Introduction
Whilst I was in Yangon conducting research on the history of psychiatry in colonial Burma, Burmese scholars and friends, though always enthusiastic and encouraging, had the same sceptical response: ‘you don't expect to find much on that topic, do you?’ Their scepticism was based upon the commonplace assumption that during colonial rule the British had not invested in any meaningful way in facilities for the mentally ill.Footnote 1 Like much received wisdom, this depiction of colonial psychiatry had a kernel of truth to it. Throughout British colonialism in Burma the institutions for treating lunatics were piecemeal, neglected and, in comparison to metropolitan institutions, insignificant. But at the same time the archival material that I was consulting revealed numerous cases of individuals, who for innocuous reasons, found themselves diagnosed as insane and confined.Footnote 2 This raised a difficult question: why did the state intervene to confine people who posed no threat to colonial rule, when treating madness was deemed to be so unimportant?
This paper examines the diagnosis and treatment of the insane in colonial Burma during the late nineteenth century in order to address this problem. As we shall see, the colonial regime's approach to insanity oscillated between overwhelming indifference and excessive intervention. In this, colonial psychiatry was not so different from other areas of colonial medicine in Burma. Atsuko Naono's recent book on the colonial vaccination campaigns against smallpox in Burma shows that, at least before the First World War, they were often underinvested and piecemeal programmes. Nonetheless, the Burmese often saw vaccinations as an unwelcome colonial intervention.Footnote 3 Despite this waxing and waning in state support for the vaccination campaigns, this was one of the more vigorous branches of colonial medicine in Burma.Footnote 4 As David Arnold has shown for British India as a whole, vaccination campaigns were one of the few areas where the colonial state did mobilize its resources to further Western biomedical practices outside the ‘colonial enclaves’ of the army, the prisons, and the European population.Footnote 5 These medical priorities were also apparent in colonial Burma. For instance, health and mortality were viewed as important measures for the success of colonial prisons.Footnote 6 In short, there was an economical deployment of medical power in colonial Burma in which vaccinations against epidemic disease and the health of colonial enclaves had priority. The deployment of psychiatric power was also rationed according to colonial imperatives, but there were distinctive problems that informed these imperatives.
Colonial psychiatry was practiced predominantly in the colonial enclaves identified by Arnold, with the obvious addition of the lunatic asylum that was opened in Rangoon in 1870. However, the importance of the colonial enclaves was not so much that they were arenas in which psychiatric treatments were performed, but rather that they were the arenas in which the insane were found and diagnosed. Most of the lunatics in Burma emerged from the colonial centre of Rangoon,Footnote 7 the courts, the prisons, and the European population. Historians of colonial psychiatry in Africa have used individuals’ routes to being found and subsequently diagnosed as insane in order to reveal some of the tensions of colonial rule.Footnote 8 In Burma the difficulties encountered diagnosing insanity within the colonial enclaves also reveal some of the fissures of the social order.
Like much of colonial Asia during the late nineteenth century, in Burma there was an uneasy division between the rulers and the ruled. Rigid racial classifications, sanctified in bureaucratic routines, were in perennial tension with the messy realities of everyday life. Alongside racial difference, gender ideologies were important in informing British understandings of their subject populations, as well as shaping their relations with them. These were the core features of the colonial order.Footnote 9 But insanity did not conform to established racial and gendered distinctions: it could strike anyone, rulers and the ruled, men and women. As a result madness threatened to undermine the colonial racial boundary and disrupt the established norms of masculinity and femininity. To complicate the situation further, as well as being a threat to the ideal of a racial and gendered order, psychiatric discourses in colonial Burma had a contested place alongside other forms of colonial knowledge, particularly ethnographic, juridical, and penological discourses. Although the colonial regime was mostly indifferent to the plight of the insane in Burma, when the insane became a difficulty to the colonial order they came into the purview of the state and it would act to intervene. The imperatives of the colonial order explain the otherwise seemingly contradictory impulses of colonial psychiatry in Burma.
This paper unpicks these complexities of colonial psychiatry to explore what they reveal about the tensions and specifics of the colonial order in Burma. It is organized into three sections. The first section examines the history of the Rangoon lunatic asylum. The asylum was a neglected institution, which was improved only episodically following internal crises and public scandals: it is an example of the general indifference of the colonial regime towards insanity and the insane. The second section looks at cases of insanity in the criminal courts. Here the presence of suspected lunatics was disruptive to the administration of justice as colonial officials, judges, and medical officers routinely disputed the sanity of defendants. These diagnostic debates reveal the contribution of psychiatric knowledge to the colonial construction of Burman masculinity. The final section focuses on insanity within the European community in Burma. Whilst Europeans were separated from Burmese and Indian lunatics, they were also internally differentiated according to class and gender. Through three case studies this section shows the divisions within, and the anxiety over, the European colonial population in Burma. Throughout the paper I argue that, whilst psychiatric knowledge and institutions were generally neglected, British officials did intervene when and where insanity threatened the making of a colonial order.
Bio-politics on a budget: the Rangoon lunatic asylum
On 3 August 1878, an Indian named Lookoo was admitted to the Rangoon lunatic asylum. His stay in the asylum was to be brutally short. In the documents that arrived with him he was reported to suffer from suicidal tendencies, although he was deemed not to be dangerous to others. Due to chronic overcrowding in the asylum Lookoo was placed in a cell with two male Burman suspected lunatics who were under observation in the asylum. Neither had previously exhibited any signs of being dangerous. As a result of the fear that Lookoo would attempt to take his own life during the night, his ankle was tied to the door of their shared cell. At four o'clock in the morning on the sixth night of his incarceration, the night watchman heard noises coming from Lookoo's cell. Upon entering he found one of the Burman inmates on top of Lookoo, pummelling him with his knees and elbows. By the next morning Lookoo had died from the injuries that he had sustained in the attack.Footnote 10
In the same year the asylum's Superintendent, Hugh Johnston, complained in his annual report that the asylum required more cells so that dangerous lunatics, criminal lunatics, and lunatics under observation could be housed individually. The committee that was constituted to investigate Lookoo's death concurred with Johnston's remarks. They could find no fault with any individual member of the asylum's staff involved in the tragic death, only with the inadequate accommodation in the asylum itself.Footnote 11 The British Medical Journal also reported on the violent killing that had occurred in the Rangoon lunatic asylum and was unequivocal in its condemnation of the entire institution: ‘To hobble lunatics like animals, to keep them cooped up night and day, to leave them quarrelling together without interference, are so utterly at variance with all sound principals of asylum management and with the dictates of common humanity, that any establishment in which such practices exist is in need of radical reform’.Footnote 12 The language of this metropolitan reproach was reminiscent of the Whiggish tone of Victorian asylum reformers attacking the brutalities of eighteenth-century madhouses.Footnote 13 This was not the last time that metropolitan observers were to express dismay at the state of the lunatic asylums in nineteenth-century British India, nor was it the only occasion that the asylum at Rangoon was singled out for particular disapproval.
