ABSTRACT
This chapter studies the gendered definition of insanity that prevailed in asylums of Bengal Presidency in its lower provinces during the nineteenth century. Those asylums included European Lunatic Asylum and ‘native’ asylums. In doing so, it looks into the social composition of men and women admitted into those asylums and the varied outlook of the asylum practitioners in diagnosing mental illnesses of both sexes. Asylums were yet another place where labour, an important means of asylums’ occupational therapy, was also gendered: labour performed by men differed from women. The paper argues that symptoms and characteristics of insanity of both ‘native’ and European women were marked by medical practitioners on similar edge. Thus, approach to gendered insanity exceeded notions of race.
