ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the impact of ‘race’ on the development of institutions for the mentally ill in Calcutta, Madras (Chennai) and Bombay (Mumbai) during the time of the East India Company. 1 Diversity in institutional development in these three presidencies was closely bound up not only with different approaches to colonial administration, but also with different attitudes towards ‘race’ in these localities. The institutions were subject to the specific histories, social conditions and racial interactions in each of the three main presidencies. Medical institutions such as lunatic asylums could not simply be transplanted to colonial India to be imposed upon its different peoples. Rather, they had to respond and be adapted to the particular local circumstances, and thus to various racial and social sensibilities. There was no single prototype of a ‘colonial madhouse’, just as it would be difficult to discern one monochrome ‘colonial condition’ or one universal concept of ‘race’. This implies a need for analysis of how the medical gaze and the discourse of colonial power acquired some of the perspectives and vernaculars extant at specific localities, and accommodated to a multitude of dialogues and discourses of resistance that articulated various social and cultural sensitivities, and commercial and political rationales. This also highlights the importance of contextualising any particular racial discourse and placing it ‘in the conditions surrounding the moment of its enunciation’. 2
