Madness in women in colonial India as in contemporary Europe was most often rooted in the womb. Mills notes, perceptively, that this association generated a certain sympathy on the part of colonial administrators for women who killed their babies. Native voices appear in multiple capacities in Mills study. These establish the indigenous discourse of insanity, which saw madness in terms of an externally imposed affliction. Nevertheless, the native voices in Mills analysis establish the reasons why Indians sometimes committed themselves to the asylum, or had their own relatives committed, without accepting the legitimacy of the colonial vision of mental illness.
Mills offers three especially illuminating insights on resistance in the colonial asylum.
In one gruesome but apparently unexceptional example, an asylum superintendent describes how he blistered and then sewed patients genitalia to dissuade them from masturbating. Oddly, Mills has nothing to say about electroshock therapy, which developed somewhat later than the period he studies, but which was used as punishment as well as treatment for prisoners suspected of faking madness in British-Indian prisons in the 1920s. Nevertheless, Mills diverges sharply from the approach of Sridhar Sharma and Waltraud Ernst, both of whom have argued that mental asylums were little more than holding pens, where aggressive treatment of the insane was conspicuous only by its absence. A second insight is that to some extent, madness and the asylum functioned as shelters from which Indians could resist colonial power. Unlike an Indian who was perceived to be sane, a madman had the privilege of openly abusing a colonial administrator, and then laughing at the latter s discomfort.