Historians of British India have previously noted that both excessive interventions in society and wilful neglect were characteristic of colonial governmentality.Footnote 14 Some historians have argued further that penal institutions in colonial situations were often the reverse of their metropolitan counterparts because they did not become embroiled in the bio-political responsibility for maintaining their inmates’ lives but instead wielded power through death.Footnote 15 Lookoo's brutal killing in the Rangoon asylum suggests that these apparent binaries of neglect and intervention, of the politics of life and of death, could be apparent in the same moment. The state's intervention into Lookoo's life was ultimately one of extreme neglect. The attempt to provide him with care and to maintain his life, by restraining him from taking his own life, contributed to his untimely death. Lookoo's killing was symptomatic of the ambiguous interventions that were intrinsic to the institutions and practice of colonial medicine in Burma, of which the Rangoon lunatic asylum was an exemplary case.
But it was also through events such as the death of Lookoo that the state of the asylum regime became visible to a public audience and that in response British officials begrudgingly brought about institutional reform. Throughout its history the Rangoon lunatic asylum lurched from scandal to scandal, and problem to problem, being reformed and expanded in response to each one in an improvised and ad hoc fashion.Footnote 16
Burma was the last province of British India to be provided with a lunatic asylum. Until the 1870s all lunatics, both those who had committed crimes and those who had not, were instead confined in the hospital wards of the province's prisons. British prison officials in Burma repeatedly attacked this situation as being detrimental to the care of the insane and disruptive to prison management.Footnote 17 There was a perception, one that has persisted in the historiography, that Burma was neglected in comparison with the other provinces of India and lagged behind their development, and the state of the province's provision for lunatics was further evidence of this.Footnote 18
With financial imperatives in mind the Chief Commissioner of Burma until 1867, Arthur Phayre, recommended the construction of three asylums, one in each of the divisions of Burma: Pegu, Arakan, and Tenasserim. They were planned to hold 200 lunatics between them. This was a very conservative estimate of the perceived need. The commissioners of Arakan and Pegu had both claimed that their divisions alone would each require asylums with a capacity to hold between 400 and 600 lunatics.Footnote 19 As it turned out even Phayre's modest plans proved to be comparatively lavish when in 1871 the lunatic asylum was opened in Rangoon to serve the whole province with a capacity for just 100 inmates. It was the only lunatic asylum constructed until the twentieth century. The scope of psychiatric power in Burma was proscribed from the outset by the financial constraints of British colonial governance in India. Thereafter the further development of asylum was continually checked by strict economic calculations.
The asylum was located next to the Rangoon central jail and it was almost immediately overcrowded. The asylum report for its first year of opening stated that there were 118 inmates, and that 20 had escaped during the year.Footnote 20 Just a year later the superintendent of the asylum was complaining that the cellular accommodation for criminal lunatics was overcrowded, and that many criminal lunatics were still being confined in prisons across the colony. Additionally an inmate died after falling 40 feet from a tree in a botched escape attempt.Footnote 21 It was clearly evident to the officials involved with it that the asylum was not fit for purpose.
Construction began on additional cells almost immediately after the asylum was opened and continued sporadically throughout the nineteenth century as British officials attempted to keep up with the growing numbers of inmates, whilst avoiding any unnecessary overspending. By the 1890s the capacity of the asylum had more than quadrupled, and yet it was still overcrowded. The annexation of Upper Burma in 1886 had only a slight effect in increasing the numbers. Consistently more than half the inmates were discovered in the city of Rangoon itself, a disproportionate number being local destitute Indians. The second biggest group were Burmese criminal lunatics found in the courts and prisons across the colony, the proportion of which grew throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote 22 The exceptional measures that were put in place to combat resistance to the imposition of British rule in Upper Burma did not result in the confinement of large numbers of lunatics.
It was not only the perennial overcrowding that was consistently cited as a problem with the asylum. The buildings were found lacking in a number of areas. For example the asylum was not originally built with a dead house for the superintendent to perform post-mortems in and was not provided with one for a decade: although despite its absence post-mortems were conducted with great frequency in the asylum.Footnote 23 More bizarrely, in 1882 the walls surrounding the asylum had to be increased from five feet to ten feet in order to protect the inmates from ‘improper observation’ and to ‘prevent intruders’.Footnote 24 Perhaps since the asylum was situated in the centre of the city, it had become something of a public spectacle and even of participatory entertainment.
