In May 2026, Banda, in Uttar Pradesh, reached 48.2 °C. Delhi brushed 45 °C. Across northern India, some people working in agriculture began labouring at night because the day had become unbearable. Roads and markets emptied during the central hours. In some areas school holidays were brought forward. In the capital, cooling spaces were opened with fans, water and rehydration salts.

While India burns, India also counts itself.

The first phase of the 2027 Census is already under way. Between April and September 2026 the listing of dwellings and households is being carried out. The population enumeration is scheduled for February 2027. The Indian government presents the process as the country’s first digital census, with mobile applications, a central monitoring portal, self-enumeration, machine-readable data and an infrastructure called Census-as-a-Service to deliver information to ministries and administrations. In the second phase, moreover, caste data will be captured electronically.

The news is not only technical. It is not only that the census is digital. The deeper news is that caste returns to the great decennial count at a moment when extreme heat shows, with brutal clarity, that no society is exposed in the same way.

That crossing is the radar. Caste, heat and data.

This is not about using India as a distant example or an exotic laboratory. It is about listening to what India is showing from within its own tensions. A society that classifies itself, moves, works under heat, sustains families, produces electricity, keeps seeds and reorganises its everyday life before the monsoon arrives.

Three voices help to read that scene. Veena Das, Arjun Appadurai and Vandana Shiva. Das helps us see how harm descends into ordinary life. Appadurai lets us follow the circulation of people, money, images, energy and aspirations. Shiva forces a return to the seed, to the soil and to the material reproduction of life.

Heat also classifies

A heatwave looks, at first, like a meteorological fact. A temperature. A map. An alert.

But heat never falls on a flat society.

Crossing a city with air conditioning is not the same as delivering food on a motorbike. Living in a tree-lined estate is not the same as sleeping in a narrow room where the fan only moves hot air. Deciding not to go out is not the same as depending on going out in order to eat. Buying cold water is not the same as waiting in a queue. Having a job that can be suspended is not the same as working under the sun on a building site, a market, a road or a field.

Heat classifies because it reveals differences that were already there.

It reveals housing, income, age, gender, caste, health, access to water, access to shade, access to electricity, the possibility of resting and the type of work. It reveals who can protect themselves and who must keep moving.

In April, electricity demand reached a record peak of 256.1 GW, on the 25th, according to Grid-India data reported by Reuters. In May, on the 21st, the ceiling broke again, at 270.73 GW, a fourth consecutive record day. The official reading may present these figures as infrastructural success. The electrical system responds, planning holds, the state manages alerts, megawatts and installed capacity.

That reading matters, but it is not enough.

Because heat does not only produce electricity demand. It also produces localised outages, sleepless nights, exhausted bodies, household spending, dependence on coal, pressure on the grids and inequality in access to cooling. The state can measure gigawatts with engineering precision and, at the same time, struggle to count transparently the deaths, illnesses and everyday losses that heat produces.

There an uncomfortable question appears. What does the state know how to count when it counts?

Counting: census, caste and opacity

The 2027 Census appears beneath that question.

India is preparing one of the largest counting operations in the world. The process will be digital, coordinated, monitored, machine-readable. In the second phase, it will incorporate caste data. And that decision opens a deep dispute.

For decades, the Indian state has registered some administrative categories, such as recognised castes and tribes. But it had not returned to a broad decennial enumeration of caste since 1931. The return of that question is not a bureaucratic detail. Caste structures access to land, education, marriage, employment, representation, housing, prestige, care and exposure to violence.

Those who defend enumeration hold that an inequality that is not measured cannot be corrected. Those who reject it fear that measuring it will harden identities, reorganise political alliances and make even more bureaucratic a hierarchy that already weighs too heavily on social life.

Both positions understand something essential. Counting is not neutral.

A census does not only reflect a society. It also organises it. It decides which differences will be legible to the state, which inequalities may enter public policy and which forms of belonging will be fixed as official categories.

But heat introduces a decisive counter-reading. The same state that deploys an enormous infrastructure to count population, households and caste does not always count with the same clarity those who fall ill, work at night, lose income, collapse or die under extreme heat. Heat deaths are hard to register. They are confused with prior illnesses, left off certificates, diluted in fragmented data and often fail to enter public statistics with the force they deserve.

Opacity also classifies.

It classifies what deserves to be counted and what remains as domestic, occupational or silent harm. It classifies which lives appear as a problem of state and which remain as tiredness, fate or bad luck.

Veena Das: heat in ordinary life

Veena Das lets us bring that question down to the terrain where it truly happens. Everyday life.

Das, an Indian anthropologist formed in the intellectual world of Delhi, worked for decades on violence, social suffering, the state, illness, poverty and ordinary life. In Life and Words, her reading of Partition and of the violence of 1984 does not treat violence only as an exceptional event. She follows it as it descends into the home, into kinship, into silence, into the body, into rumour, into care, into dealings with the state and into the small repairs through which a life carries on.

That way of looking is especially useful in the face of extreme heat.

Because a heatwave is not only a climate emergency. It is a transformation of the ordinary.

