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...