Crossing the Boundaries of ‘Colonial Psychiatry’. Reflections on the Development of Psychiatry in British India,c. 1870–1940

This article explores the development of psychiatric institutions within the context of British colonial rule in India, in particular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Existing scholarship on ‘colonial medicine’ has tended to focus on colonial power and hegemony and the British endeavour to ‘colonize the Indian body’ during the nineteenth century. It is suggested here that reference to ‘colonial’ medicine and psychiatry tends to reify the ideology of colonialism and neglect other important dimensions such as the role of international scientific networks and the mental hospital as the locus of care and medicalization. From the later period of British colonial engagement in south Asia, people’s right and entitlement to medical care and the colonial state’s obligation to provide institutional treatment facilities received increased attention. As the early twentieth-century case of an Indian hospital superintendent shows, practitioners’ professional ambitions went beyond the confines of ‘colonial psychiatry’. He practiced in his institution science-based psychiatry, drawing on models and treatment paradigms that were then prevalent in a variety of countries around the globe.