Epilogue

The emergence of professionalized psychiatry created a milieu where a plethora of healing practices and beliefs were regarded as primitive and superstitious charlatanism. More recently, psychiatrists and psychologists have come to accept the significance of healing cultures to the local members of communities who had little or no access to Western medical treatment. It has been proven that faith, socio-religious practices, and healing are often essential for recovery and well-being of those suffering from mental illness. On the other hand, many psychiatric practices including that of lobotomy and ECT have become redundant. The book has attempted to bring together rather disjointed world views of ‘scientific’ and religious, institutionalised and non-institutionalised, and colonial and nationalistic ideas on curing madness.

Indigenous Traditions, Modernity, and Madness

Emergence of the ‘mind sciences’ in vernacular Hindi literature was a variegated phenomena. Western medical ideas were sometimes amalgamated, segregated, filtered, and appropriated by the vaidyas and hakims according to the needs of the time. Certain key psychiatric concepts had long interesting afterlives while others could not survive. These hybrid practices reflect not only the wide circulation of knowledge but also the impulses of the medical markets that recast traditional medicine in a modern garb. This chapter is a preliminary investigation into the indigenous ways of dealing with and healing madness. The spread and dissemination of Western medical knowledge led to the reshaping of some of the Ayurvedic concepts of mental illness.

Everyday Histories

The routinized lives of the inmates revolved around ‘employment and amusement’, ‘diet and space’, ‘reform and reward’, and ‘resistance and adjustment’. The trope of the mundane provides a microscopic lens to delve deeper into the banal social lives of inmates behind the asylum walls. Work was emphasized for its therapeutic value but profits were central in order to make asylums self-sufficient. Work, in fact, became the yardstick on which a patient’s recovery was measured, and insanity was conceptualized as curable or incurable. The complex temporal and spatial materialities of everyday lives inside the asylum are studied here in order to comprehend the role played by various actors and discern how authority was constantly reordered and redefined.

Introduction

The book probes the worlds of the social histories of medicine and culture as pivotal entry points into what constitutes madness and deviancy in the asylum records. It will also be the first one to bring together institutional and non-institutional histories of insanity by focussing on Hindi medical literature. Psychiatric repertoire found its way in the Hindi vernacular wherein the meaning and context differed dramatically. Therefore, the study traces the emergence of ‘mind sciences’ in Hindi during the period of high nationalism. The book unmasks the irrationalities of colonialism and nationalism by contextualizing the social, cultural, and political frames in which racial, primordial, psychical, spiritual, and psychiatric understanding of madness enmeshed resulting to a peculiar milieu.

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.

Lunacy and the Colonial State

This chapter examines the variegated processes of professionalization, modernization, and Indianization along with the obstacles that colonialism created in their paths. These processes which began at the turn of the twentieth century were far from complete even on the eve of Independence. It argues that psychiatry remained at the margins of medicine as the colonial state maintained an indifference towards the development of the mental sciences. Highlighting contributions of individual psychiatrists and juxtaposing them with those of the colonial state, the chapter locates psychiatrists as historical actors at the centre of the history of colonial psychiatry during the period.

Case Notes and Histories

Case notes provide us with rare insights into the ways in which case histories were constructed. The symptoms of insanity were documented in the Indian asylums in some form or the other from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards. These recorded histories are available in a range of sources which include case registers, annual reports, official files, journal articles, and monographs written by the superintendents of the mental hospitals. The prejudices inherent in the documents help comprehend the notions that coloured the treatment methods. These sources also facilitate the reconstruction of the experiences of patients in the absence of their individual testimonies.