South Asian COVID-19 Memoirs: Mourning and Erasure of ‘Grievable Lives

Lopamudra Basu’s essay, “South Asian COVID-19 Memoirs: Mourning and Erasure of ‘Grievable Lives,’” critically examines how South Asian pandemic memoirs contest dominant state and media narratives of erasure during COVID-19. Focusing on memoirists Barkha Dutt, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Kay Sohini, Basu foregrounds personal narratives that testify to lives deemed ungrievable by political and social institutions. These memoirs function as acts of mourning that reveal structural neglect and emphasize the affective and political dimensions of grief, especially for marginalized populations in India and Bangladesh. Basu positions these texts as ethical and political counter-narratives that reclaim visibility for the “grievable” amid the pandemic’s uneven human toll.

For instance, Kay Sohini’s graphic narrative, “Pandemic Precarities: An Account from the Intersection of Two Worlds,” depicts her mourning for a grandfather who died in India while she lived in New York. Similarly, Jhumpa Lahiri’s essay in Translating Myself and Others reflects on coping with her mother’s death through translating a book from Italian to English.

Building on these examples, Basu situates her analysis within broader theoretical debates on biopolitics and mourning by applying Judith Butler’s concept of grievability to the South Asian pandemic context. She demonstrates how these memoirs act as personal and collective archives that resist nationalist and neoliberal discourses rendering certain deaths invisible. The essay broadens trauma and life-writing studies by integrating the affective economies of grief under crisis in the Global South. Through close readings of these diarists’ testimonies, Basu emphasizes pandemic memoirs as both private reckonings and crucial interventions in the politics of remembrance and ethical witnessing.