Where was a person who “went mad” sent to in the second half of the 19th century? This short article engages with this question by exploring the Cuttack Lunatic Asylum that was established in February, 1864. The colonial context, the taking over of India by the Crown (1858) and the setting-up of a system of governance that had led to the enforcement of the first Lunacy Act in India in 1858 are major milestones that were associated with this process.

It needs to be noted that the colonial system located the lunatic asylums as sites that segregated the “lunatics”. Thus, the “insane people” were arrested and confined for the safety of society and not for their treatment. Naturally, the Cuttack Jail (which was until a few years ago on Jail Road, Cuttack) served the initial purpose. The taking over of India by the Crown in 1858 and the installation of governance contributed to the predictable expansion of the Cuttack Jail to accommodate the lunatic asylum. Though we are not told anything about the labour obtained for this purpose, it would be difficult to imagine that the inmates of the jail were not involved with the construction of the lunatic asylum. The Annual Report of 1864 mentioned that the lunatic asylum comprised two double and four single wards for males and one double and two single wards for females. It was a building adjoining the jail, which made half the asylum compound “very damp” and “somewhat unhealthy”. As for “conservancy”, the patients defecated in these rooms, and the faeces got drained out through a hole in the wall and accumulated in a gamla (bucket) placed under this hole outside. Thus each ward became a nightly privy, and the inmates slept alongside their own defecation till the ward was cleaned at about 4pm the next day. The diet given to the inmates was the same as what was provided to labouring prisoners in the jail.

Even a superficial analysis of some of the lunatic asylum reports shows how the Cuttack Jail haunted the lunatic asylum like a nightmare. Its location, the living conditions of the criminalised inmates, the transfer of “criminal lunatics” from the jail to the asylum, the absence of a woman guard for the female ward, the environment and even drinking water and the food supplied were clearly on the lines of the Cuttack Jail. As asserted, a hospital was not required for the asylum and that labour was not being extracted forcibly. Here the ideas about the poor being lazy and the therapeutic component associated with work — an oft repeated point — need to be noted. One can also refer to the inmates being made to push the oil press that seems to have existed from the early years, though the first reference to it is from the report for 1877.

The repressive and coercive components are of course visible when it comes to the reference related to “coolie” labour, the police sub-inspector helping himself to take away the ornaments of a woman before she was admitted to the asylum, and the functioning of the Soro police station. Although the colonial administration could have defended itself by pointing its finger at a brown sub-ordinate who had taken away the woman’s ornaments, or the Soro police station actually returning Bustam Das Rs 100, these had deeper implications. Thus, these reflected how a criminalised “lunatic” was perceived and the fluid boundary between the jail and asylum. Even the “recovered lunatics”, were provided meagre resources based on philanthropic ideas, but especially to ensure that they — being poor — did not steal and pose any danger to the public on their return journey. Given the existing conditions the question of admitting a white man to the asylum was unimaginable given the logic of race associated with a colonial power. After all, a white man going “mad” and admitted to the asylum could undermine the power and prestige of the empire.

As for the inmates, it included Hindus and Muslims, along with some Christians. The classification of the insane illustrates the fears and insecurities of the colonial administration vis-a-vis “mobile people” such as the mendicants, the fakirs and the low castes/untouchables or tribals that can be traced to the 1857 rebellion. Thus, the inmates comprised predominantly of the poor and marginal sections like beggars, “coolies” and fakirs. The inmates from the “jungles” of the “tributary mahals” who were tribals were clearly stereotyped as the “other” in the way the report of 1865 described them. Many were from far-off places such as Oudh, Benaras, Sarun, Nagpur, Madras, Mysore, Muzaffarnagar and Nepal. The “pilgrim traffic” associated with Puri needs to be borne in mind to explain this. The agonies and the sufferings of the inmates led to suicides (1872) and also attempts to escape. Needless to say, these were occasioned by the exposure to the brutalities in the district jails or the Cuttack Jail as “criminal lunatics”, or in the lunatic asylum, where some of these practices had continued. 

How did the colonial health administration, supposedly guided by science, explain “madness”? The list of causes contained “ganja and dissipation”, “physical causes”, “hereditary”, “jungle fever”, “moral causes”, “jealousy”, “religious excitement”, “loss of property”, “grief’”, “fright”, “family quarrel”, “masturbation/excessive sex” and “unknown causes”. 

In fact, the links between “madness” with ganja assumed the form of a knowledge system. Nevertheless, a connection was also established between “starvation” and the insanity of three inmates, especially during the Naanka famine.

Of course, the gender angle implied that women were supposed to be more prone to “madness” than men. Besides, “lunacy” was connected with “heredity” in the case of women. Alongside, some new “heads” were introduced over the 1890s to explain insanity among women such as “menstrual disorder”, “childbirth” and defective “uterine function”. These reflect the way in which patriarchal, upper-caste notions interacted with Victorian morality to generate a discourse that influenced the colonial medical and administrative establishment.

The data provided by the Census of 1871-72, quantified the meagre number of the “insane”, and the absence of any real threat from the “insane”. This made the colonial government disinterested in spending on a lunatic asylum which housed the poor and marginal sections. In fact, the Cuttack Lunatic Asylum was closed down on March 30, 1906 and predictably, it was merged with the jail building. As seen, the colonial rulers did not like to spend resources on the health of the poor — a phenomenon that is shamelessly emulated even today. Similarly, the continuities in human attitudes vis-a-vis “mad” people in the present-day seem particularly striking.