This article examines how gender and race shaped everyday governance, patient labour, and occupational and moral therapies in the colonial lunatic asylums of Madras, Vizagapatanam (Waltair), and Calicut in British South India, 1871–1947. Drawing on the psychiatric archives, including Annual Reports of the Lunatic Asylums in the Madras Presidency, official correspondence, and statistical returns, it investigates who worked in the asylum, what they produced, how that labour was valued, and whose contributions went unrecorded. It identifies three interlocking dimensions of asylum governance. First, the admission registers and routine quantification converted patients’ age, caste, religion, diagnosis, and prior occupation into administrative categories, determining whose distress was recognised and whose was marginalised. Second, the gendered organisation of institutional labour recast women’s domestic work, such as cooking, cleaning, and needlework, as occupational therapy, concealing its economic value while making domestic compliance the chief measure of female recovery. Third, occupational and moral therapies, comprising regulated minor work, recreation, and amusement, disciplined both male and female patients in accordance with Victorian ideals of conduct and gender propriety. Building on these dimensions, the article argues that colonial psychiatry converted patient suffering into governable administrative knowledge and extracted caste-marked labour from confined bodies as treatment
Abraham et al. (Wed,) studied this question.