European madness and gender in nineteenth-century British India.

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore whether gender was a linchpin in the construction of Europeans' mental health in nineteenth-century British India. A relational model of gender will be employed which places emphasis on the complementarity of men's and women's mental problems within the socio-economic, political and cultural confines of nineteenth-century colonialism. The postulate of a 'female malady' which has been promulgated in recent accounts of women's mental health will be shown to be inapplicable in the context of the raj. Instead a reading of the history of mental health in nineteenth-century British India will be suggested which sees different kinds of 'madness' coexisting alongside each other, merely incorporating assumptions about gender relations rather than exemplifying any one exclusively female construct of 'madness'. The primary sources will be female and male patients' case stories and statistics produced in European lunatic asylums in India and England.