This dissertation explores how “madness” was conceptualized and perceived in early modern South Asia between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Notions of insanity were constantly being reformulated in the Mughal Empire and Deccan Sultanates, as Indo-Iranian physician-scholars (hakims) experimented with extant Greco-Arabic (Unani) and Indic (Ayurvedic) medical theories. They proposed changing causes, symptoms, and treatments for various mental illnesses like excessive black bile in the brain (saudayi), melancholia (malikholiya), mania (maniya), lovesickness (‘ishq), encephalitis (sarsam), delirium (huzyan), rabies (da’ ul-qalb), epilepsy (sar’a), Satanic whisperings (waswasa), etc. Based on this, I argue that “madness” (diwanagi or junun in Persian) was a medical category whose knowledge became more widespread across north India and the Deccan. This scientific acumen about brain disorders was refracted and woven through accounts of political and gendered rebellion in imperial chronicles; through a reimagining of unreason and insanity in literary compositions by court poets, nobles, Sufi saints, and princesses; and through philosophical and legal debates on the nature of mental incapacity in ethical (akhlaq) treatises, jurisprudential (fiqh) manuals, and administrative documents.
The overlaps between these medical, political, literary, didactic, and juridical iterations of madness reveal an evolving, complex world of early modern knowledge about the brain and its maladies. Starting with the intermixing of Unani and Ayurvedic prescriptions for diagnosing and curing insanity in medical (tibbi) manuscripts under Lodi and early Mughal rule, I trace how madness was deployed by court chroniclers as a cudgel to dismiss the agency of male and female rebels. By the turn of the seventeenth century, significant innovations in tropes of wine-intoxication, jinn possession, melancholia and lovesickness became discernible across Persian poetry, occult manuals, scientific encyclopaedias, and spiritual writings. This signals a heightened interest in the discourse of insanity that reached its apogee during the reigns of Shah Jahan (1628-58) and Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir (1658-1707), when there was a shift towards sharpening legalistic definitions of madness combined with more sophisticated classifications and treatments for psychological afflictions in pharmacopeia and medical treatises. In sum, my dissertation offers a multifaceted, intertextual cultural account of insanity and allied mental illnesses that resists the teleology of madpeople ostracized or “shackled” in lunatic asylums and subjected to Western psychiatry with the onset of British colonialism.