The arrangement of the asylum buildings were also thrown into mild disarray by the admittance of a Eurasian woman named Annie Pereira in 1871, the first year of the asylum's life. There was at the time no quarters for a female attendant in the asylum, and no ward for a mixed race woman.Footnote 25 Her race and gender made accommodating her difficult and potentially scandalous. Although overcrowding had meant that criminal, civil, and suspected lunatics were forced to share cells, Europeans were consistently kept separate from Burmese and Indian inmates, and women were housed apart from men in the asylum. However, the authorities had not prepared for the eventuality of having to house a mixed race woman.Footnote 26 Perhaps annoyed by the extra expense of building the necessary extensions to the asylum to accommodate Annie Pereira, the Chief Commissioner demanded that her relatives pay for her maintenance. The difficulty that they faced was finding somebody responsible for paying: her Burmese mother had died when she was a child and had given her over to a local Reverend in Rangoon to look after. Eventually her father was identified as a Major in the Madras Staff Corps and, in an unseemly correspondence that was evocative of the niggardly nature of colonial investment in the asylum, British officials and Major Pereira haggled over the cost of Annie Pereira's upkeep.Footnote 27
The expansion of the lunatic asylum, from its opening in 1871 and throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, as the cases of Annie Pereira and Lookoo demonstrate, was ad hoc and constrained by British financial limits.Footnote 28 The asylum grew and developed in a piecemeal fashion in response to crises in internal discipline. In addition, the rapid socio-economic changes occurring in Rangoon resulted in an underclass of destitute Indian labourers whose troublesome presence undermined the British ideals of urban order central to the planning of Rangoon.Footnote 29 This underclass swelled the population of the asylum ensuring that it was perennially overcrowded despite the almost constant building of additional accommodation.
In many respects the perceived failings of the Rangoon lunatic asylum were common to all the asylums in British India. In 1895 the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission toured all the colony's asylums, and reported uniform dismay at their state.Footnote 30 Amongst the numerous instances of malpractice that they found was a patient suffering from mania left tied to a tree in an asylum's courtyard. In another asylum they found that post mortems were being conducted in the open air, in the full view of the patients. They also highlighted some general failures that were common across all the asylums: the buildings were uniformly inadequate; the patients were not separated according to the type of affliction they were suffering; the attendants lacked any specialized training; and the overall supervision of the asylums was one among the numerous duties of civil surgeons, rather than the responsibility of a dedicated superintendent. Concerning the Rangoon lunatic asylum, however, they were especially damning in their recommendations. The asylum buildings were described as ‘defective in plan and arrangement’, and the asylum was situated in the wrong place. They argued that rather than in the centre of Rangoon, a lunatic asylum would be better placed in a quiet and healthy district.Footnote 31 In short, close it down and start again somewhere else.
The British officials serving in Burma roundly rejected the recommendations of the Commission. They argued, characteristically, that building a new asylum would be a costly and unnecessary expense. In this vein the Inspector General of Jails staunchly defended the condition of the asylum, writing,
it is unfair to compare the treatment of insanes in this country with that adopted in England. How would our churches, Law courts, Hospitals or Jails compare with similar institutions at home? I am inclined to believe that the Rangoon Asylum would suffer least by the comparison.Footnote 32
In essence he was arguing that colonial asylums had to be assessed according to a lower standard than their metropolitan equivalents. There was a greater acceptable level of neglect in the provision of colonial state institutions, justified by the reasoning that without colonialism there would be no provision at all.
Post-colonial historians have often noted this comparative logic in colonial rule; the colony was perpetually unfinished, in a process of becoming, and always at a stage behind the development of Europe.Footnote 33 But this logic also reflected the reality of reduced medical provisions in colonial contexts. The lunatic asylums in India, including the Rangoon asylum, differed from their metropolitan counterparts considerably in terms of scale. The numbers of lunatics confined in the asylums across British India were but a tiny fraction of the overall population and their incarnation was a far cry from anything approximating to a colonial ‘great confinement’.Footnote 34 As a science, colonial psychiatry was also a poor relative of the burgeoning profession in Britain. Indeed, in comparison to the growth of the science in other colonial contexts, particularly French North Africa, psychiatry in British India was a peripheral interest of negligible importance.Footnote 35
It might seem from the history of Rangoon asylum that the British attitude to insanity in Burma was principally one of indifference marked by occasional impulses to reform. However, the difficulties judges and medical officers faced when attempting to diagnose insanity in the courts made colonial psychiatry a matter of greater urgency for the British. Through these disputed court decisions it is also possible to see how psychiatric knowledge contributed to the construction of the ‘Burman character’ in colonial discourse.
Criminality, insanity, or just Burman?
Recent historical research has begun to explore the specificities of the colonial prison in Burma: the unusually high criminal population for British India; the racial tensions implicit in their staffing and management; and the ways that Burmese anti-colonial politics permeated the prison walls.Footnote 36 Another unusual feature of the penal system in colonial Burma was the high number of criminal lunatics, mostly Burman men.Footnote 37 The high and rising numbers of criminal lunatics in late nineteenth-century Burma highlights the importance of being able to understand the interactions between colonial institutions. The police, the prisons, the courts, and the asylum, were all intertwined in finding and confining the insane. Following in the approach of Taylor Sherman in her work on state punishment in India, these institutions can be considered as nodes in a ‘coercive network’, although not nodes in a functioning and harmonious relationship with each other.Footnote 38 In colonial Burma, tensions between British judges and medical officials attempting to diagnose insanity in criminal cases exposed the contests and overlaps between ethnographic, criminological, and psychiatric discourses. Whilst the colonial government was indifferent to the need to provide treatment for the insane, it was concerned about differentiating between criminals and lunatics when it came to dispensing colonial justice.
During the 1870s a number of cases came before judges in British Burma in which the accused had the suspicion of insanity attached to them. Their approaches to these cases were inconsistent and irregular. In February 1873 the Commissioner of Pegu highlighted to the Chief Commissioner two cases of murder in which the accused had been acquitted due to unsoundness of mind. In one, the accused Nga Myat Theing had killed a man apparently under the influence of a drug administered to him during a tattooing and based on this evidence the judge acquitted him as being temporarily insane.Footnote 39 In the second case, one Nga Oung Tha had attacked his wife and then the police sergeant sent to arrest him, with a knife. In this case the medical officer's evidence stated that he believed the accused to be sane, but the judge ruled against the medical evidence and acquitted him as insane. His reasons for doing so were revealing: testimonial evidence of a previous bout of insanity and ‘the appearance of the man. . .his dull dazed look, such as one who has some deep mental worry passing on his brain’ were enough to convince the judge.Footnote 40 On receiving the details of these cases the Chief Commissioner wrote to the Government Advocate asking his advice on appealing these decisions, as he believed ‘that the two men who have committed very grave crimes. . .escaped punishment on very insufficient grounds’.Footnote 41
These were tensions between judges, administrators, and medical officials that often occurred around cases of criminal insanity in the nineteenth century.Footnote 42 The use of discipline in the late nineteenth century was underpinned by the logic of devising appropriate punishments intended to target the ‘soul’ of the criminal.Footnote 43 Although colonial punishment, as numerous studies have noted, largely remained corporeal,Footnote 44 the use of psychiatric knowledge in courts and prisons demonstrates that there was some importance attached to knowing the minds of the criminals as well. The disagreements that arose in colonial Burma emerged because it was unclear who had the authority to diagnose insanity, the judge or the medical officer. These were important points of tension as insanity was increasingly used as a defence in court and to secure release from confinement.
