Mad around the Edges: Psychiatric Enclaves in British India

Between 1858 and 1912, the British government of India established over thirty “native lunatic asylums.” These were both an echo of asylum reforms occurring in Britain and an extension of the Raj’s efforts to create hospital, schools, and prisons in India on par with those in Western Europe. While the impetus behind these native asylums was primarily that of constructing an imperial “information order” of surveillance, social communication and knowledge production, I argue that these sites acted as spaces for local men and women to perform their own narratives regarding mental health, local expertise and employment.

Using the ongoing debate of territorial contiguity in defining South Asian statehood and national identity, I argue that the British-built native asylum in India was a socio-medical enclave, which only tenuously responded to the imperial structures above. Building on the existing historiography of psychiatry, I demonstrate the presence of a local asylum community constituted by tea sellers, laundry men, asylum inmates, British administrators and a wide range of other actors. This community moved fluidly—seemingly itinerant within the imperial hierarchy—yet fundamentally constructed and participated in a very coherent, rich and stable body politic. This paper uses this local community as the primary unit of analysis, transgressing the usual boundaries of institutional and/or South Asian historiography, to examine the social and cultural history at the edge of an empire.