‘Faith and Fury’: Jyoti Yadav’s pandemic reports from UP, Bihar represent crucial field journalism

A man worked at a brick kiln in Lucknow for 20 years. In the summer of 2020, he lay wrapped in a blanket on a cart, sick with bronchitis, barely able to move and with no money to be treated at a hospital, as three men dragged him home to Sitapur, 80km away.

Around the same time, 15-year-old Jyoti Kumari had begun cycling, with her ailing father seated behind, from Haryana to Darbhanga in Bihar, a journey of 1,200 kilometres. A year later, Kumari’s father died of a cardiac arrest during the deadly second wave of Covid-19 in May 2021.

In Uttar Pradesh, at a Barabanki hospital, as the second wave approached its peak, an exhausted doctor recounted how all he dreamt of were falling oxygen levels, attendants charging at him after the death of a loved one, or people begging and pleading with him for oxygen cylinders.

As bodies burned day and night in the harsh summer heat along the ancient ghats of Varanasi, members of the stigmatised Dom caste who conducted the cremations also took on the role of priests, many of whom had abandoned their posts.

Through accounts like these, journalist Jyoti Yadav’s Faith and Fury: Covid Dispatches from India’s Hinterlands puts together a compelling account of...

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