PhD 
 

Provisional Thesis Title: The Care Crisis in Gynaecology : Tracing the pluralities of reproductive expertise and healing in the Darjeeling Himalayas

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 and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her work sits at the intersections of medical anthropology, the anthropology of reproduction, and science and technology studies - with broader interests in therapeutic knowledge, medical pluralism, embodiment, gender, and the social life of health and illness. She is particularly interested in how forms of medical and embodied knowledge acquire authority, how histories and infrastructures shape experiences of care, and how questions of reproduction, suffering, and the body are negotiated across institutional, intimate, and everyday worlds.

Her research is informed by a longstanding engagement with sexual and reproductive health, feminist scholarship, and South Asia. She has previously worked with UNFPA on policy analysis and advocacy related to sexual and reproductive health and rights. Rayana holds a Master’s degree in Anthropology and Sociology from the Geneva Graduate Institute, where her thesis examined reproductive health activism among sex workers in India and the queer moral geographies of disease and care.

When not anthropologising, 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.
 

Research Interests
 

• Medical Anthropology
• Gynaecology
• Science and Medicine
• Reproductive Risks and Vulnerabilities
• Plural Healing Epistomologies
• 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)