ABSTRACT
The creation of physical and social distance between ruler and ruled has been identified as a pillar of colonial power relations in British India. The spatial expression of madness in British India was defined both by race and issues of social class, caste, and communal background. The gradual medicalisation of institutional space and management followed relatively close behind the steady stigmatisation of madness. The gradually hardening stigma bound up with mental illness will be traced alongside the tendency to increase the geographical distance between the centres of important conurbations and the chosen locations for asylum buildings during the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Local modifications in the implementation of social and racial distance among asylum inmates will be related to the locale-specific commercial and cultural relationships between the ruling and particular ‘ruled’ elite groups.
