Women, mental health, and stories across India

For an extremely culturally diverse country like India with so many different languages, customs, taboos pervading its citizens, one common factor that remains consistent in the literature of the different bhasha languages is the miserable plight of women in general surviving often as a subaltern within a primarily patriarchal mental makeup of society.

- SOMDATTA MANDAL

What happens is ostracisation, and to add to that is the madness that expresses itself in different ways as a lived, social, and sometimes even celebrated condition. The present anthology under review, very well edited by two women who are teachers by profession, is a compendium of stories of women, written by women in 15 Indian languages and three dialects (Marwari, Magahi, and Bhojpuri) that speak of pain, endurance, and everyday negotiations with mental health. Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make healthy choices.

Bandaged Moments brings together 26 compelling stories from almost the whole of India, from Kashmiri in the north to Malayalam down south, and from Rajasthani Hindi or Marwari in the West to Assamese in the East. They focus on humanising psychological conditions through storytelling, with each narrative illustrating the multifaceted nature of mental health issues, the challenges of seeking psychiatric help in India, along with the redemptive power of a support system (or the consequences when there isn’t one), and the lived experiences of individuals grappling with mental health issues in varied cultural settings. Mental illness is quite a complicated issue and includes anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and schizophrenia, and is therefore bound to shame and silence.

The short stories included in this anthology are of different kinds. Some like Glass Walls (Tamil, and the longest with more than 8000 words) and Flying Fish (Assamese) deal with clinical schizophrenia; others like Story of Laughter (Bengali), The Tale of a Toilet (Kannada), Mind it, Madhuriya! (Magahi),