Thinking the delirious pandemic governance by numbers with Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits and Prayaag Akbar’s Leila

ABSTRACT

Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of technocratic near-real-time data-driven governance, in that new rules, measures, and prohibitions have been introduced and revoked in response to predictive statistical and epidemiological models, graphs, charts, and aesthetically powerful data visualizations. Pandemic governance has enforced an extreme governance by numbers. The real has come to mirror the structure of dystopian fiction. In his analysis of governance by numbers, Alain Supiot shows how this form of governance ushers in a return of ties of allegiance and the re-emergence of feudalism in new guises. While the rise of technocratic autocracy and security regimes has been remarked upon, the simultaneous return of bonds of allegiance has been to a large degree overlooked. And yet it appears in recent postcolonial dystopian literature from India, Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits and Prayaag Akbar’s Leila, which this article reads as illuminating the extreme endpoint of this delirious governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Postcolonial dystopia
• governance by numbers
• India
• inequality
• COVID-19
• ties of allegiance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Research Council of Norway under project no. 313626 – Algorithmic Governance and Cultures of Policing: Comparative Perspectives from Norway, India, Brazil, Russia, and South Africa (AGOPOL).

Notes on contributors

Tereza Østbø Kuldova

Tereza Østbø Kuldova is research professor at the Work Research Institute, Oslo Metropolitan University. She is a social anthropologist and author of How Outlaws Win Friends and Influence People (2019), Luxury Indian Fashion: A Social Critique (2016), co-editor of Crime, Harm and Consumerism (2020), Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Street Gangs (2018), and Urban Utopias: Excess and Expulsion in Neoliberal South Asia (2017), in addition to numerous articles. She currently works on algorithmic governance, surveillance, corruption, and artificial intelligence in policing.