Hafsa Tameez

PhD Candidate in Sociology

The Wise Ones are all Mad: Cultural Dimensions of Mental Health over Time in India

Supervisors: Dr Chamsy El-Ojeili and Dr Kevin Dew

Madness has a long religious, socio-cultural history in India across several indigenous medical systems. Traditional beliefs about mental health indicate a link between madness and the divine but following British colonialism great changes occurred not only in India's mental health knowledge but also in knowledge/power relations and social structures relevant to knowledge production/transmission, beliefs and practices. As India advances its modern biomedical model of mental healthcare, the general public seems to have retained its own understanding about mental health, spread through portrayals of mental illness in India's growing systems of popular knowledge transmission. It would appear that a gap persists today between official and popular forms of knowledge when it comes to the mind and its place in medicine. Has this gap between official and popular knowledge existed historically? If so, how has this relationship between official and popular knowledge about mental health changed over time as discourses about mental health have changed?

Through a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, this research examines the cultural dimensions of how bodies of knowledge have developed over time in India, focusing on madness and its cultural role. What has guided these changes in the official and popular discourses about madness and the nature of knowledge, and how can studying the sociocultural history of how the current context came to be add to contemporary discourses about mental health, knowledge, and knowledge relations?