Thesis ID: CBB001567454

Indian Insanes: Lunacy in the 'Native' Asylums of Colonial India, 1858--1912 (2013)

unapi

Bhattacharyya, Anouska (Author)


Harvard University
Greene, Jeremy
Bose, Sugata
Greene, Jeremy
Harrington, Anne
Bose, Sugata


Publication Date: 2013
Edition Details: Advisor: Harrington, Anne; Committee Members: Bose, Sugata, Greene, Jeremy.
Physical Details: 257 pp.
Language: English

The new Government of India did not introduce legislation for `native' lunacy in colonial India as a measure of social control after the uprisings of 1857-8; discussions about Indian insanes had already occurred in 1856, following asylum and pauper reform in Victorian England. With the 1858 Lunacy Acts, native lunatic asylums occupied an unsteady position between judicial and medical branches of this government. British officers were too constrained by their inexperience of asylums and of India to be effective superintendents and impose a coherent psychiatry within. They relied on their subordinate staff who were recruited from the communities that surrounded each asylum. Alongside staff and patients, the asylums were populated by tea sellers, local visitors, janitors, cooks and holy men, all of whom presented alternate and complementary ideas about the treatment and care of Indian insanes. By 1912, these asylums had been transformed into archetypal colonial institutions, strict with psychiatric doctrine and filled with Western-trained Indian doctors who entertained no alternate belief systems in these colonial spaces. How did these fluid and heterogeneous spaces become the archetypes of colonial power? Rather than presume commensurability with other colonial spaces such as the native prison and native hospital, or assume that all colonial asylums began as tools of empire and of social control, this dissertation embeds the native lunatic asylum within the social and cultural milieu of mid-century colonial India to argue that the local community was integral to managing these institutions. Tracing the legal, institutional and social histories of these native asylums, from 1858 to the Lunacy Acts of 1912, this project reveals increasing interventions by the Government of India - the 1861 Indian Penal Code, an 1868 asylum survey, a variety of lunacy amendment acts - to reassert its colonial agenda and capture the transient nature of madness within its imperial gaze. With the rise of the psychiatric expert and the increasingly significant role of medical education in India, the asylum was transformed into a singularly colonial and homogeneous space.

...More

Description Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 75/02(E), Aug 2014. Proquest Document ID: 1465060033.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001567454/

Similar Citations

Chapter Anouska Bhattacharyya; (2016)
Colonial Madness: Community and Lunacy in Nineteenth-Century India (/isis/citation/CBB228973246/)

Book Sarah Ann Pinto; (2018)
Lunatic Asylums in Colonial Bombay: Shackled Bodies, Unchained Minds (/isis/citation/CBB126077328/)

Book Axelby, Richard; Nair, Savithri Preetha; (2008)
Science and the Changing Environment in India 1780--1920: A Guide to Sources in the India Office Records (/isis/citation/CBB000820136/)

Book Manjapra, Kris; (2014)
Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire (/isis/citation/CBB001552057/)

Article Facchinetti, Cristiana; Muñoz, Pedro Felipe Neves de; (2013)
Emil Kraepelin na ciência psiquiátrica do Rio de Janeiro, 1903--1933 (/isis/citation/CBB001420641/)

Book Claire E. Edington; (2019)
Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam (/isis/citation/CBB895433219/)

Book Topp, Leslie Elizabeth; Moran, James E.; Andrews, Jonathan; (2007)
Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment: Psychiatric Spaces in Historical Context (/isis/citation/CBB000773995/)

Book Monk, Lee-Ann; (2008)
Attending Madness: At Work in the Australian Colonial Asylum (/isis/citation/CBB000952071/)

Authors & Contributors
Pinto, Sarah Ann
Thabane, Motlatsi
Arnab Chakraborty
Manjapra, Kris
Wilbraham, Lindy
Bhattacharyya, Anouska
Concepts
Colonialism
Psychiatric hospitals
Mental disorders and diseases
Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence
Psychiatry
Great Britain, colonies
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
18th century
20th century
Places
India
Germany
Bombay (India)
Cape of Good Hope (South Africa)
Lesotho
Hong Kong
Institutions
British East India Company
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment