Research profile: Shilpi Rajpal

Decolonising the Mind: Birth of the Global Mental Health Movement in India, 1920 - 1980s

I am primarily a social historian of psychiatry and I have taught legal history, social history and gender studies along with the history of medicine at both the Bachelors's and Masters's levels at the Department of History, University of Delhi and the Department of History and Culture, Jamia Millia Islamia, India.

My previous research 'Curing Madness? A Social and Cultural History of Insanity in North India, 1800-1950s', was published in December 2020 by Oxford University Press, New Delhi. Curing Madness focuses on both institutional and non-institutional histories of madness in colonial North India. ‘Madness’ and ‘cure’ are explored as shifting categories, which travelled across cultural, medical, national, and regional boundaries, thereby moving beyond asylum-centric histories. It probes the worlds of social histories of medicine and culture as pivotal entry points into understanding ‘madness’ and ‘deviancy’ in colonial asylum records. It is the first scholarly work to bring together institutional and non-institutional histories of insanity by focussing on the vernacular resonance of the western psychiatric repertoire within the Hindi medical literature. The book unmasks the irrationalities of colonialism and nationalism by contextualising the social, cultural and political frames in which racial, primordial, psychic, spiritual and psychiatric understandings of madness enmeshed resulting in a peculiar milieu. The book is based on a wide range of sources, such as governmental records, case registers, and medical literature published in vernacular languages, across India, Pakistan and the UK.

Current Research

This project traces the local, national and global histories of psychiatry in colonial and post-colonial India. The process of decolonisation of psychiatry was sluggish and unplanned in India. Given the rise of internationalism, Indian psychiatrists were influenced by the American, Soviet and West European models of psychiatry and psychiatric education. On the other hand, Western psychiatrists and psychologists (from the USA, the UK, Soviet Union, Europe and Canada) unrelentingly made scientific enquiries in India allowing it to become a model disciplinary site in South Asia. International trends such as psychoanalysis and the mental hygiene movement provided the much-needed initial impetus for India to connect with the growing movement of transcultural psychiatry. The forming of the Indian psychiatric society and the role it eventually played will be critically investigated in the dissemination of psychiatric knowledge.

This bilateral exchange of knowledge had become a hallmark of the decolonisation of psychiatry in India. This study locates India as a significant partner within the global exchange of knowledge formation of the sciences of the mind. It will be novel in terms of methodology, context and sources and will fill a major lacuna in the present historiography of the decolonisation of global mental health. The research will locate psychiatrists and psychologists as political, social and intellectual cohorts who played a significant role in redrawing the landscape and language of madness during this transition from colonialism to post-colonialism.

Engagement with DECOLMAD

DECOLMAD offers an exciting entry point to write the history of decolonisation of psychiatry and looks closely at the development of transcultural psychiatry in India and beyond. My intervention will contextualise the historical and cultural specificities related to India in delineating the global transcultural mental health movement. By looking at the archives it will compare the realities and exigencies of decolonised nations like India alongside the growing international movement that often overlooked local difficulties in the Global South.  The focus will be on writing a macro history of the policies of governance through mental health initiatives, processes such as acculturation and the resultant knowledge exchange between the East and the West and the West and the East. The end of WWII saw quixotically prioritising ‘internationalism’ over ‘nationalism’, and ‘humanism’ over ‘individualism’. The universalisation of human beings and their mindscape was seen as some sort of resolution since the world was increasingly getting divided into belligerent segments.

The DECOLMAD focuses on subsequent resolutions that took shape in the form of the International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia (IPSS) and a mental health unit of WHO that was set up at Agra in 1966. By locating these global initiatives in local spaces, the research will extend the frontiers of DECOLMAD and evaluate epistemological shifts in psychiatric knowledge production. Moreover, patients’ histories and the case histories of ‘schizophrenic patients’ will be assessed critically in light of new developments in transcultural psychiatry. The research will carefully scrutinize the growth of clinical acumen and unravel multiple voices of the patient, practitioner and kin of patients. It will investigate the hegemonic/imperial role played by Western psychiatry to unravel the underlying tensions of the decolonization process. It will attempt to comprehend and contextualize various meanings of decolonization in both the metropole and colonies.