The utility of the defence was apparent to some of the general population. In 1873 two friends petitioned the government for the release of Pha Htau into their care after he had been acquitted of murder due to unsoundness of mind. The Chief Commissioner rejected their petition.Footnote 45 Similarly, later the same year, a friend of Chin Cheng, who had murdered a 13-year-old girl apparently without any motive, petitioned the Commissioner of Rangoon for leniency due to Chin Cheng's history of insanity. The petition was sent too late as Chin Cheng had already been sentenced to transportation for life after pleading guilty to the crime.Footnote 46
High-ranking officials were also concerned by the confusion over court procedures regarding criminal lunatics. For example, Nga Noo was tried in 1873 for causing grievous hurt and acquitted due to unsoundness of mind. The Chief Commissioner complained that the judge, Mr Forbes, had considered Nga Noo insane at the time of the trial but, instead of halting the proceedings whilst Nga Noo was medically observed, had tried him regardless. The Chief Commissioner called the attention of the colonial courts ‘to the necessity of greater care being paid in disposing of pseudo-lunatic criminals’.Footnote 47 The term ‘pseudo-lunatic criminals’ neatly encapsulates the suspicion around the legal defence of insanity. A year later the mistake was repeated in the case of Nga Myat Hnit who had murdered one woman and wounded three others. He was also tried despite being insane and therefore incapable of making his defence. Again the correct procedure of removing the insane accused until they were fit to stand trial was pointed out to the judge.Footnote 48
These matters came to a head over a case in 1876. Nga Kwon was acquitted of causing grievous hurt with a dangerous weapon because of unsoundness of mind on evidence that infuriated the Chief Commissioner. Nga Kwon was said to be suffering from a fever that rendered him unconscious of having done anything wrong. The Chief Commissioner complained that the ‘excuse is worthless. There is not a particle of medical evidence to show that Nga Kwon was ever suffering from fever’. He went on to summarize the broader problems as he saw them:
. . .there is throughout this province generally too great a readiness on the part of Magisterial Officers to accept the plea of unsoundness of mind, the result being practically tantamount to an acquittal of the accused person, as it is observed that, should a prisoner happen to be sent to the Lunatic Asylum, he is generally immediately after being admitted declared sane. . .Footnote 49
The government appealed against the case of Nga Kwon and the decision was overturned. Nga Kwon was sentenced to a years’ rigorous imprisonment.
At their heart these difficulties surrounding the diagnosis of criminal lunatics were insurmountable. The central problem lay in the inherently illusive nature of a firm diagnosis. Most officials, irrespective of their medical training, based their judgements largely on the demeanour of the suspected individual. Insanity had to be ocularly evident.Footnote 50 The criminal lunatic Nga Oung Tha, mentioned above, was acquitted by the judge as insane in part because of his ‘dull dazed look’.Footnote 51 Chin Cheng, who was convicted of murder, was referred to a medical officer because the Commissioner of Tenasserim had ‘observed a silly look about the prisoner’.Footnote 52 It must be noted that this notion of demeanour was more expansive than simply looking at a suspect's physical characteristics, although this was often how British officials read the bodies of the colonized in India.Footnote 53 Irving Goffman's meaning of visibility is closer to how officials saw insanity. For Goffman, visibility meant ‘perceptibility’ or ‘evidentness’. In other words, ‘demeanour’ referred not solely to physical manifestations but also to mannerisms, speech impediments, and other potentially incriminating forms of behaviour.Footnote 54 For example, the Superintendent of the Rangoon asylum diagnosed Nga Tha Goung as insane from the following characteristics that he observed in him:
an imperfect knowledge of the difference between right and wrong. . .He is not ignorant of time, quantity, quality, or space. His knowledge, however, is very imperfect. I have found from his history that, he has often sulked and become irritable when teased.Footnote 55
There were a number of problems that emerged from this reliance on demeanour to diagnose insanity. Firstly, numerous criminals were diagnosed as insane because of the temporary effect of a drug. As we have seen, Nga Myat Theing was acquitted as insane because of the effect of a drug administered to him during a tattooing.Footnote 56 Similarly one Tah Tay was acquitted of theft because he was said to be temporarily insane due to the effect of an indigenous drug used to treat rabies.Footnote 57
A second more concerning problem for British officials was feigned insanity. As Satadru Sen has argued, where colonial punishments were regulated by medical concerns, the doctor-patient encounter was one in which deception and mutual suspicions were common.Footnote 58 Chin Cheng, whom the Commissioner of Tenasserim described as having a ‘silly look’, was described subsequently as ‘pretending to be silly’ by the civil surgeon who observed him.Footnote 59 Superintendent Griffith of the Rangoon lunatic asylum for most of the 1870s and 1880s, also reported on the suspected criminal lunatic Maung Maung who ‘pretended to be dumb for twelve months’, but spoke as soon as he was returned to jail.Footnote 60 In 1880 Griffith wrote that amongst criminal lunatics ‘feigned insanity seems to be common’.Footnote 61 This was a widespread difficulty for colonial psychiatry in British India. George Ewens, author of Insanity in India published in 1908, suggested, based on his experiences in the Punjab lunatic asylum, that medical officers reduce the food and conditions of the inmate, and even that they force-feed them through the nose, in order to find out if they were feigning madness.Footnote 62 The line between punishment and treatment could be blurred, and diagnosing a suspected lunatic could be a battle of wits between the patient and the doctor.
