Anveshi, since its inception, has been engaged in research and advocacy about gender and health. Its focus has been on women’s health, local knowledge, and social determinants that are mostly ignored in the mainstream health research and the health care system. Our initial work in this area resulted in the reports that were prepared for the Task Force on Health under the National Commission for Self Employed Women in 1989. The first report, titled Women and Health Care System in Zaheerabad: Towards A New Paradigm of Health (1989) looked at the health care service system and how they were distant and unsuited to the needs of women in remote villages. The second report, Back Pain In Women: Possible Relationships to Prolonged Work, Chronic Calcium Deficiency and Bone Thinning (1989), focused on the usually ignored area of women’s back pain, its social roots, how this ignorance is embedded in the health care system with its biomedical model.
Our lineage in health activism goes back to the Stree Shakti Sanghatana, which in collaboration with Saheli and other sister organizations, protested against and initiated a public interest litigation against the covert administration of Net en and Depo Provera injectable contraceptives to women in rural India in the 1980s.
As part of Anveshi’s belief in making resources and readings available in the local language, we have produced health handbooks over the years. One of the classics was Savaalaksha Sandehaalu: Sthreelu-Aarogyam, Samskruti, Rajakeeyalu (1991), inspired by Our Bodies and Ourselves but inclusive of problems and experiences of women in the Indian context. This collaborative volume, based on research in India, was produced by women from both medical and non-medical backgrounds, offers a critique of medical knowledge and practice, the family, and the doctor-patient relationship. It draws on women’s experiences and alternative practices to provide information about women’s health problems in an accessible manner. This book became extremely popular with individuals, organizations, and even the Women and Child Welfare department of the Andhra Pradesh government. A revised and reworked second edition was bought out in 2004 as Taking Charge of Our Bodies: A Health Handbook for Women with fresh research on a broader range of issues affecting middle-class women. Its Telugu version was published as a revised edition of Savalaksha Sandehaalu in 2006.
As a part of this work to strengthen local knowledge, Anveshi brought out the translation of the classic feminist book Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers into Telugu as Mantrajaalam Doctorlada, Mantrasanulada? in 1994. To bring together the knowledge of the local women healers and indigenous medical systems, which are ignored in mainstream health discussions, Anveshi housed the Andhra Pradesh chapter of the handbook, Touch Me, Touch Me Not: Women, Plants and Healing in 1997 published by Kali for Women.
The presence of scholar-activists deeply invested in mental health such as Bhargavi Dhavar and Jayashree Kalathil in Anveshi at different points of time brought questions of mental health into our fold. Our critical investments in the area of mental health have raised questions about care and treatment of mental distress, mental health policy and rights, and the representation of mental distress in the popular domain. In 1996, Anveshi organised a conference on Women and Mental Health. The conference brought together psychiatrists, social workers, feminists, and mental health self-help groups. It later led to a book, Mental Health from a Gender Perspective (2001) edited by Bhargavi Davar. Part of the research of Bhargavi Davar’s pioneering book Mental Health of Indian Women: A Feminist Agenda (1999) was housed by Anveshi. It drew attention to the high incidence of mental distress among women and the pathologization of what needs to be understood as a social phenomenon. Between 2002 and 2003, Jayashree Kalathil organized several discussions on mental health representation, societal perceptions and care that materialized into productive discussions amongst feminist scholars and activists.
In 2004, Anveshi entered into collaborative research with Christian Medical College, Vellore, called the CMC-Anveshi Collective. Many discussions, meetings and explorations later, this research culminated into a book: Towards a Critical Medical Practice: Reflections on the dilemmas of medical culture today (2010). The essays in the volume pioneered new ways of thinking about the crisis of medicine in neoliberal India. Lakshmi Kutty, Sheela Prasad, R. Srivatsan, Susie Tharu, D. Vasanta and Veena Shatrugna worked on this project.
