Beyond Gates and Walls: Carcerality and Deviance in Colonial British Psychiatry, 1854–47

When the British annexed Punjab in the mid-19th century, they established the Punjab Mental Hospital, an asylum primarily meant to house “insane” Indian people from the local colonized populations. In a landscape of colonial abuses imbued with racist notions, the Punjab asylum seemed to — at least in part — be slightly more siloed from the colonial machine; in yearly reports, the administrators dedicated (at least some) space to listing conditions and treatments. Scholars have disagreed about the intentions behind colonial institutions like the Punjab Mental Hospital, debating the merits of an asylum based in carcerality, but few have effectively situated the asylum’s birth within the structural and social reality of 19th century British India. This project will rely on a litany of maps and physical representations (including photographs) of the asylum, which will be clearly displayed on the poster. Additionally, facts and numbers from the yearly financial reports will be extracted and analyzed as plots and figures for inclusion on the poster. In using financials, demographics, and photographic and cartographic representations of the asylum over time, this project will argue that the Punjab Mental Hospital was not only inherently carceral — in construction and location, as well as the imposition of criminality onto the patients and “escapees” — but that the institution’s resemblance to a colonial prison was an essential and core aspect of the asylum’s circumstances. This project will also argue — through the use of personal writings of colonial administrators like CJ Lodge Patch — that though many of the prevailing psychological treatment theories of the time relied on restraint and isolation, the Punjab Mental Hospital’s administrators attempted a differing approach, only to be constrained by the colonial structural and personnel reality of British India in the 19th century. In clarifying the history of the Punjab Mental Hospital, this presentation will illustrate the complexities of how medicine and public health have been weaponized against marginalized communities of color.