Notes on Care, Positionality, and the Slow Work of Witnessing in the Field: A Photo Essay Series – Part 2

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.

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Stories, Silences, and Shared Spaces

Stories don’t always come as words in the field. Sometimes they arrive in the pauses between sentences, in a shifting of the eyes, in what remains unsaid. Silence, too, becomes part of what is offered. Sometimes, people choose not to speak, and that too is part of the story.

One afternoon, the woman you are interviewing says she’ll take you to the other side, where your team is waiting. As you walk with her, she turns into another gali (narrow lanes), and voices begin to call her name. They greet her with warmth. “Aare kitne din baad dekhe, kaise hai?” (It’s been so long since we saw you, how have you been?) “Aayega wapas” (Come back soon). The story of her friends never came up in the interview. But it found its way to me in that moment, in smiles, in familiarity, in the simple act of walking together.

In that gali (narrow lanes), the walls held stories too. Flags of different colors swayed side by side, some of faith, some of belief and some of resistance. There was assertion here. There was ideology and the everydayness of politics waiting to be witnessed.

There were animals too. Cats stretched across courtyards. Hens moved between doorways. A rabbit waited by a threshold, feasting on sliced vegetables and peels saved for her outside. A cat licked leftover fish curry from a vessel not yet washed.

There were stories everywhere. Some were spoken, others simply needed to be witnessed. They didn’t always fit into the tools we carried or the questions we came prepared to ask, but they were there, waiting.

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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. 

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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.