Affective Activism and Digital Archiving: Relief Work and Migrant Workers during the Covid‐19 Lockdown in India

Abstract

This article traces what I term the affective activism of volunteers, civil society organizations, and lorry drivers engaged in relief work to assist stranded migrant workers wanting to travel home during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic and national lockdown in India. I define affective activism as an archival practice that is driven by relief figures' affects of fear, anger, and aspirations-in this instance, toward their legal and administrative accountability to funders. Drawing on my ethnographic work in a relief network and using independent interviews I conducted, this article critically compares two modalities of digital archiving conducted by relief figures: collecting migrant workers' Aadhaar-unique biometric number identifiers issued to Indians-and digitally archiving their relief efforts through videos, voice-notes, and WhatsApp Messenger screenshots. I argue that relief figures expressed their anxieties in the form of talismanic beliefs that records of Aadhaar and their material infrastructure would keep safe the migrant workers they were trying to help. Alternately, and sometimes, concomitantly, they performatively deployed Whatsapp artifacts to support their accountability in the face of bureaucratic and political specters. Both forms highlight the desire of relief figures to exceed paper forms and state practices in their archival impulses. [affective activism, India relief work, migrant workers, digital archiving, and visual politics]

Zones of compounded informality: Migrants in the megacity

“…Critically, where employers and the state retreated, civil society activists responded to the urgent needs of migrant workers. Tarangini Sriraman provides an account of relief work assisting migrant workers to travel home-a process that for activists included archiving their engagement and managing their anxiety by systematically noting the Aadhar ID numbers of the workers they assisted (Sriraman, 2022). In effect, then, although Aadhar numbers did not facilitate access to India's social safety for migrant workers in the wake of COVID 19, they did provide a mechanism for activists to track and legitimize their interventions, facilitating archival practices required for legal and administrative accountability to funders.…”

“…An estimated 130 million people in India lost their jobs the day after the lockdown was ordered (Breman, 2020). Migrant workers, concentrated in in informal employment and housing were disproportionately affected (Sriraman 2022). Women, overrepresented in the lowest rungs of supply chain production and in domestic and construction work (Action Aid, 2020; Silliman Bhattacharjee, 2020b), were also particularly hard hit.…”