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Paper short abstract

“Mann udaas hai” explores how Bhil women’s experiential knowledge of distress circulates through idioms, silence, and everyday care, holding local authority yet losing recognition within institutional mental health systems, revealing epistemic polarisation grounded in unequal regimes of evidence.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how experiential knowledge of mental distress is produced, circulated, and constrained within polarised mental health landscapes through an ethnographic study of Bhil women in southern Rajasthan, India. Drawing on extended fieldwork, it explores how women articulate emotional strain through locally grounded idioms such as mann udaas hai (the heart feels low), bojh (burden), and “tension,” rather than through psychiatric categories.

These idioms constitute forms of experiential knowledge that carry authority within kinship networks, ritual practices, and everyday labouring lives. Women recognise distress through embodied signs, silences, humour, and shared work, and respond through relational forms of care involving family, ritual healers, and informal women’s networks. Yet this knowledge rarely gains legitimacy within biomedical mental health services, where distress must be translated into diagnostic categories, individualised symptoms, or measurable outcomes to be recognised as valid evidence.

The paper argues that this gap reflects epistemic polarisation between situated, relational ways of knowing and institutional mental health frameworks that privilege standardisation and visibility. As women’s experiences move or fail to move across infrastructures of care, silence is misread as absence, endurance as resilience, and collective coping as individual adjustment. By following experiential knowledge across community, ritual, and clinical domains, the paper highlights how unequal regimes of recognition shape mental health care and deepen epistemic exclusion.