A third, and the most revealing, difficulty facing British officials attempting to diagnose insanity amongst Burmese criminals was the need to distinguish between normal behaviour and pathological behaviour.Footnote 63 Superintendent Griffith captured this difficulty in his annual report on the asylum in 1880. He acknowledged:
. . .it is very difficult to say whether they are responsible or not. If their responsibility is to be tested by the existence or non-existence of delusions, or by knowledge of right and wrong, I should unhesitatingly say that they are not irresponsible. If however the want of control, which renders them the creatures of the most violent and dangerous passions and impulses, be admitted as in itself evidence of insanity and irresponsibility, then certainly there are few, if any, of these cases that can be considered sane or responsible.Footnote 64
This difficulty was particularly pronounced because of the prevalent colonial characterizations of Burman men as being prone to sudden, unthinking outbursts. The high-ranking British official, Harold Fielding-Hall, wrote in his book on Burmese society, that ‘The Burmans often act as children do. Their crimes are the violent thoughtless crimes of children; they are as little depraved by crime as children are’.Footnote 65 Keith Norman MacDonald, a colonial medical officer wrote similarly, ‘when they are roused they are very passionate, and are capable of committing great acts of cruelty’.Footnote 66 It was a ubiquitous trope deployed by colonial officials that Burman men were generally docile but impulsively violent when provoked.Footnote 67
These general depictions of Burman men overlapped with both colonial discourse on Burmese criminality and with the symptoms of insanity apparently exhibited by Burmese lunatics. In police reports the Burmese were commonly described as having a ‘marked homicidal tendency’.Footnote 68 In the asylum reports Superintendent Griffith wrote that the Burmese lunatics had a tendency towards violent outbursts of acute mania. British officials saw insanity amongst the Burmese as an exaggeration of their stereotypical flaws and criminal propensities.Footnote 69
This was an intrinsically gendered discourse. Many of the acts of violence labelled as insane were those committed against women. For British officials this was explained by the apparent freedom of Burmese women: a figment of colonial knowledge that was accompanied by the figure of the ‘henpecked husband’.Footnote 70 According to this colonial depiction of Burmese marital relations, it was only in violent outbursts that the otherwise docile and cowed Burmese man could assert his ‘natural’ authority. A passage from the Report on Criminal and Civil Justice in British Burma, for the years 1870–1871 makes this connection between gender and criminality explicit. Bemoaning the ease at which Burmese women could attain a divorce, the author commented:
The woman, who perhaps has for years been a wife takes the opportunity to form a new connexion. The husband repenting of his hastiness, and still regarding the woman as his wife, steps in with a knife or a chopper dah and settles the matter in the speediest way, by taking the law into his own hands, the victim being most frequently the divorced wife.Footnote 71
The author's proposed solution was to make it harder for women to get divorced.
This overlapping of discourses of gender, criminality, and insanity perhaps help to explain why so few Burmese women were diagnosed and confined as lunatics: a circumstance that British officials themselves were at a loss to explain given their erroneous belief that the sexes were almost equal in Burma.Footnote 72 In contrast to Britain where madness was predominantly a ‘female malady’, British officials in Burma associated it with a repressed but explosively violent form of Burmese masculinity.Footnote 73
Simply observing a suspected lunatic to reach a diagnosis was a process rife with problems: the suspect could have been labouring under the temporary effects of drugs; they could have been feigning insanity; and clearly distinguishing between pathological, criminal, and normal Burmese behaviour was impossible since they were all inextricably linked. In the face of these intractable difficulties, the tensions between judges, administrators, and medical officers were resolved by establishing clearly whose observations carried the ultimate authority, and the medical gaze won the day. In 1879 the Chief Commissioner ruled that criminal lunatics had to be held either in the asylum or in the jail hospital in Rangoon for medical observations.Footnote 74 The asylum was further marked out as a privileged space for diagnosis later in the same year when the Chief Commissioner emphasized that all non-criminal lunatics should be sent for observation in the Rangoon asylum whenever possible.Footnote 75
By the 1880s the asylum had became the preferred site for the confinement of all lunatics and medical observation became the sole authority by which the suspected insane were diagnosed. This did not resolve the abstract difficulty of distinguishing between the criminal, the lunatic, and the normal Burman man in the British mind but simply made it a matter for medical specialists. However, psychiatric knowledge from the asylum did serve to mark out the differences between Indians and the Burmese. As we have seen, the majority of Burmese inmates of the asylum had been diagnosed through the criminal justice system. In contrast the Indian population of the asylum were mainly destitute men from Rangoon who had fallen from the precarious existence provided by the maistry organized labour gangs, into the world of vice and disease in the underbelly of the city.Footnote 76 Psychiatric discourses depicted the different forms of insanity prevalent amongst the Burmese and Indian inmates as the result of inherent racial differences between them, overlooking that their differing symptoms may have reflected the different journeys that Burmese and Indian men made into the asylum. British medical officers and asylum superintendents regularly contrasted the violence, strength, and muscularity of the Burmese lunatics to the lethargic, harmlessness of Indian lunatics who were seen as cannabis addicts, part of an India-wide theme of asylum knowledge.Footnote 77 According to colonial psychiatry the Burmese were prone to being maniacal and the Indians were prone to being melancholic. Ethnography and epidemiology were intertwined.
Although British officials did not make the comparison themselves, the portrayal of Burmese insanity was similar to the colonial depictions of other Southeast Asian populations. Burman men's apparent propensity to sudden bouts of homicidal violence seems analogous to contemporaneous psychiatric discourses on amok in colonial Malaya, Java, and the Philippines, where a man (this too was a gendered disorder) would suddenly become uncontrollably violent.Footnote 78 This similarity suggests that the colonial perception of Burmese insanity might have been an element in a broader process by which Burma became imagined as part of Southeast Asia, as a discrete geographical unit of Western knowledge, which has fed into later area studies.Footnote 79 More definite was that psychiatric discourses in colonial Burma served to further differentiate the Indian population from the Burmese population. But there was a further racial differentiation within colonial psychiatry in nineteenth-century Burma made between ‘Native’ (Burmese and Indian) lunatics and European lunatics. Here the two were not compared and contrasted, but separated.
