Emergence of a marginal science in a colonial city: Reading psychiatry in Bengali periodicals

Abstract

Psychiatry as a western medical science arrived in India with colonialism. By mid-nineteenth century, lunatic asylums grew around the major metropolitan centres. By the early twentieth century, this new mental science had percolated to the vernacular periodicals of popular science: the focus of this article. It has been argued that the process of vernacularisation opened up new possibilities of an alien science. The cultural negotiation of colonial psych iatry was neither smooth nor seamless enough to establish a new code of norm/abnorm guided by the Enlightenment. Based on the analyses of Bengali texts, it is argued that by transforming itself culturally, psychiatry could challenge a universalistic science by constructing an indigenous theory.