Beginning in early April, a fortnight after Mumbai went into strict lockdown, I started receiving a daily WhatsApp message from my research partners, who live in a self-built settlement in North-East Mumbai. Their ward is notorious for scoring the lowest marks on the city’s Human Development Index and is dense with precarious self-built neighbourhoods as well as new project housing built by private developers to accommodate slum-dwellers displaced by new infrastructure projects. AbdouMaliq Simone and I have argued that these are districts inhabited by ‘urban majorities.’ Majorities are unstable and constantly transforming coalitions generated by a multitude of practices and configurations of paying attention and operating in concert.[1] We remark upon the proliferation of agonistic collectives, inventing practices of being together in cities across the globe, particularly visible during this pandemic year. These ways of being together and interconnecting across the volatile and destructive conditions engendered by contemporary capitalism underpin the vital labour of social reproduction.

Lockdown messages kept coming through the months, a proliferation of names and things circulating through digital space, amplifying the real relief that the emerging alternate Public Distribution Systems were providing to locked-down citizens.

On the 78th day of our relief work, we conducted training of 65 nurses on Covid 19 and ventilation, supplied 31 dry ration kits, 30 PPE kits, 10 N95 masks, 3 hygiene kits, food for stray dogs, food for a camp of 35 and 10,700 cooked meals.[2]

Anil Bilal Lara Anita Jameela

The 'ration card' is an almost sacred document that allows access to the public distribution system, enabling households to purchase grains, oil and sugar at a subsidised rate. But it is prized even more for its ability to serve as proof of domicile, that is to say proof of having lived in the city of Mumbai at a particular moment in time. Covid-19 predictably overwhelmed the system, and in many informal neighbourhoods, lockdown was absolute, with no one being allowed to move in or out, even of their lanes. The lane (patti in Marathi) is the building stood on its side. DIY infrastructure serves to deliver water and electricity and to carry away debris form the central spine or service core of the lane. Shacks (zhopdas in Marathi), some more and others less permanent, proliferate around the edges of the lane and butt up against the backs of the shacks in the adjoining lanes. Without movement into or outside these lanes during lockdown, the ration card was rendered useless.

Within days, however, an alternative distribution system emerged with individuals sourcing money and support from friends, neighbours, politicians and anyone who could give to provide ration kits to households along these lanes. Distribution often took place at night to keep things orderly. Lists were created and meticulously maintained to ensure that those whose rations were about to run out could be called over for their next kit. Food, medicines and feminine hygiene products were distributed by those already seasoned in the tactics of andolan (or struggle, Hindi) and neighbours they had trained. Webinars were attended and certificates gathered from leadership seminars, which they could instead have taught. Platforms were generated to nurture social life in the shadow of an already failed state apparatus for which these neighbourhoods and spaces of the urban majorities have always been invisible. Logistical guidance, as always, was provided by the wise people of the neighbourhood whose lives involve constant agitation to secure entitlements that are theirs by constitutional right. Their work embodies the 'capacity to aspire',[3] through which they are able to move resources and plan life-worlds and arrangements that are actively disavowed by the state and elites. Cobbled together on shoestring budgets, cell phone data, messaging apps, handwritten lists and home-made PPE, these real-virtual, digital-analogue platforms cater to an actually existing public, locked out of the distribution mechanisms of the state, for whom they simply do not exist until the land they occupy becomes ripe for development.