It changes the hour at which one works. It changes the possibility of sleeping. It changes the mood inside a home. It changes the relationship with water. It changes the care of girls, boys, older people and people who are ill. It changes the body of whoever carries bricks, drives, sells fruit, cleans streets, harvests or waits at a stop.

It also changes what is kept silent. Tiredness is normalised. Heatstroke becomes part of the job. A fever is settled with a cheap pill. The impossibility of resting becomes a family problem, not a public fact.

Das helps us say something simple and difficult. Social suffering does not always appear as a great catastrophe. Sometimes it appears as routine.

From that gaze, heat does not replace caste, class or gender. It settles upon them. It runs through them. It makes them physical. It puts them under the skin.

Arjun Appadurai: circulation under extreme temperature

Arjun Appadurai lets us look at another dimension. Circulation.

Born in Bombay, today Mumbai, Appadurai made Indian modernity and cultural globalisation a field of thought. Modernity at Large proposed looking at the contemporary world through flows of people, technologies, finance, media and ideas. That intuition serves to read an India under extreme heat.

India is not still. People, goods, money, images, rumours, energy, food, applications, aspirations and futures all circulate. In an extreme spring, heat alters that circulation.

When the day becomes unbearable, work shifts to the night. When the temperature rises, electricity demand rises. When the grid is strained, localised outages appear. When the body does not rest, the city works in another way. When the market empties in the afternoon, social time changes. When agriculture reorganises around heat, the rhythms of the countryside change too.

Appadurai serves here not only to speak of diasporas or globalisation, but to follow the concrete flows that make a society. Electricity, schedules, water, transport, platforms, work, remittances, monsoon, harvests, desires.

Heat reprogrammes circulation.

A hot city is not simply a city with more degrees. It is a city where routes, schedules, pauses, costs, debts and risks all change. A family under heat does not only consume more electricity if it can pay for it. It also reorganises sleep, cooking, care, movement and work. A country under heat does not only switch on more fans and air-conditioning units. It also intensifies its energy dependence, its pressure on coal and its inequalities of access to cooling.

Appadurai helps us read India as a living network of unequal movements. Heat does not stop that network. It deforms it.

Vandana Shiva: sowing under pressure

Vandana Shiva opens the third plane. The seed.

She is worth reading with precision. Shiva is not an academic anthropologist. She is a physicist by training and an Indian voice of political ecology, seed sovereignty, biodiversity and the critique of monocultures. Her trajectory is linked to Indian environmental struggles such as Chipko, to Staying Alive and to the creation of Navdanya, founded in 1987 as a movement for biodiversity, organic farming and the right of the peasantry to save and exchange seeds.

In an India under extreme heat, that discussion ceases to be abstract.

The joint FAO and WMO report on extreme heat and agriculture warns that rising temperatures threaten the livelihoods, health and labour productivity of more than a billion people. Agrifood systems are on the front line. In already hot regions, including much of South Asia, there could be up to 250 days a year too hot to work safely outdoors.

That means heat does not only affect human comfort. It affects the reproduction of life.

It affects crops. It affects livestock. It affects fishing. It affects soils. It affects the health of those who work. It affects the possibility of producing food without falling ill. It affects the price of eating. It affects the time to sow, water, harvest and sell.

The seed, then, is not rural nostalgia. It is infrastructure of survival.

Shiva can and should be read with critical distance. Some of her positions have been contested, and that debate is part of any responsible reading. But her place in this piece does not depend on turning her into unquestionable authority. It depends on recognising that, in the face of extreme heat, the question of biodiversity, native seeds, peasant knowledge and food autonomy returns to the centre.

In a world that tends to call the digital innovation, Shiva reminds us that there is also innovation in conserving diversity, sustaining soils and protecting the conditions of life.

Caste, heat, data

The Indian scene of 2026 brings together three infrastructures.

The infrastructure of the state, which counts.

The infrastructure of circulation, which moves people, energy, money and desire.

The ecological infrastructure, which sustains seeds, water, soil, shade and bodies.

Artificial intelligence tends to enter the scene promising classification, prediction and optimisation. But before asking what a system can predict, it is worth asking what world we are handing it as data. If the census turns caste into state information, if heat turns inequality into bodily exhaustion, if energy turns temperature into electricity demand and if agriculture turns climate into hunger or survival, then no database is innocent.

India under heat lets us see something AIthropology Lab needs to look at closely. Categories do not float in the abstract. They fall upon bodies. Upon schedules. Upon neighbourhoods. Upon castes. Upon fields. Upon rooms where one cannot sleep. Upon people who work while others take shelter. Upon seeds that still hold a possibility of life.

Das reminds us that harm descends into the ordinary.

Appadurai reminds us that society is made of circulations.

Shiva reminds us that life also depends on seeds, soils and biodiversity.

Caste does not on its own explain heat. Heat does not replace the history of caste. But together they reveal something decisive. Inequalities are not only inherited. They are also sweated.

India counts, circulates and sows under a new temperature. For an anthropology of AI, the lesson is direct. No system of classification understands a life unless it also learns to see which bodies bear the world, at what hour they work, where they sleep, which seeds they keep and what heat they must endure.

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