Idioms of Madness and Colonial Boundaries: The Case of the European and “Native” Mentally Ill in Early Nineteenth-Century British India

Abstract

THE COLONIZATION OF MADNESS

Lunatic asylums began to emerge in India towards the end of the eighteenth century. Although some critics expressed concern as to the propriety of an institutional response to mental illness, they formed a small minority. During a period when the asylum took on “a status as panacea equivalent to the steam engine, the rights of man, or the spread of universal knowledge” (Bynum et al. 1988:3), medical and public opinion had come to believe that madness could be cured and that confinement in an institution could not fail to be beneficial both for Europeans and Indians. Furthermore, Europeans in India could not usually rely on any family or parochial networks, so the East India Company had to assume responsibility and increasingly make institutional provision for these employees until they could be sent back home to Britain. The steady growth in institutional provision was also applied to lower-class Indians. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, the three small institutions in the provincial capitals of Madras, Mumbai (Bombay), and Calcutta (originally intended for the European insane and for only a small number of Indians of the better classes) were no longer considered adequate in view of the considerable expansion of British territory during that period. Consequently, the need to set up a network of public asylums to receive both “criminal” and “harmless” insane Indians in provincial centres upcountry had become pressing.