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'Social distance,' and 'social distancing' have become the linguae francae of our world ravaged by COVID-19. Pandemic related social distancing prescriptions, however, do not operate in a vacuum. How do social distancing strategies for containing the pandemic intersect with extant social divisions? Using a unique census-scale micro-dataset from rural Karnataka (an Indian state as large as France), we meditate on this question by drawing on theoretical insights from multiple disciplines including the intellectual genealogy of 'social distance' as a measure of social divisions. Our rich dataset contains independent India's first census-scale enumeration (n ≈ 36.5 million) and coding of elementary caste categories (≈700 jatis). Our dataset is also the first to combine self-reported jati and religion information. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first systematic large-n portrait of intra-village residential segregation in rural India. Our micro-segregation analysis along jati and religion axes provides evidence for a 'permanent cordon sanitaire.' Our analysis also sheds light on how the pandemic intersects with internal migration trajectories in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The normative promise of urbanization in India – muting of the caste boundaries – remains untested empirically. • We show that caste-based residential segregation is rife, even among India's most urban centers. • The degree of segregation does not vary by the population size of a city, or its growth over the last 6 decades. • Methodologically, we highlight what should be an ideal neighborhood to study segregation in Indian cities. We present the first ever large-scale snapshot of urban residential segregation in India at the neighborhood-scale. Our analysis from 147 largest cities in contemporary India shows how caste-based residential segregation is independent of city size (our sample includes all cities in India with at least 0.3 million residents in 2011). The extent of segregation in the largest metropolitan centers with over ten million residents closely tracks cities that are nearly two orders-of-magnitude smaller. We also show how residential segregation across a large swathe of urban India mirrors the spatial geometry of rural India. Our findings call into question one of the central normative promises of modernization in India and elsewhere — the gradual withering of traditional ascriptive identities such as caste. Our paper also contributes to the emerging debates in urban segregation by developing an interdisciplinary framework for analytical and empirical operationalization of a neighborhood unit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]