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

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Indian Insanes: Lunacy in the 'Native' Asylums of Colonial India, 1858-1912 Indian Insanes: Lunacy in the 'Native' Asylums of Colonial India, 1858-1912 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Bhattacharyya, Anouska. 2013. Indian Insanes: Lunacy in the 'Native' Asylums of Colonial India, 1858-1912. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11181217 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA © 2013 Anouska Bhattacharyya All rights reserved. Professor Anne Harrington Anouska Bhattacharyya Indian Insanes: Lunacy in the ‘Native’ Asylums of Colonial India, 1858-1912. Abstract 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 iii 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. iv Contents Abstract ....................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................... vi Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1 .................................................................................................................... 35 Chapter 2 .................................................................................................................... 72 Chapter 3 .................................................................................................................. 104 Chapter 4 .................................................................................................................. 143 Chapter 5 .................................................................................................................. 176 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 205 Appendix: 1868 survey questions ............................................................................ 222 Bibliography ............................................................................................................ 246 v Acknowledgments This project began, evolved and finished under the magnificent guidance and endless patience of my advisor, Anne Harrington. The motivation behind her own work – “the experience of suffering is real” – showed me it was possible to be both scholarly rigorous and intellectually responsible in my historical research. I have learned how to be a better scholar and a better teacher under Anne’s supervision, and I cannot thank her enough. My other committee members provided the perfect complement to Anne’s help: Sugata Bose bestowed his great wisdom in framing this project within the long history of South Asia, and Jeremy Greene – the unofficial “wunderkind” for the history of medicine – constantly pushed my expectations of myself, of what it meant to write history, of what my sources could tell me, and of what I could tell my audience. I am honoured to have had such a formidable committee. Beyond the “great men” (and women) who officially supervised me, a whole community at Harvard provided support and guidance in a multitude of ways. Thank you to Linda Schneider for the pep talks and last-minute signatures; to Ellen Guarente for her patience and validation; Allie Belser for never failing to have the answer; Michele Biscoe for reminding me about those deadlines; and to Richard, Marty and the whole Putnam Gallery crew for supporting me through the entire process. I have been lucky to discuss my work with peers whose talents far excel my own: thank you to Mateo Munoz, John Matthew, Tara Dankel, and Andy McDowell in particular, whom I am privileged to call my teachers as well as my friends. Thank you to the organizers and participants of the South Asia Workshop for providing the most supportive interdisciplinary space on campus. I am also thankful for my departmental History of Medicine Working Group, the vi participants of which gave thoughtful and significant feedback to my first and second chapters. To the many Harvard librarians and archivists who helped to locate the most obscure sources, notably Fred Burchsted: thank you for excusing all those overdue books! My work benefited from audience feedback at a number of conferences. Thank you to all the participants and organizers of the Joint Atlantic Seminar for Medicine, the American Association for the History of Medicine, the Rocky Mountain Interdisciplinary History Conference, the British Society for the History of Science, the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, the recent conference at the Indian Ocean World Centre in Montreal, and the Three Societies’ Conference in Philadelphia. On my various forays to the subcontinent, I received an enormous amount of assistance at the National Library in Kolkata, at the National Archives of India in New Delhi, and at the Central Institute for Psychiatry in Ranchi. This research was made possible thanks to the generous support of several funding opportunities and organizations. The Frank Knox Memorial Travelling Fellowship permitted seven glorious months at the British Library and Wellcome Library in London. Thanks to the Harvard South Asia Initiative for allowing me to travel to the National Archives of India in New Delhi, the National Library in Kolkata and the Central Institute for Psychiatry in Ranchi. My own Department for the History of Science was incredibly supportive with their Hiebert Award for Summer Research, and the GSAS Graduate Student Council also provided hefty and necessary funds for an entire summer of archival work in South Asia. My utmost appreciation for all of the opportunities you vii have afforded me, and my deep regards for your supporting graduate students like myself who are simply interested in knowledge for knowledge sake. I am grateful to my friends and confidantes for putting up with my incessant and often incoherent ramblings: Sadie, Chelsie, and Tully, you are a scholar’s best friends. Thank you, Mike, for suffering the highs and the lows of this project at my side: thank you for your love, your common sense and the best writing chair! Above all, this dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Pijush and Rubi Bhattacharyya, who taught me by example to think, argue, read, write and learn. I am grateful for the long tradition of hard work you passed down to me, and for the wonderful heritage I’ve earned. Tomra na thakte, ami ki kortham? viii Introduction: A Permeable Institution In 1872, a patient by the name of “Goorab” escaped from Jubbulpore Asylum in what is now Madhya Pradesh in Central India. He had escaped by jumping over the hedge at the very periphery of the asylum grounds while the asylum attendants were not paying attention. The most interesting part of this story is that his escape was noticed only a couple of months later, when he returned of his own volition; during his absence, neither asylum superintendent nor the Visiting Officials (such as the Inspector-General of Prisons) had realized that this asylum of forty-eight patients had been reduced by one. How could the asylum superintendent not miss one of his patients for so long? Had not there been a head count in two months?
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