Quotidian Madness: Time, Management and Asylums in Colonial North India, c. 1850–1947

Abstract

This article focuses on the ‘internal’ histories of the lunatic asylums in colonial north India. It looks closely at the asylums in the Punjab and the United Provinces. The routinized life of the inmates revolved around ‘employment and amusement’, ‘diet and space’, ‘reform and reward’ and ‘resistance and adjustment’. The trope of the mundane provides a microscopic lens to delve deeper into the banal social lives of inmates behind the asylum walls. Work was emphasized for its therapeutic value but profits were central in order to make asylums self-sufficient. Work, in fact, became the yardstick on which a patient’s recovery was measured, and insanity was conceptualized as curable or incurable. An investigation into diet and recreation patterns helps construct the social history of psychiatry in colonial India. The complex temporal and spatial materialities of everyday lives inside the asylum are studied here in order to comprehend the role played by various actors and discern how authority was constantly reordered and redefined.