A prostitute, a sailor, and a lawyer: treating European lunatics
The presence of European lunatics was cause for much anxiety amongst colonial officials. In general, even when sane, the European population could be burdensome for the British administration in British India. Whilst they were an important group of imperial supporters, often among their numbers were unruly and potentially embarrassing individuals whose erratic behaviour could threaten European racial prestige.Footnote 80 In nineteenth-century Burma this occurred through some infamous incidences of European violence, usually committed by British soldiers, as well as widespread relationships between British officials and Burmese women.Footnote 81 These incidences were acutely problematic for high-ranking British officials because of the centrality of maintaining a racial division between the rulers and the ruled across India, a process of categorization that often ran up against the messy realities of colonial life.Footnote 82 As a result of these tensions, occasionally medical officers in British India employed different idioms of madness to maintain these important but illusive colonial racial boundaries.Footnote 83
This racial division of the treatment of the insane in British India has left its mark on historical scholarship. Waltraud Ernst's book on European madness and the lunatic asylums of India in the first half of the nineteenth century ending in 1858, dovetails neatly with James Mills's study of the ‘native-only’ asylums of British India in the second half of the nineteenth century from 1857.Footnote 84 The reason behind this racially marked periodization was that it was decided in the mid-nineteenth century that European lunatics were better off being deported back to Europe rather than housed in asylums in India. At the same point the colonial administration began to build lunatic asylums for the indigenous insane population. However in practice things were less clear-cut. In the Rangoon lunatic asylum a small contingent of Europeans were housed long-term in separate accommodation in the asylum and not deported. Moreover, deporting the European insane was a fraught and contingent process, and often the fate of an individual depended on their class and gender. Colonial psychiatry did not only make distinctions between races, it also made distinctions within races.Footnote 85
One European inmate of the Rangoon asylum for whom there was no suggestion of deporting was a German woman who was met by Charles Addis, the Rangoon agent of the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation, on a visit to the asylum in 1892. In his diary Addis describes her as a prostitute and he imagined her descent into insanity.
The fair young child stamped with the image of God at play amid the cornfields of Germany. . .She thinks no evil. She falls—ah! If she only knew it, by the elements highest within her. Temptation, seduction, shame. A wanderer henceforth, homeless on God's earth.
Eastward she moves, as her attractions fade. Constantinople, Cairo, Singapore, Rangoon; at each stage touching a lower and yet lower depth of misery and vice.
And now last scene of all. The hair whitening, the voice thin and quavering, the hands tremulous, the corners of the mouth turned down in deep dejection. . .Friendless, sinful, solitary she awaits a pauper's grave in an alien land.Footnote 86
Although Addis was not at the asylum in any official capacity, his fictional narrative reveals much about the otherwise unspoken connections between gender, sexual desire, and insanity in the minds of Victorian British gentlemen in colonial Burma.
It is worth juxtaposing Addis's words with Rudyard Kipling's poem Mandalay, which was written at a similar time. Whereas for Addis the German woman's decline stemmed from her following her unrestrained desires into the east, ultimately ending in the depravity of Rangoon, Kipling's poem described in more positive tones the desire of a British soldier for his erstwhile Burmese mistress who represented for Kipling all the exotic attractions of the east.Footnote 87 European women's desire for the east was potentially corrupting. In contrast, a similar male desire could be an allegory for the imperial mission. This gendered libidinal economy was apparent more generally in colonial policies. The high-ranking British official in Burma, John Nisbet, defended the widespread intimate relationships between European colonial officials and Burmese women by arguing that they maintained the officials’ health and sanity.Footnote 88 On the other hand, high-ranking British officials uniformly condemned even the suggestion that European women were sexually available to Burmese and Indian men.Footnote 89
The unnamed German inmate was deemed beyond recovery. She was one of a small but consistent number of European female lunatics held in the Rangoon asylum simply labelled as prostitutes. Indeed, the European enclosure was reported as being overcrowded by 1887 and throughout the 1900s, despite the stated colonial policy being to deport them.Footnote 90 It seems that gender and status were decisive factors in deciding which lunatics being returned to Europe would benefit: white prostitutes were not deemed deserving enough of the additional expense of deportation. The case of another European lunatic, John Ryan, illustrates the difficulties that British officials faced when they did attempt to deport the insane.
John Ryan was an English seaman of 35 years who arrived bound in chains in the Burmese town of Bassein at five o'clock in the morning on 20 February 1873 on an American ship called Titan. A quarter of an hour earlier he had murdered the ship's mate in an apparently unprovoked attack with a knife. The Civil Surgeon of Bassein conducted a number of interviews with Ryan and observed his behaviour during his initial incarceration in the local jail's hospital, concluding after a few months that Ryan was an ‘incurable madman’.Footnote 91 Ryan's own account of the killing consisted of a narrative of betrayal and ‘bitchery’ through which his reputation in England was being damaged, and also told of his persecution by a mysterious man called Captain Jack, who was pursuing him in his travels across the globe. He believed the ship's mate to have been in league with Captain Jack and so when the mate dragged him out of bed and struck him to get him to work, Ryan killed him on the spot.Footnote 92 However the Civil Surgeon ascertained that Captain Jack did not actually exist and was in fact one of Ryan's ‘delusions’. Ryan's paranoia continued during his confinement in the Bassein jail hospital, where he claimed his food was being poisoned and that the warders were plotting against him. His moods alternated between depression and ferocious anger, the intensity of which terrified his keepers.Footnote 93
Historians of colonial madness have made good use of the testimony of the insane, exploring the social, cultural, and political reference points that were present, without being constrained by the potentially debilitating debate over the ‘reality’ of mental illness.Footnote 94 Ryan's case suggests some of the tensions of life at sea: the paranoid anxiety of being distant from home and confined in a small space. It would be interesting to see how far his testimony resonates with those of other distressed seaman: his fear of people conspiring against him in England was certainly one that afflicted other Europeans suspected of insanity. Additionally, his paranoia surrounding the prison staff and especially concerning prison food was a common point of tension in the penal system, and were delusions occasionally associated with lunatics found in the colonial prisons.Footnote 95
Ryan was transferred from the jail in Bassein to the lunatic asylum in Rangoon where the Superintendent and the annual committee of visitors agreed that it would be best to remove him to England as quickly as was possible.Footnote 96 The Chief Commissioner himself attached some importance to Ryan's deportation but predicted that finding a ship from Rangoon willing to take him would prove difficult given his violent outbursts. He advised that they send him first to Calcutta so that he could be sent back with the ‘next batch’ of European lunatics.Footnote 97 The Chief Commissioner was right to be wary. Ryan was sent to Calcutta in November 1874. But he was then returned to Rangoon and transferred back into the asylum in August 1875 because of his behaviour and the cost that would be incurred deporting him.Footnote 98 It was not until February 1876 that transportation was finally found that was willing to take him back to England, three years after he had first arrived in Burma.Footnote 99 Official policy was to deport the European insane, but achieving this involved negotiating with other provinces of British India as well as with the captains and owners of potential ships. For British Burma at least, deporting European lunatics involved an informal and ad hoc set of procedures. In 1891 the arrangements made for another European criminal lunatic, Sherlock Hare, broke down dramatically.
