Paper short abstract:

Traces emergence of 'immunity nationalism' during COVID-19 pandemic in India, exploring its production via commercial and vernacular discourses. 'Immunity' was constructed in accordance with north Indian dietary idioms, offering a distinct class and religious imaginary of the nation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the emergence of ‘immunity nationalism’ during the COVID-19 pandemic in India, exploring its production through interlinked commercial, political and vernacular discourses. Through fieldwork in Banaras along with media discourse analysis, the vernacularisation of immunity is traced as a category congruent with a pure, vegetarian north Indian diet, and ayurvedic models of heat and energy. A distinct conception of immunity emerged during the pandemic as a middle class imaginary of nationalism that positioned strong, often implicitly Hinduised, bodies in opposition to a chemical-saturated western modernity as well as, in certain instances, a generalised Muslim other. Its constitution as an imaginary occurred both through the statements of political figures and the marketing strategies of medicinal and food-based businesses, as well as the everyday dietary practices and ethical theories of middle class north Indians.

The paper seeks to explore how this emergent discourse of nationalism affected the reception of vaccines in north India, which offered a divergent, opposed conception of immunity. It also examines how theories of immunity developed and transformed over the course of the pandemic, as death and disaster undermined existing vernacular understandings of health. Immunity nationalism is read here as a development of older South Asian theories of nationalism, what Joseph Alter terms ‘somatic nationalism’, yet also as something that allowed for the incorporation of novel biomedical and epidemiological ideas within longstanding class-based and religious framings of the self centring on food and ethical dietary practices.