Lunatic Asylums in Colonial Bombay: Shackled bodies, unchained minds by Sarah Ann Pinto (review)

For many years, historians and scholars working on colonial India overlooked the history of health and medicine. However, in the past couple of decades, the field has received significant attention. This is reflected in the rising number of works on public health in colonial India. A few major themes dominate the secondary literature on public health and medicine in colonial India—the triangle of disease, health and medicine has been studied from many perspectives. The field of mental health histories has received less attention from scholars working on history of medicine and public health. Sarah Pinto's book is one of the first attempts to study the social history of lunatic asylums in the Bombay Presidency, and she approaches her study through an analysis of Indigenous responses to these colonial institutions. The book is based on the author's doctoral thesis submitted at the Victoria University at Wellington, New Zealand.

Pinto begins by looking at the existing historiography on lunatic asylums from a global perspective. She provides a brief but comprehensive overview of the various themes that dominate mental health histories such as the history of psychiatry; psychiatry as a means of social control in the colonies; interconnections between race, madness and crime; the extent of mental health infrastructure; and the dynamics between traditional healing systems and Western psychiatry. In the second chapter, Pinto argues, "the lunatic asylum system had become a failed colonial enterprise" (31) in India because the "British established asylums in an ideological setting hostile to its growth" (36). The colonial mental health institutions remained peripheral because the colonizers discarded Indian belief systems and existing traditional methods of treatment.

In Chapter Three, the author elaborates on the structure of administration in the colonial asylums. Using the concept of the "middle ground" as suggested by Richard White, the author argues that in the colonial asylums of Bombay Presidency, the interaction and negotiations between the British and the Indian worlds "affected the colonial hegemonic project" (63). Considering the resistance and disapproval displayed by the Native population toward Western psychiatry as a method of treatment, the European superintendents at the asylums resorted to "hybridised methods of treatment within the asylum" (92) based on their common sense and their daily experiences at the asylum. By providing a variety of examples, the author highlights that the constant power struggle between the colonial state, the penal department and the medical professionals employed at the asylums had a direct negative impact on the efficient functioning of these institutions. Later in the chapter, Pinto moves beyond a coloniser-versus-colonised conflict and also sheds light on the effects of the existing class and caste inequalities within the Indian society on the administration and governance of the lunatic asylums.

The fourth chapter elaborates on the three types of treatments employed at the asylums in Bombay Presidency: clothing, diet and occupation. Pinto effectively traces the agendas of the colonial state in the implementation of these treatments and the complex responses on the part of the patients admitted into the lunatic asylums. Citing the example of the appointment of a separate Brahmin cook in 1911 for upper-caste patients, the author demonstrates how the asylum staff encouraged "patients to practice caste prejudices around food" (113). Chapter Five offers a detailed look at the noisy and chaotic soundscape, which was a dominant characteristic of Bombay's asylums. Pinto argues that the financial conservatism displayed by the colonial state resulted in the limited use of padded rooms, which were considered both "cost ineffective and high maintenance" (133); and this in turn resulted in poor sound management of the asylums. The author engages with a number of detailed case studies, to illustrate ways in which the colonial state manipulated, suppressed and muted the voices of the patients.

In the final chapter, the author looks at the reports published by the local press to understand and analyse the public perception of the lunatic asylums in the presidency. In her analysis, Pinto identifies that the custodial nature and the...