Keywords
Social and Political Control
Female Malady
Gendered Diagnosis
Race and Medicine
How to Cite
Abstract
This study explores how gender, race, and imperial authority shaped colonial mental health practices in India during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly as tools for enforcing moral and social control. In the colonial context, insanity functioned less as a medical condition and more as a means to discipline individuals who challenged imperial order or defied established gender expectations. Women were frequently confined for behaviors deemed morally improper—such as disobedience, widowhood, infertility, infanticide, or sexual nonconformity—while men’s mental illnesses were typically linked to occupational stress, violence, idleness, or physical decline. Mental asylums became spaces where colonial and indigenous gender ideologies intersected, transforming women’s grief, trauma, and defiance into clinical symptoms of insanity that ultimately reinforced patriarchal and imperial hierarchies. Racial distinctions also determined treatment outcomes: European women were often repatriated or provided with private care, whereas Indian women were institutionalized, serving as symbols of cultural inferiority. Through analyzing how madness and gender were defined and treated, this paper argues that colonial psychiatry in India embodied the power relations of empire. It reveals how women’s suffering and dissent were pathologized as madness to sustain racial and social dominance. The study concludes that colonial mental health practices were deeply entangled with political authority and gendered moral governance rather than purely medical intentions.
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