Review Of ‘Faith and Fury: Covid Dispatches From India’s Hinterlands’

The privileged minority often remains at the centre of public conversation, while the underprivileged become visible only during elections or when their interests become politically useful. The Covid-19 pandemic made this divide starker. While many complained about the absence of online deliveries, domestic help, drivers or caretakers, millions of migrant workers lost their livelihoods almost overnight. With little security or support, they began the long journey home, carrying the weight of a system that had failed them. For many, home was the only place where they could find whatever little remained, or die in the arms of their loved ones.

In Faith and Fury: Covid Dispatches from India’s Hinterlands (Westland), Jyoti Yadav brings us face to face with a reality many of us either viewed with sympathy from the safety of our homes or simply ignored. As a field journalist, Yadav documents the migrant crisis across the country, particularly in northern and eastern India, revealing what much of the mainstream narrative left out. We saw images of corpses and glimpsed the suffering of migrant workers through digital media, but her reporting gives them something more enduring—their voices. She documents people who walked hundreds of kilometres, squeezed themselves into trucks, and spent whatever little they had earned to reach home, where they hoped they would not starve and die of hunger.

The sudden lockdown hit migrant workers in metropolitan cities the hardest. As Yadav and her team travelled across the outskirts of cities and smaller towns, they found migrants taking narrow, unfamiliar routes to avoid the police. With instructions to quarantine anyone showing even mild Covid-19 symptoms, the migrants often feared the police more than the virus. A group once hid behind a tree after spotting Yadav’s car and emerged only after her team introduced themselves. The group members told them, “If we get caught, the police send us back to quarantine centres and delay our journey.”

When the authorities asked migrant workers to turn to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), Yadav notes that “due to unprecedented influx of migrants, the employment rate under MGNREGA went up five times.” Yet, her conversations with workers reveal the deeper crisis. Those who once earned around Rs 1,000 a day to support their families were now earning barely Rs 300. These workers had left their villages in search of better and more sustainable livelihoods, only to return to an economy where rising prices, fuel shortages and excessive hoarding of essential supplies further reduced what they could afford. For those already living on the margins, even basic survival became a struggle at that time.

Yadav’s account of quarantine centres in rural India is alarming, though hardly surprising. Migrants were given masks and poor-quality food, but many centres lacked electricity and even adequate water. People were crowded into single rooms, making the idea of social distancing practically meaningless. Little was done to make their journeys home safer. Yadav documents an accident involving a truck carrying migrants. “All we saw there were torn shoes, ripped clothes and remnants of food,” she writes. Their bodies were lifted with a crane, leaving behind a haunting image of a crisis that was about more than the virus. Many were dying from hunger, exhaustion and the dangers of travelling vast distances without food, money or security.

When Yadav describes Baikunth Dham, where hundreds of migrant workers were being cremated, she was stopped by the authorities. The gap between official figures and what Yadav witnessed at Baikunth Dham and Mukti Dham is striking. She also notes how local authorities in some villages began blaming migrants as infections increased. In several cases, officials and other stakeholders abandoned these communities once their tenures ended or deadlines for screening passed. The discrimination widened, while the failure to treat or even acknowledge patients became increasingly visible. While much of the country was banging utensils and lighting diyas in solidarity with doctors, migrants and rural communities were facing a far harsher reality. They waited for their families to return safely, prepared to receive their bodies if they did not, and struggled for the bare minimum needed to survive.

Throughout Faith and Fury, Yadav presents the crisis without taking sides, simply documenting what she witnessed. These accounts reveal why class and caste divisions became brutally visible during the lockdown, yet, many chose to remain silent because the crisis did not affect them directly. The book’s importance lies in reminding us of the power of field journalism and why we need it more than ever in the times we live in.

(Kabir Deb is a writer, reviewer and translator based in Karimganj, Assam)