PhD 
 

Provisional Thesis Title: Navigating Reproductive Vulnerability: Ethnomedical Knowledge and Women’s Healing Practices in the Darjeeling Hills

PhD Supervisor:  Aditya Bharadwaj

My PhD examines the intersection of reproductive health and indigenous medical knowledge in the Darjeeling Hills of Eastern India. This research interrogates how women’s ethnomedical practices persist, adapt, and are marginalized within India’s plural medical landscape, shaped by colonial legacies, state policies, and the capitalist appropriation of indigenous healing systems. By centering women as knowledge bearers, I explore the interplay between gendered medical expertise, epistemic authority, and state recognition.

Focusing on communities such as the Lepcha, Kirati (Rai, Limbu, Sunuwar), and Gorkhas—whose healing traditions remain unrecognized—alongside the state-supported Tibetan-origin system of Sowa Rigpa, I analyze how certain indigenous medical systems gain legitimacy while others are dismissed. I investigate how biomedicine’s dominance and institutional exclusions reinforce hierarchies that erase women’s contributions to reproductive care, even as their knowledge remains vital in contexts where formal healthcare is inaccessible.

My work critiques the historical and ongoing processes of epistemic erasure that devalue affective labor, traditional midwifery, and plant-based healing. Simultaneously, it examines the paradox of global medical pluralism, where indigenous medicine is commodified yet the women sustaining these practices remain marginalized. Through ethnographic and archival research, I seek to foreground the lived experiences of indigenous women healers, challenging biomedical hegemony and advocating for the recognition of diverse, evolving reproductive health knowledge systems within contemporary healthcare frameworks.

Profile

Rayana is a PhD Researcher in Anthropology at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research investigates the intersections of reproductive health, global histories of medicine, and indigenous health systems, with a focus on oral histories, intergenerational subjectivities, and archival politics. She has extensive experience in ethnographic and qualitative research, previously holding positions at institutions such as UNFPA, where she contributed to policy analysis and advocacy for sexual and reproductive health rights. Rayana holds a Master’s degree in Anthropology and Sociology from the Geneva Graduate Institute, where her thesis explored reproductive health activism among sex workers in India and the queer moral geographies of disease and care. When not athropologis-ing, one can find her in cosy spaces reading about feminist body horror, musing about her love for cinema or enjoying matcha lattes under the sun. Connect with her on Twitter at @CalicoCatRay.

Research Interests
 

• Medical Anthropology
• History of Science and Medicine
• Reproductive Risks and Vulnerabilities
• Ethnomedical Knowledge
• Post-colonial Health Interventions
  
   

Publications and Works
 

• Ghosh, Rayana. "Surveilling Sexuality: Abortion, Morality, and Colonial Governance in 19th-Century Bengal." The Polyphony, January 6, 2025.
• Ghosh, Rayana. Caring and Desiring as Sex Workers: Health Activism and the Queer Art of Resistance in Sonagachi, India. Master’s thesis, Geneva Graduate Institute, June 2024.
• Ghosh, Rayana. "Queer Disability, Resistance and Censorship: A Cyber Ethnography of Queer and Disabled Content Creators and Activists on Social Media." Young Sociologist, March 1, 2023.

Fellowships, Grants and Awards

The Graduate Institute (IHEID), Doctoral Academic Scholarship (2024)