Houses of Madness: Insanity and Asylums of Bengal in Nineteenth-Century India

249 Pages·2015·0.865 MB·English

by  Debjani Das

Title Pages
Houses of Madness: Insanity and Asylums of
Bengal in Nineteenth-century India
Debjani Das
Print publication date: 2015
Print ISBN-13: 9780199458875
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199458875.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) Houses of Madness (p.ii)
(p.iii) Houses of Madness
(p.iv)
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Title Pages
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Dedication
Houses of Madness: Insanity and Asylums of
Bengal in Nineteenth-century India
Debjani Das
Print publication date: 2015
Print ISBN-13: 9780199458875
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199458875.001.0001
Dedication
(p.v) To
Kublai and Kopsia (p.vi)
Page 1 of 1
Illustrations
Houses of Madness: Insanity and Asylums of
Bengal in Nineteenth-century India
Debjani Das
Print publication date: 2015
Print ISBN-13: 9780199458875
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199458875.001.0001
(p.ix) Illustrations
Figures
1.1 Dullunda Asylum 54
1.2 Diagram of Patna Lunatic Asylum Showing the ‘Female Ward’ 58
1.3 Diagram of Patna Lunatic Asylum Showing the ‘Male Ward’ 58
1.4 Diagram of Dacca Lunatic Asylum, 1805 61
1.5 Diagram of Dacca Lunatic Asylum, as Proposed in 1819 63
1.6 Dacca Asylum: Proposal by Surgeon of the 24 Parganas 65
Maps
1.1 Bengal Presidency during the Mid-nineteenth Century 15
1.2 Calcutta, 1893 35
(p.x)
Page 1 of 1
Acknowledgements
Houses of Madness: Insanity and Asylums of
Bengal in Nineteenth-century India
Debjani Das
Print publication date: 2015
Print ISBN-13: 9780199458875
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199458875.001.0001
(p.xiii) Acknowledgements
THE COMPLETION OF THIS BOOK would have been impossible without the
constant assistance, guidance, and support of many who have patiently been by
my side all these years. I would like to take this opportunity to dearly and
sincerely thank them all. I am especially grateful to my supervisor, Professor
Tanika Sarkar, for her incisive comments and invaluable suggestions. Her
insistence that I discuss, analyse, write, and rewrite at every stage helped me to
explore a wide range of possibilities. I am thankful to Dr Biswamoy Pati, Dr
Mridula Ramanna, Professor Kunal Chakrabarti, and Professor Deepak Kumar
for their valuable suggestions and comments.
Adopting the assistance of different disciplines is an essential tool and I wish to
thank my friend Kausik Ghosh at the Department of Geography and Environment
Management, Vidyasagar University, for drawing the maps in this book. I would
also like to thank my colleague Kaushik Ghosh, architect and urban planner, for
drawing the diagrams, which will help readers have an idea of the nineteenth-
century asylum plans. A word of sincere thanks also to the publisher, copy-editor,
and two reviewers whose suggestions helped me a lot.
I am grateful to the staff and archivists of the West Bengal State Archives,
Kolkata; the National Library, Kolkata; Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, Kolkata; the
National Archives of India, New Delhi; the Teen Murti Library, New Delhi; the
Central Secretariat Library, New Delhi; the National Medical Library, New Delhi;
Jawaharlal Nehru University, (p.xiv) New Delhi; the British Library, London; and
the Wellcome Library, London.
I am indebted to my parents, my parents-in-law, and to my sister-in-law,
Manjusha. I would like to take this opportunity to dearly thank my friends,
including Mamta, Uma, Sarani, Jagori, Shewli, Sovanjan, and Subhajit, who were
there patiently by my side through all the ups and downs and have accepted me
Page 1 of 2
Acknowledgements
the way I am. I am also lovingly thankful to Timur, who silently cheers me up at
all times. Discussions with my friends Shilpi Rajpal and Erica Wald have always
been encouraging; their comments and suggestions have made me rethink my
work on several occasions. I also take this opportunity to thank my colleague
Gautam Chando Roy in whom I have found a wonderful friend. Through several
discussions, he has made me think about aspects of social history, which have
helped me immensely. He constantly supports, encourages, and inspires me to
think, write, and do research.
