Intersecting Health Discourses

In India, public health programs aim to support maternal and child health during childbirth. In Uttar Pradesh (UP), these programs intersect with scientific medical explanations and women’s traditional community beliefs. This article examines the supernatural illness Hawa-Bayaar, meaning “wind-breeze,” commonly identified among rural women in eastern UP, believed to threaten the feminine generative power. Drawing on ethnographic data collected from Raebareli and Pratapgarh districts of eastern UP, the study argues that biomedicine provides scientific discourses on illnesses, but it coexists with women’s traditional understandings, largely shaped by shared communal experiences. This understanding of illness, based on the coexistence of both medicines (biomedicine and traditional), leads women to a state of confusion in expressing and explaining it in the clinical space, sometimes making them subject to mockery in the clinical space. The article concludes with a discussion highlighting the medical pluralism in this context, where the fear of affected reproductive capacity due to supernatural illness motivates women to engage with both medicinal systems simultaneously in the sociocultural and clinical spaces.