ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the way the body, especially the still and silent body, has elicited theorizations on the nature of the social and its relationship to selves and bodies. Asking how diagnosing was the site of tacit theorization in early twentieth-century India, it considers connections between psychiatry, colonial rule, documentary knowledge, and politics of knowing. In late colonial India, psychiatrists, often working in carceral institutions, used interlinked concepts such as hysteria, melancholic stupor, and psychocoma to ask how bodies respond to the world. Their diagnostic efforts reinscribed, and in some instances resisted, racialized and gendered moral categories.
