<p>The langar is an institutionalized Sikh practice of cooking and serving food, free of charge, to anyone who knocks at the doors of a gurdwara, the term for a Sikh place of worship. Although the Sikhs constitute a religious minority in Delhi, followers of this faith took on a gigantic and expanded role through COVID-19. Gurdwara workers and volunteers catered and delivered food to quarantined citizens, jobless workers, migrants returning to villages on foot, waiting relatives outside hospitals, and police staff on duty. They also fed street dogs deprived of leftovers from eateries through the lockdowns. What made these extraordinarily risky feats possible is a sacred practice as old as the Sikh religion – providing seva (service) and langar for the poor and hungry, wherever it is needed. Food cooked and offered by gurdwaras through COVID-19 factored in common food taboos that are strikingly varied by caste, class, region, and religion in the city. Special meals were prepared by women in their homes for onward delivery to patients. Donations of rations, milk, oxygen concentrators, and money came unstintingly. From the angle of New Materialist studies, public representatives and police personnel, though charged with ensuring public order through COVID-19, had scarce material or organizational capacity. They had to rely on the resources of the gurdwara’s langar for food provisioning. Oxygen delivery was enabled by piped supply to seated patients through innovative ‘oxygen langars’ here. Subsequent appreciation of gurdwara management led to state-subsidized medicines being routed through gurdwaras at newly envisaged ‘medicine langars’, supplementing existing efforts. The lived religiosity of Sikhs through the COVID-19 crisis was underlined for this religiously plural city. The abiding vitality of langar and seva etched the value of how diverse types of hunger – food, oxygen, medicine - can be quelled by the adaptive Sikh langar.</p>