Sherlock Hare's background contrasted markedly with that of John Ryan who was described by the Civil Surgeon of Bassein as an ‘ignorant but able man of his class’.Footnote 100 Hare was a gentleman. His father was the former Tory Member of Parliament Thomas Hare, an early proponent of proportional representation in the electoral system.Footnote 101 His sister was Alice Westlake, supporter of the suffragettes and an artist who was married to John Westlake,Footnote 102 a man who had an impressive career. Westlake was the first Professor of International law at Cambridge University, the British representative to the International Court of Arbitration at The Hague from 1900 to 1906, briefly Liberal Member of Parliament for Romford in 1885 and 1886, and founder of the Workingmen's College on Great Ormond Street.Footnote 103 Hare also had imperial connections; his brother was Lancelot Hare who rose to become Lieutenant Governor of Bengal in 1906 and spent most of his career in East Bengal and Assam. Sherlock Hare was an altogether more notable person than John Ryan, and a world away from the anonymous German woman.
Hare's career before being diagnosed insane, was an unusual and ill-fated one.Footnote 104 He trained and practiced as a barrister in England before moving to Rangoon in order to lease the Great Coco Island, the northern most of the Andaman Islands, from the Government of British Burma in 1878. He wanted to grow coconuts on the Island, but by 1882 the whole venture had begun to go badly wrong. Facing increasing debts Hare began practicing law in Rangoon, and was elected President of the Rangoon Municipality. He was also a regular contributor to the Rangoon Gazette, complaining in letters to the editor about a number of minor social issues and personal irritations in a fashion that illustrates his evidently eccentric and confrontational character.Footnote 105 He would have cut a familiar figure in Rangoon's European community, and as it turned out, he had made himself quite unpopular.
In early 1891 Sherlock Hare set upon another barrister in Rangoon called John Hannay. According to the numerous witnesses this attack was made entirely without any immediate provocation from Hannay. Later the same day Hare went to Hannay's office and attempted to force his way in to confront Hannay, who was by then absent. Rumours amongst the tightly-knit European community in Rangoon had it that Hare had even stolen a rifle to threaten Hannay with. Some witnesses claimed to have seen him on the streets of Rangoon with a pistol. As a result of this alleged intimidation Hannay took Hare to court for assault. In the case a number of witnesses came forward who testified to previous aggressive acts committed by Hare. For example, Emile Morean, who had travelled on a steamer from Calcutta with Hare, claimed that Hare had ‘touched him in the face’ after demanding that Morean apologize to the ladies present for his public use of the word ‘blooming’.Footnote 106 But rather than being found guilty of assault, Hare was diagnosed as insane.
Hare's personal physician, Dr Pedley, testified in court that Hare had suffered from ‘attacks of melancholia’, and that during these episodes he considered him to be not responsible for his actions. Dr Davis, the Superintendent of Jails, and Dr Sinclair, the Inspector General of Jails and Hospitals, both agreed with Pedley that Sherlock Hare was insane at the time of the assault. In their judicial report on the case, Hare's explanations of his actions and his replies to their questions were presented as evidence of his madness. Looking back at his responses now, they seem more like the replies of someone with an absurd sense of humour. In response to Morean's accusation of assault on the steamer Hare said, ‘Oh you know how slow it is on board ship, it was all fun’. Davis and Sinclair also reported that after twice attempting to escape ‘when recaptured he could give no reason for doing so beyond that he saw it was rather funny to see everyone running after him’.Footnote 107
His explanations for his attacks on John Hannay were more subdued and serious. He claimed that Hannay had damaged his prospects in life and, although Sinclair and Davis described him as ‘disinclined to discuss the subject’, he believed that until he confronted Hannay he ‘dreaded a refusal from some lady in England’.Footnote 108 Like John Ryan, except that the focus of his paranoia was demonstrably a real person, Sherlock Hare's explanations of his acts revealed frustration at being unable to protect his reputation back in England. Throughout the trial and the subsequent medical observations no mention was made of the fact that Sherlock Hare's father Thomas Hare was then on his deathbed.Footnote 109
It was arranged for Sherlock Hare to be deported to England on a ship called the Elton captained by a man named Robert Campbell. For his journey Hare was provided with a European attendant, a 45 year old man called Healey who had been released from Rangoon prison where he had been serving two months’ imprisonment for deserting a ship. Healey was promised five pounds if Captain Campbell reported that his behaviour had been good.Footnote 110 The Government of Burma was made to rue these informal arrangements. Instead of handing Sherlock Hare to the authorities, on arrival at Gravesend he escaped, or rather, was let free by Captain Campbell, who not only released him but lent him twenty-five pounds to buy a suit of mourning to mark his father's recent death.Footnote 111 However Hare was not at large for long. Following a tip-off from his brother-in-law John Westlake, he was arrested at the Bull Hotel in Cambridge and taken to Virginia Waters Holloway Sanatorium on 2 June. In his possession was an envelope addressed to Captain Campbell containing a cheque for twenty-five pounds.Footnote 112
The treatment of Sherlock Hare had been lax. A deeply concerned Secretary of State for India called upon Captain Campbell to help explain how Hare whilst being classified as a dangerous criminal lunatic had managed to escape. Campbell described in his defence the lackadaisical attitude with which Hare had been treated in Rangoon. He said that Hare arrived at the Elton alone except for Healey, whom Campbell described as Hare's ‘servant’, and without any documentation. On the ship itself Hare was allowed to roam about the decks, and even went on shore at Aden and Port Said.Footnote 113 Hare's class status was influential in determining his treatment. The cost-effective transportation suitable for John Ryan, who was also classified as a dangerous criminal lunatic, was not suitable for a gentleman. Hare was granted substantial amounts of liberty and given a personal attendant/servant, paid for by the Government of Burma. The Secretary of State condemned the complacent and haphazard arrangements put in place by the Rangoon authorities but, angry as he was, he too accepted that allowances had to be made for Hare's class: ‘The case of Mr Hare was no doubt somewhat peculiar; and it may have been right to make arrangements so that the hardships of his position should be as little aggravated as possible’.Footnote 114
