Stories and Reflection from the fieldwork in M-East Ward, Mumbai, India
By Anushree, Research Assistant, NIHR-GEMMS, India
This photo essay series reflects on fieldwork conducted during interviews with migrants in the M-East Ward: On learning to witness, on being changed by what you see, and on the slow becoming that unfolds in spaces where care, community, and researchers meet.
Introduction
Small steps and quiet witnessing
This photo essay is an attempt to witness the everyday lives of migrants in Mumbai’s M-East Ward.
While the broader research explores the structural understanding of precarity, gendered experiences of violence, and mental health, this visual journey attempts to pause at quieter moments that unfold across homes, streets, and shared spaces.
Migration is rarely a single moment of departure or arrival. It stretches across time, carried in a continuum of needs and aspirations, the quiet memories of homes left behind, and the steady rhythms of routine that emerge in the effort to rebuild one’s life here. It continues not just through the journey, but in what follows: how people make choices, hold on to histories, make sense of the place around them, and find ways to move through uncertainty.
This photo essay is a small attempt to sit with those moments, to witness them, and to hold space for reflection on all that the everyday quietly carries.
On Arriving and Not Knowing
You arrive with a notebook, a set of research questions, and tools one has carefully prepared, shaped by your training, by the research engagements, by the intention to do good. You think you are ready. Ready to listen, to understand. You believe care is something you will offer. You imagine knowledge as something that will be co-produced in this process.
You plan your pilot interview for the afternoon, thinking it’s when men will be at work, children in school, and perhaps the women will have time to speak with you in privacy. In some bastis, this holds true. Afternoons feel slower, softer. There is space. Conversations stretch.
You try the same approach elsewhere, expecting the day to unfold similarly. But it doesn’t. People are busy, tired, not keen to engage. You wonder what shifted. Why is it different here?
The field guide gently reminds you, “Dopehar mein paani aata hai iss basti mein.” (Water comes in the afternoon in this settlement.) You nod. Your assumptions quietly catch up with you.
Time here doesn’t move by the clock, by mornings or afternoons, but by water. Water to be awaited, to be collected, to be used, to be shared. It sets the rhythm of the day. It decides when chores are done, when rest is taken, how life is organised, especially for migrant women whose days revolve around this wait. There are no fixed hours. There is paani ka samay (the time when water comes), a rhythm shaped by the necessity of collecting water.
And so, you begin again. Not with questions, but with presence. With pauses. With waiting. The field turns its gaze gently back at you, asking you to notice what you don’t yet know. To sit with your assumptions. To be with the discomfort of not knowing, and to listen anyway.
Photo Credits: Most photographs featured in this essay series were taken by the author (Anushree) during the data collection phase of the NIHR-GEMMS project. The image accompanying the caption of “Care as Method” was generously shared by community researcher Manisha Balaji Uphade.
This research was funded by the NIHR (NIHR Global Health Research; grant nihr134629) using UK aid from the UK Government to support global health research. The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the UK government.
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