Abstract

This book focuses on the Ranchi Indian Mental Hospital, the largest public psychiatric facility in colonial India during the 1920s and 1930s. It breaks new ground by offering unique material for a critical engagement with the phenomenon of the ‘indigenisation’ or ‘Indianisation’ of the colonial medical services and the significance of international professional networks. The work also provides a detailed assessment of the role of gender and race in this field, and of Western and culturally specific medical treatments and diagnoses. The volume offers an unprecedented look at both the local and global factors that had a strong bearing on hospital management and psychiatric treatment at this institution.

Waltraud Ernst is Professor in the History of Medicine in the Department of History, Philosophy and Religion at Oxford Brookes University, UK.

‘An in-depth account wherein individual and institutional histories coalesce, a work of honest scholarship which will be useful for medical historians, sociologists and lay readers alike.’ —Deepak Kumar, Jawaharlal Nehru University

‘Waltraud Ernst offers us a major new contribution [and] by far the most detailed and insightful account of a mental hospital for Indians produced to date. […] [Ernst is] a leading light in this field.’ —Christopher Harding, ‘Social History of Medicine’

Psychiatry in India during the nineteenth century has hitherto been represented as an essentially ‘colonial’ psychiatry, permanently and intrinsically linked with the British civilising mission and British control over India. This book is the first comprehensive case study of an early twentieth-century Indian mental hospital that was headed by an Indian rather than a British superintendent.

The work explores the ways in which the institution was run, its patient profile, the circumstances of its staff and the treatments administered, all in relation to the regional sociocultural and political context, the wider medical and colonial setting in South Asia, and contemporary global developments in psychiatry.

Themes covered in the work include gender, culture, race and plural clinical practices within the context of medical standardisation. ‘Colonialism and Transnational Psychiatry’ offers an unprecedented look at both the local and global factors that had such a strong bearing on hospital management and psychiatric treatment at this institution. This study of Ranchi sets a standard against which future scholarship will be able to judge the impact of local affairs and transnational connections on a wider range of institutions in, and exchanges between, South Asia, the West and other parts of the world.

 ‘Ernst paints a fascinating picture of a mental hospital in India where doctors and patients struggle with the problems and paradoxes of modernity during an era of dramatic political change and medical innovation on a global scale.’ —Joseph Alter, Pittsburgh University

‘A very important and original contribution to the growing literature on psychiatry and colonialism, notable for its tight focus on a single mental hospital for Indians rather than the imperial ruling class.’ —Andrew Scull, University of California, San Diego