Managing Madness
The lunatic asylums were largely ‘custodial’ in nature and had complex hierarchical structures that preserved hierarchies between the ‘sane’ and the ‘insane’, ‘white’ and ‘black’, and the ‘high’ and ‘low’ castes and classes. These binaries were an intrinsic part of colonial medicine. The ‘insane hospitals’ were renamed as the ‘mental hospitals’ by the second decade of the twentieth century. This chapter maps the changes that took place in terms of architecture, medicine, and treatment. The novel principles of moral management became obsolete as the fears of degeneration gave psychiatry a biological turn. Not only did the architectural values change but the underlying ‘scientific’ understanding of madness, its diagnosis and treatment underwent fundamental transformations. It examines the ways in which bureaucratic experiences were structured, organized, and reified into modern Indian psychiatry.