Madness, Cannabis, and Colonialism: The "Native Only" Lunatic Asylums of British India, 1857-1900 (review)

James Mills suggests in his introduction that while colonial asylums in India were meant to control and regulate itinerant and dangerous Indians, they became in reality arenas for contestation and resistance to alien rule. This is developed into a more sophisticated discussion of the interplay of knowledge, power, and agency in the final sections. Here Mills concurs with the important point raised in recent debates about postcolonial histories that it would be anachronistic, and indeed would amount to the reification of the power of colonialism, if contestation and resistance to Western ideas and colonial institutions were taken as the sole indicators of authentic autonomy in colonial subjects. Even those confined within the walls of the colonial lunatic asylum "could make decisions about their own interaction with the world without regard for their position as subjects of colonial power" (p. 173).

However, the main chapters are much less sophisticated than the statements made in the last few pages of the book might suggest. Here the interpretation of the evidence is at times annoyingly simplistic, based on inaccurate details and insufficiently contextualized. In the second chapter, where Mills sets out to demystify the contemporary British (mis)conception that lunatic asylums in India were filled with ganja smokers, he fails to put the public debates and official inquiries into the wider context of the concurrent debates and campaigns about the moral justification and economic necessity of the British-Indian government's opium-trade monopoly, and the impact of the earlier Opium Wars on public perceptions and government policies. This omission is particularly puzzling because analyses of the opium trade and the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report, as well as of the interrelated nature of the arguments put forward in regard to both, have been available since at least the 1960s—and relevant primary sources can now easily be downloaded from Internet source sites.

Lack of attention to detail and contextualization are evident, too, in regard to asylum reports and case notes in Bengal. These were at the time skewed toward management and treatment practices in Dr. Payne's institution at Dullunda, not least because the O'Kinealy Committee singled it out for its investigation into medical expenditure and other issues in 1878-79. Reference to the point that Dr. Payne was a controversial figure who was criticized by a number of his colleagues as well as by the colonial government for his harsh, disciplinary, and prejudiced attitudes and practices might have helped to substantiate further the point made by Mills in the last sections of his book: namely, that a range of at times contradictory ideas and treatments prevailed during this period, and that a significant number of practitioners may well have been humanely inclined toward their patients. Just as not all actions by colonial subjects ought to be judged only in relation to issues of colonial power, so in the case of British medical practitioners, too, other than merely colonialist and medico-hegemonic motives may need to be acknowledged and explored.

Occasionally Mills constructs straw men of other authors' work. For example, in the chapter on the "disciplining" of Indian populations by the colonial state and medical authorities, he rejects the suggestion that admission came to be restricted exclusively to those who were violent or seen as a threat to Europeans (p. 102)—although this suggestion was never made in such a simplistic manner; instead, Mills rightly argues that "the process by which an individual came to be in the case notes was far from being a well-defined one and was likely to be the result of a series of local decisions and contingencies" (p. 102). Similarly, in the chapter on asylum treatment regimes Mills wrongly points the finger at others for characterizing lunatic asylums...