Legal Reforms and Lunacy in Colonial India: Its Representations in History and Literature

The British were involved in the act of passing laws during their reign in colonial India. According to the laws passed in England, a lunatic was described as a person who had lost the use of reason either from grief or any other accident. England was already going through a practice of establishing asylums for the lunatics since the eighteenth century. The first mental hospital in India is recorded to have been established in 1600 by the East India Company. The first asylum in Bombay was established in 1745 and the second asylum was established in Calcutta in 1784. Besides this the passing of the Lunacy laws in England also necessitated the implementation of similar kind of laws for the lunatics in Colonial India as well. According to Waltraud Ernst, around 15- 20 lunatic asylums were built in British India by the late 1840s. However, there was an introduction of Western psychiatry in the field of legal reforms for the lunatics in colonial India in the nineteenth century as well. The process behind the implementation of legal reforms talks about the colonizer’s attempts at regulating the body through various laws. The literary representation of lunacy in colonial India provides the social and other broader aspects of lunacy in a more complicated manner. This paper will try to analyze the various implications of the representation of legal reforms and lunacy in colonial India both in history and literature.