Any work can never excel without positive and discerning criticisms. Deep
Kanta, my husband, is my best critic. Discussions with him have always been the
most knowledgeable experience. He always makes me think and question my
work, and I have benefitted greatly from him.
My final and greatest debt is to my brother, Dhiman, without whom neither
would I have thought of writing this book nor would I have been what I am
today.
Page 2 of 2
Tables
Houses of Madness: Insanity and Asylums of
Bengal in Nineteenth-century India
Debjani Das
Print publication date: 2015
Print ISBN-13: 9780199458875
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199458875.001.0001
(p.xi) Tables
3.1 Annual Returns of ‘Native’ Female Insane Patients Treated in the
Asylum at Dullunda during the Year 1862, Showing ‘Unknown’ Cases 131
3.2 Annual Returns of Patients Treated in the Dacca Asylum during the
Year 1865, Showing Complications in Female Inmates Caused Due to
‘Cachexia’ 149
3.3 Report on Women Admitted at the Dullunda Asylum in 1865 Showing
Female Inmates Who Died Due to ‘Asthenia’ 156
3.4 Cases of Monomania, Imbecility, Dementia, and Melancholia among
Female Inmates at Dullunda Asylum during the Year 1862 167
3.5 Cases of Mania among Female Inmates at the Moorshedabad Asylum
during the Year 1862 170
3.6 Different Types of Insanity among Men and Women, Patna Lunatic
Asylum, 1862 170
3.7 Casualty List, History, and Post-mortem Appearances of Three Female
Inmates at the Dacca Lunatic Asylum in 1862 189
(p.xii) 4.1 List of ‘Recovered’ Women Patients Who Were Employed in
Various Duties in the Dullunda Asylum 222
4.2 A Comparative Statement Showing the Existing Scale of Pay until
1860 and the New Proposed Scale of Establishment for the Asylum for
‘Native’ Insane Patients at Dullunda, near Fort William 231
4.3 Present (1860) and Proposed Pay of the ‘Native’ Workers of the
Asylum 237
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Introduction
Houses of Madness: Insanity and Asylums of
Bengal in Nineteenth-century India
Debjani Das
Print publication date: 2015
Print ISBN-13: 9780199458875
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199458875.001.0001
Introduction
Debjani Das
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199458875.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
The historiography of ‘colonial psychiatry’ has opened up a broad scope of
subject areas in mental illness and asylum practices. The introduction looks at
some of the scholarly work done on insanity and asylums of India, America, and
Europe in the nineteenth century. It focuses on the nineteenth century as this
was the period when various definitions of insanity evolved, several asylums
were built in India, and rules, regulations, and acts were passed to govern the
mentally ill.
Keywords:   colonial psychiatry, mental illness, asylum practices, asylums, asylum rules
Yes!
Mental Illness is Treatable
Mental Health Week
(Advertisement, Times of India, 8–14 December 2010, New Delhi edition)
THIS ADVERTISEMENT IN A NEWSPAPER was published by the Government of
India along with a week-long schedule of mental illness awareness campaigns.
Its various activities included painting competitions, poster exhibitions, and
street plays highlighting issues surrounding mental illness and discussions on
‘identification and management of common mental diseases’. This showed the
government’s initiative to address mental illness and also to make its citizens
aware of the malady, which is curable. Also, by publicizing the event, the
government made an effort to break the taboo associated with mental illnesses
in India. It reached out to the maximum number of people through several
programmes based on community engagements. It assured the public that
Page 1 of 11
Introduction
mental illness was curable like any other disease. Such an awareness campaign,
therefore, highlighted the beneficial measures adopted by the government to
address issues of mental health. It also showed the need to control and curb
problems related to it. In the present day, mental illness is a cause of alarm as
many people, both in developed and developing countries, are increasingly being
diagnosed with the problem. In post-Independence India, issues of mental health
were addressed not only in mental hospitals or psychiatric institutions, but also
through several non-governmental (p.2) organizations; for instance, in recent
years, two very significant non- governmental organizations working on
community mental health problems are The Banyan Tree in Chennai and Iswar
Sankalpa in Kolkata. In the treatment of mental illness, the difference between
the functioning of a government-run institution and a non-governmental
organization is that while the former particularly limits itself to the treatment of
patients once they are admitted, the latter engages itself more with the
community at large. In doing so, these organizations try to reach out to the
community, take initiatives to locate homeless persons suffering from mental
illnesses, admit them at their treatment shelters, and at the end of the treatment
regime, not only take steps to return the patients to their families but also very
effectively continue with their post-treatment care. Mental patients are admitted
into such homes or shelters either by their family members or by the police. The
government’s engagement with the issue and the gradual involvement of non-
governmental organizations emphasize the relevance and need for awareness of
mental illness even in the present day.
