Abstract
Crisis is the opposite of all that is normal. It implies a sudden rupture, a breakdown in the natural order of things—in the sense of certitude typical of the routine. It destroys the habitual patterns of existence in the domain of the ordinary, the normal—the domain of the home. This rupture is crucial as it is here that a process of regeneration, through which a new normal becomes comprehensible and concrete, occurs. The pandemic we are in is one such rupture. It has changed our lives and our perception of the normal, both within the home and the world outside. It has also changed the relationship between the two spaces. This chapter explores the linkages between the various narratives of the prevailing crisis and its negotiations in the everyday. A new normal is being negotiated. Viewed through the looking glass, to use Lewis Carroll’s metaphor, we seem to be entering a bizarre universe, a flipped world on the other side of the mirror. It is all that everyday is not—it is turbulent, unstable and unpredictable. What is the nature of his new normal? What kind of shifts is the pandemic initiating? How is a new cognitive framework being shaped? Are the prevailing concepts and methods of enquiry adequate to gauge the emergent reality? These are some of the questions it explores in the Indian context.
O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.
PINDAR, Pythian iii, quoted in The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus.
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Notes
- 1.
George Orwell, 1984, 1949, Secker & Warburg, London.
- 2.
Major trends in disaster research have been comprehensively outlined by Nicole Curato and Jonathan Corpus Ong in their Introduction to The Special Issue: Disasters Can Lift Veils: Five Issues for Sociological Disaster Studies (Curato & Ong, 2015).
- 3.
The concept of becoming as used by Deleuze (1990) enables a discussion about transformations that are ongoing. He uses the term ‘becoming’ to describe the continual production of difference inherent in the way events are constituted. Becoming is the very dynamism of change, moving towards no particular goal or end-state. It is not merely an attribute of, or an intermediary between events, but is a characteristic of the very production of events.
- 4.
The translations from the original Hindi text are by the author of this paper.
- 5.
Imambara is a building used to perform the mourning rituals of Hussein. Mercias are elegies about Imam Hussein and his people who were martyred in Karbala. The most famous ones are by Mir Anees and Mir Dabir who contributed to the development of mercia as a distinct literary tradition. These are recited in the mourning assemblies organized during Muharram. Majlis is a mourning assembly to mourn the Martyrdom of Hussein.
- 6.
Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of deterritorialization, territorialization and re-territorialization are described in a variety of ways in their works (D&G 1986, 87, 94), to understand the processes producing change. They use the biological understanding of ‘territoriality’ as discussed in the studies of birds in the nineteenth century, according to which the aggressive defending of a particular territory by male birds is a way of socially organizing themselves. In these studies, territoriality was viewed as a biological drive directed to preserve the species. However, Deleuze and Guattari look at territoriality in terms of what is produced by the biological function of mating, hunting, eating, etc. They argue that aggressiveness is not the basis of the territory; rather, it is territoriality that actually organizes the functions; i.e. functions such as mating are organized ‘because they are territorialized’ (D&G 1987). Deterritorialization is viewed as a movement producing change. It indicates the creative potential of a process of arrangement/organization (assemblage). Thus, to deterritorialize means to set free an individual from the fixed relations that restrain/control them while at the same time opening them to new arrangements/organizations. The process of deterritorialization is inherent in a territory as its transformative force; hence, it is tied to the very possibility of change immanent to a given territory. Deterritorialization is always bound up with processes of reterritorialization, which does not mean returning to the original territory but rather the ways in which elements recombine and enter into new relations (D&G 1994).
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Acknowledgements
My deepest gratitude to Prof. Savyasaachi for being there and enabling me to shape my ideas, to Nandini D. Tripathy for her sharp criticism and editorial assistance to chisel this chapter, to Dr. Anurita Jalan, my friend and colleague, hours of discussion and friendly banter with whom made this journey creative and enjoyable, and last but not least, to Dr. Rashi Bhargava for her inputs during discussions and the quiet sincerity with which she went through the draft.
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Tripathy, G.D. (2021). Introduction: The New Normal—Home and the World Through the Looking Glass. In: Tripathy, G.D., Jalan, A., Shankardass, M.K. (eds) Sociological Reflections on the Covid-19 Pandemic in India. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2320-2_1
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