This chapter engages with liminality in a state of exception in the context of the pandemic-induced lockdown in India which displaced thousands of migrants from the urban nerve centers of the country. While the lockdown imposed a nationwide state of exception which restricted mobility, suspended fundamental rights of participating in the public life, and reduced human life to bare life (Agamben, 2020; Nagesh et al, Volume 1), the migrant laborers in India, who mostly work in big cities under precarious living conditions, inhabited a state of both social and spatial liminality. In the wake of the national lockdown, which came into effect on March 25, 2020, thousands of laborers who originally hailed from the hinterlands of nonindustrial states, started walking back to their villages from the industrial cities after losing their jobs and therefore the ability to afford to stay in the city. Our focus in this chapter is to understand liminality in the state of exception for the urban poor, marked by their ‘dwelling in displacement’ (Saxena, 2020), where they found themselves ‘stuck in the interstices of material and discursive spaces, leaving them with lingering precarity’ (Saxena, 2020: 2). Bhan et al (2020) point out how Southern responses to, and experiences of the pandemic are vastly different from the Northern processes; practices such as social distancing and working from home are especially difficult to observe, especially for the subaltern (see also Lemanski and De Groot, Volume 1). In this sense, the pandemic ceases to be a portal, as exhorted by Roy (2020) in her provocative Financial Times article, where the ‘ “before” and “after” of the pandemic, and where the “crisis” and the “everyday” are not so neatly separable’ but ‘continued in intensified contingencies’ and compounded precarity and risks (Bhan et al, 2020). Our chapter attempts to understand the splintered and fragmented nature of pandemic governance, the lockdown and state of exception, instead of thinking in terms of totality.

Images of migrant laborers – young and old, pregnant women, children, and the elderly – on the news and social media haunted the nation with memories of the partition of India in 1947 (Biswas, 2020) and the Bengal famine of 1943 (Dutta, 2020). The pandemic-related migration was not triggered by a political crisis but it translated into a political predicament.