A Difficult and Necessary Place

Instead of reforming mental hospitals, India is shutting them down

- Alok Sarin

THE year was 1857. On the 11th of May, a straggling bunch of mutineers were coming from the not-so-distant city of Meerut, approaching the gates of the walled city of Delhi. The first ‘official’ structure they see is the mental hospital. This is outside the gates of the city, by the banks of the Yamuna, approximately where the Maulana Azad Medical College stands today. Remember that the river used to flow where the newspaper offices are located today. The significance of the date will escape nobody.

This was the first act of rebellion in India’s war of Independence—the ransacking of the mental hospital of Delhi and the ‘liberation’ of the 100-odd inmates of the hospital. History has not been kind either to the institution or its inhabitants. This act of rebellion is perhaps not celebrated as it should be, and what is completely missing is the fate of those who were liberated from the hospital. One record says “...all the patients either escaped or were set free, and were never recovered. In all probability the greater number of these perished miserably in the subsequent siege of Delhi or in the fighting before or within the walls of the city.”

This remains a defining characteristic of the mental hospital across generations.

The mental hospital remains a part of cultural discourse throughout the history of India. It may be of interest to students of literature that Saadat Hasan Manto, arguably one of the greatest of storytellers, locates the iconic tale of Toba Tek Singh in the Lahore mental hospital. The tale of the partitioning of the hospital in Manto’s story is based on a historical fact. Fiction sometimes is based on strange histories.

The story of Tezpur also needs recounting.