One of the most pertinent questions in relation to any mental hospital is: who were the people who ended up in it? Who were they prior to becoming ‘patients’ with a particular diagnosis attached to them? Were they ‘village idiots’ and ‘half wits’, as is often assumed; ‘the morally disreputable, the poor, and the impotent, […] vagrants, minor criminals, and the physically handicapped’, as the sociologist Andrew Scull suggested in 1979 for the period prior to the mid-nineteenth century in England?1 Or were they dangerous psychopaths, religious fanatics and ‘mad axmen’, as many fear when they hastily walk past a mental institution? Were the inmates merely somewhat strange ‘eccentrics’ who had developed the Indian version of the British colonials’ ‘doolally tap’ syndrome where they went ‘pagal’ (‘mad’)? Were they just a mixed bag of inconvenient family members and depressed women, political rebels, uncooperative Indian princes or intractable tribals who were locked away?

Evidence for each of these characterisations can be found in hospital records and medical, official and patient accounts all over the world. Sociohistorical analyses that set themselves apart from previously preferred ‘Whig’ narratives that celebrated the progress of biomedicine in Western science-based psychiatry have tended to focus on mental institutions as means of social, political and gender control, where formerly autonomous people were forced into the role of the ‘passive patient’.