulment and the need for a new solution. The liberal face of these policies in the interwar period wore the two masks of social hygiene (using science to decrease transmission) and moral hygiene (arguing against the ethics of prostitution). Unlike Britain, however, India had tolerated “red light” districts. In Rangoon subtle laws were passed that used police surveillance and fines not to eradicate prostitution, but to confine or “distance” it to a few choice lanes where the women could be monitored and occasionally treated (figure 3).

Figure 3 The Rangoon Police Act (1902) exclusion zone for brothels, with three zones where the law did not apply. Copyright: Stephen Legg.

I’ve referred to this process more generally as “civil abandonment.”[3] This was the process by which courts, charities, police forces and municipal committees coalesced, in the most public and rational of terms, to dislodge and disenfranchise women labeled “prostitutes” and to then abandon them, either through closing down their places of work entirely, or through forcing them further and further from the civil core of the city.

What this process highlighted was both the long existence of “social distancing” for population groups identified as social, health and political risks, and the complex forms of spatial distancing through which abandonment was accomplished. In Delhi, prostitutes were excluded through a series of laws that banned their existence in certain bazaars, forcing them out of the city, just as edicts were passed experimenting with sites where they might reside. There was a complex geometry at play in this social distancing, too far and the men of the city could not access them (and what might they do, denied of sex with women?); too close and the increasingly vocal middle classes would protest. The site eventually chosen (n.5 on the map below) was “G.B. Road,” located where a section of the city walled once stood, on the border between the city and its outside (figure 4).

Figure 4. The various sites which were suggested for the location of prostitutes in interwar Delhi. Copyright: Stephen Legg.

Alongside these exclusions were a series of underfunded and half-hearted inclusions, whereby charitable “rescue homes” forcibly protected young women found in brothels. The exclusion was not that of the plague, and inclusion was not that of the leper, but in the approaches to the city and in one of its problem subjects we find modern remnants of the ways in which epidemic, quarantine, space and politics coincided.

That was History?
Not for sex workers across the world right now, who face an ever more complex legal entanglement of spaces in which they can and cannot operate. Not for Indian citizens, who face an ever tighter biometric surveillance network. And most certainly not for occupants of Indian-administered Kashmir, who have been under effective quarantine since August 2019, regarding which one much-discussed tweet from a Pakistani commentator asked “Dear World, How is the Lockdown? Kashmir.”

There are no straight connecting lines here, between 1857 and 2020, between Florence and Srinagar, between intensive-care beds and military encampments. But these entanglements provoke us to think about contagion (political and epidemiological), life and space in ever more complex ways. I conclude with Arundhati Roy on Kashmir, from her February 2020 Clark Lecture:

It’s a pioneering experiment in the mass violation of human rights. The information siege aside, thousands of Kashmiris, including children, civil society activists and political figures, are imprisoned—some under the draconian Public Safety Act. These are just the bare bones of an epic and continuously unfolding tragedy. While the world looks away, business has ground to a halt, tourism has slowed to a trickle, Kashmir has been silenced and is slowly falling off the map. None of us needs to be reminded of what happens when places fall off the map.

NOTES

[1] Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Duke University Press, 2008.

[2] Stephen Legg, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

[3] Stephen Legg, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities and Interwar India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.