SASNET Seminar with Shilpi Rajpal: "The Making of Modern Indian Psychiatry"

"The Making of Modern Indian Psychiatry - Nationalization and Internationalization of Mental Health Policies"

About the seminar

In the 1960s and 1970s, India was a major partner in several studies conducted by the World Health Organisation, whose Mental Health Division formulated the National Programmes of Mental Health. A 1974 WHO expert committee meeting in Addis Abeba called and pushed forward the priority for mental health care in developing countries. The program was launched in seven countries. including Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, India, Philippines, Senegal and Sudan.  India was one of the first countries to follow the WHO guidelines to set up the National Programmes of Mental Health.

In her research, Shilpi Rajpal assesses psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers 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 postcolonialism. She investigates their role and responsibilities as they acted as allies and other times as opponents in planning, operating and executing national schemes and international policies.  

Some of these figures include K C. Dube (former Director of The Agra Mental Hospital),  N. N. Wig (closely associated with the WHO), Kirpal Singh (military psychiatrist), Erna Martha Hoch (Swiss psychiatrist who worked in Kashmir), Roshen S. Master (well known for her radio-shows on destigmatizing mental illness and also member of the World Psychiatric Association), Jaswanth Singh Neki (former Director of Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education & Research, Chandigarh) and David Satyanand (the first Head Of Department of All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi). This research contextualizes the longue durée processes whereby these historical actors carried the beacon for both their professional growth and to fulfill altruistic desires of providing better mental healthcare infrastructure in India.

About the lecturer

Shilpi Rajpal is primarily a social historian of psychiatry in India and an ERC postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Culture and the Mind at the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on the local, national, and global histories of psychiatry in colonial and post-colonial India. 

Her previous work, 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. The book 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.