Harrison on Mills

Is there such a thing as “colonial power”? James Mills thinks that there is not. “Power is everywhere”, he argues, and “attaching too much significance to naming it at any one moment obscures this fact. Colonial power is not really colonial power, medical power is not really medical power, and so on” (p.185). This, perhaps, is the central message of Madness, Cannabis and Colonialism : that historical actors are autonomous individuals whose actions cannot be understood simply in terms of prevailing structures of power, be they colonial, medical, or otherwise. Thus the individual, argues Mills, can act in creative ways outside prevailing systems of cultural, social and political power.

Mills thus avoids many of the simplistic dichotomies that have marred some recent scholarship on what has become known as “colonial medicine”; indeed some of his conclusions tend to subvert the concept itself. He takes issue, for example, with Megan Vaughan’s study of colonial psychiatry ( Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness, Oxford: Polity, 1991), which concluded that “colonial power” created objects rather than subjects, and did not operate through individual subjectivities, like the power described in Foucault’s writings. Colonial medicine and colonial states were thus intrinsically different from their counterparts in Europe, she argued. Mills, however, uses the rich archive of lunatic asylums to demonstrate that colonial psychiatry, in British India at least, sought to shape individual subjectivities in much the same way as asylums in Britain. Asylum superintendents used techniques such as moral management, like their counterparts in Britain, to create individuals who were productive and self-disciplined. Furthermore, they varied their treatment regimes in accordance with the “the peculiar idiosyncrasies of the various patients,” as one asylum superintendent put it (p.128).

Mills also take a rather different view of lunatic asylums than most of those who have written on British India. He takes issue, for example with S. Sharma ( Mental Hospitals in India, New Delhi: Directorate General of Health Services, 1990) and Waltraud Ernst ( Mad Tales from Raj, London: Routledge, 1991) who argue that Indian asylums were merely places of detention, in which socially disruptive elements could be contained. Mills acknowledges that the vast majority of those admitted to Indian asylums would probably not, today, be regarded as mentally ill, and that many were admitted simply because they did not fit easily into colonial society. For example, many of those incarcerated in Indian asylums were allegedly driven mad by their excessive use of cannabis, which, since the uprising of 1857, had been increasingly associated with violence and disorder. However, Mills argues persuasively that asylums were as much places of treatment as of detention. Lunatic asylums were one of the few places where the British came regularly into contact with Indians and, as such, provided a rare opportunity to both observe and reform the subject population. “Recovery” was said to have occurred when the patient showed the capacity for self-regulation.

But as Mills clearly demonstrates, there was a world of difference between intentions and results. European medical officers were rarely in permanent attendance, since most were civil surgeons for whom asylum management was merely one of many duties. This meant that much depended on the attitudes of Indian subordinate staff, some of whom performed their tasks reliably, whilst others distorted or thwarted the aims of their British superiors. Some, for instance, perpetrated acts of violence against patients, which subverted the general principle of the humane but firm treatment of the insane — the main principle of asylum management in Europe. But British staff also relied from time to time on physical restraint and punishments that aimed to shame the individual into conformity. Despite this, many of those committed to asylums proved resistant to medical authority and persisted in practices, such as masturbation, which undermined Western norms of discipline and order. However, to see such acts simply as resistance to either colonial or medical authority would be too simplistic, according to...