Abstract
In 1870, a British medical officer and official visitor at several asylums in the Bengal Presidency, Dr. Edwards, wrote of a patient in the Calcutta Medical Gazette. Without a professional organ for “alienists,” or psychiatrists, in India, the various medical gazettes (Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Indian) were the most common outlets for ruminations on lunacy in the subcontinent. Regular exposure to native lunacy had put white insanity into perspective for Dr. Edwards. He wrote:
I cannot understand the language and life Mannu leads. Labelled a violent insane, he has caused little trouble once he arrived. That which I took as evidence of his lunacy was, when visited by his father…normal behaviour. It cannot be that entire families are insane, even allowing for the hereditary nature of many diseases of the mind…In talking with his father, I agreed to give Mannu a small garden plot. Working with his hands, renders him less liable to babbling and spitting.1
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Notes
Categories of madness in the nineteenth century were neither absolute nor constant. The category of “violent insane” was taken directly from European psychiatry, and was a common diagnosis for any patient who behaved violendy on admission. Until Emil Kraepelin’s diagnostic categories at the turn of the twentieth century, psychiatry did not possess a common and consistent diagnostic vocabulary. Eric J. Engstrom and Matthias M. Weber (2007), “Making Kraepelin History: A Great Instauration?” History of Psychiatry, 18(3): 267–273.
Local families who were invested in indigenous or familiar therapies sought out local healers, such as vaidyas and hakims. So much so that by the end of the century, doctors in medical hospitals in India actively recruited such healers to act as in-house locums. If British officers were sensitive to caste taboos and local concerns over women in public spaces, they also recruited high-caste or even female medical staff to encourage families to enter these colonial medical spaces. Kumari Jayawardena (1995), The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Colonial Rule (New York: Routledge), p. 40
For more detail about the history of moral reform in British psychiatry, see Anne Digby (1985), Madness, Morality and Medicine (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press).
Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry J. Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry, eds. (2010), Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), p. 3.
Bengal Secretariat (1863), Annual Report of the Insane Asylums in Bengal for the Year 1862 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Office, NAI).
This was a long-standing practice, which was economically efficient, especially in the aftermath of the 1850s uprisings. Bengal Secretariat (1909), Triennial Report on the Lunatic Asylums of Bengal for the Years 1906, 1907 and 1908 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, British Library [BL]).
A. C. C. DeRenzy (1878), Report on the Tezpur Lunatic Asylum 1877 (Shillong: Assam Secretariat Press).
R. S. McGregor, ed. (1997), The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), p. 915.
The history and dominance of tea in Indian culture is far too expansive to summarize here. However, tea plants have been native to East and South Asia for millennia, and drinking tea has been a common practice in Assam and the northeast of India for almost as long. The Dutch and British East India Companies began their trading monopolies in the subcontinent to capitalize on tea production and consumption. See Colleen Taylor Sen (2004), Food Culture in India (Connecticut: Greenwood Press), pp. 19–27
E. M. Jacobs (2009), In Pursuit of Pepper and Tea: The Story of the Dutch East India Company (Amsterdam: Netherlands Maritime Museum)
Alan Macfarlane and Iris Macfarlane (2004), The Empire of Tea: The Remarkable History of the Plant That Took over the World (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press)
Jane Pettigrew (2001), A Social History of Tea (London: National Trust).
It might be possible to perform the same exercise using the dhobis, the laundrymen who were often recruited to clean the clothes of homes and institutions alike. However, dhobis appear in the historical record even less than the chai wallahs, so this may prove difficult. Dhobis preceded modern professional dry cleaners. In the nineteenth century, they would have accessed the asylums through the side entrances, and had little contact with the British staff (who left the historical record we rely upon). Moreover, as asylums became more self-sufficient, many of the patients would have been encouraged to wash their own linen, as a form of occupational therapy, instead of relying upon the dhobis. There are few studies on the class and caste of men who comprised the dhobis, for example, Lucy Norris (March 2005), “Dho bighat,” Visual Anthropology Review, 21(1-2): 168–179.
This represents approximately three visits every two days, which seems an excessive amount, until you consider the prevalence of tea within British and Indian culture. Bengal Medical Department (1866), General Report on the Lunatic Asylums, Vaccination and Dispensaries in the Bengal Presidency 1865 (Calcutta: Office of Superintendent of Government Printing, BL).
Correspondence, J. T C. Ross, to Inspector General of Hospitals, Fort William, July 11, 1865, BL. I cannot conceive that this asylum was planned because of demand by local communities. I imagine that the lack (albeit not complete absence) of high-caste patients in these asylums triggered the administration into assuming this was an issue of purity. It is more likely that higher-caste insanes were kept at home, regardless of the institutional help available to them. Karen I. Leonard, among others, has written extensively on caste and caste practices in India: (1994), Social History of an Indian Caste: The Kayasths of Hyderabad (London: Orient BlackSwan)
Nandini Sundar (July 2000), “Caste as Census Category: Implications for Sociology,” Current Sociology, 48(3): 111–126.
C. A. Bayly (1996), Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 3.
J. Habermas (1979), Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. T McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press)
J. Habermas (1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press).
Dr. F Payne (1869), Annual Commentary on Bhowanipore, a Lunatic Asylum in Bengal (Calcutta: BL).
Bengal Medical Department (1865), “Patna,” in General Report on the Lunatic Asylums of the Bengal Presidency 1864 (Calcutta: NAI), p. 8.
Bengal Medical Department (1882), General Report on the Lunatic Asylums of the Bengal Presidency 1881 (Calcutta: NAI).
In his report, Stewart also wrote how “for some days after the nautch, [we] endeavoured to set up an amateur performance, and amuse [ourselves] with cymbals, guitars and other native instruments after hours.” J. T. C. Ross, Indian Medical Department (1886), General Report on the Lunatic Asylums, Vaccination and Dispensaries in the Bengal Presidency 1884 (Calcutta: BL).
For an example of the former, see M. Javaid Akhtar, A. A. Ali, and S. Akhtar (2010), “The Role of Vernacular Press in Subcontinent during the British Rule: A Study of Perceptions,” Pakistan Journal of Social Sciences, 30(1): 71–84.
J. Natarajan (2000), History of Indian Journalism (Delhi: Government of India), pp. 100–112.
“We have been able to pur chase...rice and dhal much more cheaply...The doctor has shown remarkable talent at jhanjata.” Bengal Medical Department (1882), General Report on the Lunatic Asylums of the Bengal Presidency 1881 (Calcutta: NAI), p. 3.
Bengal Medical Department (1883), General Report on the Lunatic Asylums of the Bengal Presidency 1882 (Calcutta: NAI).
Historical anthropologists have built on the chequered relationship between history and anthropology to examine the meanings of caste and kinship in this time period. These hybrid works are useful in reevaluating the interaction between family, asylum, and community within the routine opposition of “tradition” and “modernity” in India. Saloni Mathur (2000), “History and Anthropology in South Asia: Rethinking the Archive,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 29: 29–46.
Saurabh Dube (2007), “Historical Anthropology of Modern India,” History Compass, 5: 763–779.
British officials outside the immediate purveyance of the asylum read such texts as Henry Maudsley (1886), Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings (London: K. Paul, Trench)
William James Moore (1883), A Manual of Family Medicine and Hygiene for India (London: J. & A. Churchill)
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Bhattacharyya, A. (2016). Colonial Madness: Community and Lunacy in Nineteenth-Century India. In: Winterbottom, A., Tesfaye, F. (eds) Histories of Medicine and Healing in the Indian Ocean World. Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137567581_4
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