In 2006, as part of her short term fellowship in Anveshi, Lakshmi Kutty looked at ill-health in lower-middle-class families in the old city of Hyderabad. Entitled Patients Managing Healthcare: Re-reading Intractability in Illness, the ethnographic study found that ill persons inhabit various realms of existence simultaneously, but these intertwined realities were rendered invisible by the medical system’s way of looking at them as individual bodies battling sickness. The study also brought to light the intensive amounts of negotiation that ill persons are made to effect vis-à-vis medical advice or medical institutional spaces; patients are forced to adjust/manage their experiences of pain and distress so that they can derive maximum utility from whatever normativized medical assistance that is being offered.
In 2013, Mithun Som did a series of small studies about occupational health and insurance available to vulnerable informal sector workers. The first was about the death of a sanitation worker, Satyam, inside a manhole in Hyderabad. She traced Satyam’s life and journey to the city due to rural distress and caste-based exploitation, and how similar forces pushed him into this unsafe, unprotected work leading to his untimely death. The second looked at the living and working conditions of informal workers in the Jeedimetla Industrial Area in Hyderabad and delved into the politics of occupational health and the low importance it gets in medical education. In the third, she examined the Employee State Insurance system and the patients’ experiences of it. It brought forth how workers’ hard-earned money was not used for their own health but rather lay unused in the banks or spent on infrastructure.
Members of Anveshi—Veena Shatrugna, R.Srivatsan, Sheela Prasad, Lakshmi Kutty, Mithun Som—have been very active on health platforms across the country like Medico Friends Circle (MFC) and Jan Swasthya Abhiyan (JSA) among others. They were elected as conveners of MFC during the years 2014-2016. This has not only helped enrich the different initiatives in Anveshi but has also enabled us to carry forward our engagements with gender, caste, and mental health into those platforms. The Anveshi convening team steered the themes of the annual conferences of MFC during those years towards mental health and social discrimination in health. R. Srivatsan, our Senior Fellow, served as the co-editor for the MFC bulletin from 2016-2019. In 2014, our health group brought out a special issue of the Anveshi Broadsheet on Aarogyasri, Health Care on the Agenda.
In 2017-18, the Anveshi-CMC Collective conducted a participatory research project with the Adivasi Munnetra Sangham, ACCORD, and ASHWINI of Gudalur. The project was a year-long study, led by R. Srivatsan, of the health and development pressures of the four adivasi communities (Paniya, Bettakurumba, Kattunayakan and Mullakurumba) in Gudalur. There were two different prongs of the project—a quantitative epidemiological study of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases in these communities; and a qualitative interaction/interview-based study of the nutritional, health-seeking and general lifestyles of these communities under development pressure. The outcome of these projects has been in the form of reports and continuing participatory projects of this kind in Gudalur.
Miscellaneous Projects
Family and Mental Health (2003)
Jayasree Kalathil prepared this report for the Study Group on Mental Health which met in Anveshi between 2002-2003. This is the report of the workshop that explored the articulations of and negotiations with mental distress in the context of the family. Download a full report or read a short version published in aaina: a mental health advocacy newsletter.
Defying Frontiers, Defining Possibilities – Part I: Diagnosing Dismissals. A Documentary on Health (2002)
This 36-minute documentary film was produced as a part of a collaborative project with the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG), University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The project was envisaged in terms of documenting the contemporary Indian women’s movement through the work of some influential feminist thinkers in India, to culminate in a reader along with a visual documentary of various interviews. This first film in the series, made by Shital Morjaria and K. Anita, shows Dr Veena Shatrugna in conversation with Rekha Pappu, discussing the women’s movement’s engagement with questions of health. The film also includes a group discussion involving about 12 members of Anveshi invested in health issues. It raises a number of significant issues in relation to the feminist perspective on health, including reproductive health, contraception, nutrition, back pain in women, the role of the drug industry, alternative health care systems, and mental health.