These three cases of insanity as well as British officials’ differing responses to them reveal some of the contours of European society in colonial Burma. One was an irredeemable social outcast; one was a lower class seaman on the fringes of white society; and one was an eccentric gentlemen and a prominent member of the European elite in Rangoon. Each in their different ways posed a potential threat to racial prestige through their deviant and unruly behaviour. Being European in colonial Burma was to be conspicuous. Behaviour was monitored. British officials preferred to remove these errant members of society, if at all possible, through deporting them back to Europe. But practical difficulties and financial concerns also had to be taken into account alongside considerations about the status of the lunatic to be deported. There was a hierarchy of priorities based partially on class and gender. The psychiatric treatment of the German woman and John Ryan were of less importance than the treatment of Sherlock Hare. Moreover, class and gender also influenced the diagnosis of European lunatics. White women desiring indigenous men allegedly risked their mental wellbeing. And if Sherlock Hare had not been a gentleman and instead a working-class European, he would have probably just been charged with assault and sentenced without his sanity being questioned. Indeed, the case of Sherlock Hare particularly reveals the claustrophobic nature of upper class Rangoon white society. Numerous relatively innocuous episodes of his past indiscretions were recalled during his trial and rumours were espoused as evidence from the witness box. Hare himself best described his dilemma when he was explaining to the doctors examining him why he had not attempted to escape when a clear opportunity arose, ‘you all know me so well, I would surely be caught at once’.Footnote 115
Cases of European insanity demonstrate the anxieties over racial prestige. In all circumstances these deviant Europeans had to be removed from society and where possible returned to Europe to recover. However, within this racial differentiation there were further divisions according to class and gender. Not all European lunatics were thought capable of recovery or treated with the same degree of urgency. As with the difficulties over the diagnosis of Burmese criminal lunatics, psychiatric knowledge overlapped with racial discourses and gender ideologies. Alongside concerns over these deviant Europeans was the familiar theme of colonial indifference towards the treatment of some lunatics. The attempts to deport European lunatics from Burma were organized on an ad hoc basis within strict financial limitations, and, in Sherlock Hare's case, these arrangements resulted in a minor imperial scandal. The colonial regime would intervene to confine lunatics who posed a threat to the colonial order, but beyond that it remained indifferent to treating insanity.
Conclusion: the method in the madness
In 1886, psychiatrist and former member of the Indian army, William W. Ireland, published The Blot on the Brain: Studies in History and Psychology. In this book he speculated on the psychological disorders of famous and infamous historical figures such as Joan of Arc, Mohammed, and various Roman emperors.Footnote 116 Three years later, and also three years after the annexation of Upper Burma, he published a follow-up entitled Through the Ivory Gate. Here he continued a theme from his earlier work on the detrimental effects of power on the sanity of rulers. However in this book Ireland brought into consideration several characters from the recent history of the British Empire, such as Louis Riel, leader of the Canadian Métis population during the Red River Rebellion of 1869–1870; Theodore II of Abyssinia, who had come into conflict with the British in the 1860s; and, the most recent of all, Thebaw, the last king of Burma.Footnote 117
For Ireland, Thebaw's delusions where not specific to his individual pathology or even to an inherited royal trait, rather they were part of a mass delusion shared by the Burmese race. He argued that they displayed a misplaced and exaggerated sense of their own strength in comparison to the British.Footnote 118 After a short history of hypochondria, alcoholism, and general brutality within the Konbaung dynasty, Ireland comes to his conclusion on the mental flaws of Thebaw himself:
From all that I can learn, Thebaw was never thought insane, but weak and indulgent, the tool of his wife. Derived from the same stock, both seem to have inherited the worst qualities of their race. Stupid, arrogant, cruel, weak, and cowardly, Thebaw was scarcely a free agent, though nominally a despotic prince.Footnote 119
The characterization of Burman men as henpecked husbands venting their frustrated masculinity through acts of violence is reproduced in Ireland's portrayal of Thebaw's psychology: such a people could not rule themselves.
The assumption that the British were indifferent about providing institutions to treat the insane is an accurate one. The Rangoon lunatic asylum was an example of colonial bio-politics on a meagre budget. And yet despite this psychiatry played a role in the making of a colonial order in Burma. The problems of diagnosing criminal lunatics contributed to the colonial construction of Burman masculinity and the differentiation of the Burmese from the Indian population. At the same time European lunatics were removed from colonial society before they could undermine racial prestige. As Ireland's chapter on King Thebaw makes explicit, the right to rule was based on the perceived psychological capacity to rule, and for him the Burmese and their erstwhile monarchs were not capable. They went mad with power. However, as this paper has also shown, in Burma there was no corresponding guarantee that Europeans would always be in possession of their sanity.