While the Indian government of the twenty-first century attempted to bring
mental illness to public attention by putting an advertisement in a local
newspaper, the authorities in the nineteenth century kept it a private affair
within the closed walls of asylums. Though the present-day government makes
an effort not to associate mental illness with any taboo or shame, but to
recognize it as a disease that is curable if treated on time, the colonial
government tried to cover up the subject as it not only conceived mental illness
as a matter of pity and hopelessness but also did not recognize it as a curable
disease until the end of the nineteenth century.
‘Insane hospitals’ or ‘lunatic asylums’ were terms used in medical records of the
nineteenth century to define institutions where mentally ill individuals were
confined. Patients were admitted into those institutions either by their family
members, friends, acquaintances, or by the police, but always under the
supervision of the Magistrate of the state. A look into the period reveals various
attempts by medical officers of both the East India Company and the colonial
government to understand mental illness. The nineteenth century witnessed the
evolution of several definitions of insanity and the insane, including experiments
on asylum construction. This also led to the proliferation of asylums in India.
Page 2 of 11
Introduction
In particular, this book studies the reasons for the environmental and
geographical locations of the asylums of Bengal. It further analyses how (p.3)
that determined the architecture of asylums and the method of treatment within
them. During the nineteenth century, the definition of insanity was constantly
revised and reframed. Within this context, gender issues played a key role: it
became difficult for the medical practitioners to situate ‘mad’ women. Even
though medical officials found it problematic to define them, possibly because of
the relatively small number of women admitted into asylums, they still
constructed an image of insane women that needs to be questioned.
In Europe and America, a whole body of scholarly work exists and is still being
produced on insanity and mental asylums. These address a range of issues from
treatises on insanity and its definitions to the condition of patients in the
asylums and the acts and policies implemented. Medical literature written by
physicians in England and America during the early nineteenth century is also
extensive. In India, the issue of insanity in the nineteenth century has not been
extensively dealt with, other than very important contributions made to the field
by Waltraud Ernst and James Mills.1 The present work is a new contribution to
the already expanding historiography of colonial psychiatry, as it takes up the
case of the Bengal Presidency, which was very important with Calcutta being the
capital of British India during the nineteenth century. It was here that the first
European Lunatic Asylum was established along with several other ‘native’
asylums, much before they were constructed in any other part of India. Although
there is an extensive literature on the issue in general, there is a particular
dearth of historiography on the area in the case of Bengal; hence, much of this
work is based on primary sources and their interpretations. Since English and
European physicians were in charge of the asylums in Bengal, the medical
literature and references drawn in this work are also based on their
observations on what was happening in England and how they tried to translate
their knowledge into practice in Bengal.
This work concentrates on the nineteenth century as it was the period when
various definitions of insanity evolved, asylums were built in India, (p.4) rules
and regulations were made, and acts on lunacy were also passed to govern the
mentally ill. In England, the beginning of parliamentary enquiries on madhouses
began in 1807, followed by an act to set up public asylums in 1808. Porter has
pointed out that there has been ‘no attempt to create an interpretative synthesis
of English madness before institutionalization became the dynamo of change in
the nineteenth century’.2 Another reason why this study is confined to the
nineteenth century is because it marked the consolidation of British rule in
India. Therefore, it is also necessary to know whether the transfer of power from
the Company to the Crown caused any shift in the understanding of insanity and
its treatment as well as in the laws implemented to control those who were
mentally unfit.
Page 3 of 11