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TABLE II.
Deals with the Criminal Lunatics : the total number of this class treated is
steadily increasing : although at the end of the year the number remaining was
less by 2, the daily average number in the Asylum during the year exceeded
that preceding by almost as many. 5 (4 males and 1 female) were new admissions
against 7 for the year 1882. 3 (2 males and 1 female) were re-admitted one
after trial under Section 471 Criminal Procedure Code, in the other two there was
a relapse before their trial could take place and they were sent back, but they
were no real addition as they were only discharged temporarily.
Of the new admissions 4 (3 males and 1 female) were charged with murder,
and 1, a male, with theft.
The cases in which murder occurred are very illustrative of the way in which
the homicidal impulse takes possession of the individual, the gratification of which
appearing to remove many of the signs of insanity and to be attended with a
general amelioration of thir mental state. They also present the general character
of a crime committed while reason is dethroned :—Motiveless and unnatural : un-
provoked, unpremeditated and attended with a half triumphant feeling of satisfac-
tion at having accomplished what the perpetrator does not appear to consider a
crime and takes no pains to conceal.
One Ganesh a religious monomaniac, after having been insane for ten days,
without any apparent provocation suddenly seized his infant child aged 15 days,
dashed it to the ground and killed it after which he became calm and quiet, in
which condition he remains to this day, fully ten months during the past six
months he works steadily in the cook-house and likes to be doing something.
Mardan Sha, a Raj Gond, has been more or less subject to delusions with
melancholy for the past five or six years: about six months ago he had at his
house what we should call a musical conversazione, he himself being a proficient
on the Zithar.
One of the performers who played a native " tom tom" laughed at him
whereupon he took up his sword and cut down the unlucky drummer: he was
very fierce and violent at the time but after killing the man he grew calm, and
has been so for the three months that he has been in the Asylum. He does not
appear to have the slightest recollection of having done the deed : and if it is at
all recalled to his memory he begins to cry in a foolish melancholic manner, and
falls into a state of tremor, very like the condition of "mimosis inquieta"
observed in women predisposed to crime while insane.
A third, Jugmohun, has all the appearances of a harmless imbecile ; he was
brought to the Police Station talking wildly and with excited gestures described
how he had beaten his wife and killed his infant child by dashing it to the ground
in a violent manner : he is now quite calm sitting in one place for hours at a time,
apparently in a state of complete abstraction, often ejaculating " chor do," mean-
ing that he should be discharged from the Asylum.
The fourth is a female named Khimia effected with suicidal mania : in yield-
ing to the impulse she caused the death by drowning of her daughter a child
aged about one year.
Early one morning in September 1882 she arose from beside her husband
taking with her the child above referred to. There is evidence that she suckled
the infant immediately before ; proving " protanto" that her feelings towards the
child were beneficent. She went to a " baoli " near her village took off the
child's petticoat and without any ostensible provocation jumped into the well
with the child in her arms. The shock appears to have roused in her the instinct
to preserve her life, for she stated that when she rose to the surface she caught
hold of a step leading down to the well and crawled out : it would appear that
she forgot all about the child who was afterwards found drowned in the well.
The neighbours tell stories of previous outbreaks of insanity 15 or 20 years ago
in herself and in her brother, but they are too " perfect" to be worthy of implicit