De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) will lead a project to explore the mental health of internal migrants in India after being awarded a grant of nearly £200,000. The innovative interdisciplinary project will use theatre storytelling practices to raise awareness of mental health and provide support for migrant slum dwellers in Pune, a city in Western India. The project is funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). DMU Professor of Mental Health Raghu Raghavan will lead the project as principal investigator and will be supported by other DMU academics as well as partners from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bengaluru, the Institute of Health Management in Pachod and Pune’s Swatantra theatre group. Over two years, investigators will work with internal migrants living in Pune’s slum communities to examine their mental resilience in the face of adversity. Their stories will then be told in the form of theatre performances by the Swatantra theatre group and the performances will be shown back to the community in the hope that their reactions can be captured and more memories can then be collected. Prof Raghavan said: “Internal migration in India is a major issue with millions of people moving from the villages to the cities in search of employment, so there are lots of slum dwelling communities, particularly in the city of Pune. “There has been a lot of research already showing that people in slum dwellings can suffer from anxiety and depression. We wanted to look at a new idea in terms of there being something beautiful within their lives, so we wanted to look at resilience and how people construct resilience in the midst of adversity. “We wanted to go for a more positivist model rather than a reductionist model of how we look at global health. The story of resilience has never been told. “We will collect the stories from people and then try to model a theatre piece with the community. It is all about co-creation of knowledge.”