Psychiatry: A Gendered Microhistory
Amitranjan Basu Amitranjan Basu [First Look : Ajita Chakraborty, My life as a psychiatrist: memoirs and essays. Kolkata: Stree, 2010, pp. 220, index+references, hard cover, Rs. 500.00. ISBN 81-85604-92-4 978-81-85604-92-3.] For the last two decades, since I started reading critically psychiatry and psychology from the cultural perspective, I had the opportunity to engage myself with colleagues from both humanities and human sciences, and this engagement has enriched me a lot to understand and describe the complexity of cultural practices called psychiatry and psychology. There seem to be a growing interest in the humanities that deal with human mind, but more with psychoanalysis than with psychiatry, psychology and psychiatric social work. There is a renewed interest with Frued, Lacan and a range of post-modern and post-colonial scholarships emerging from Euro-American societies. While these efforts have been productive to re-view south-asian society, culture and politics, I can hardly recall about any serious work based on resources that developed in the South Asian mileu in the last four to five decades! There are few exceptions like Ashis Nandy and Sudhir Kakar, who probably entered the reference list when appreciation of their work started being audible from the Euro-American academia! No study tried to include the works of those who tried to raise a critical voice within these disciplines. No serious reading has been done with the ‘internal’ discourses of mental ‘sciences’ that can strengthen our intellectual culture to offer alternative views on our society, politics and culture. In this context, the book under review can provide an entry point for my colleagues. It links up with the threads of knowledge that the early scholars of our psychiatry, produced in a context where these disciplines were more marginalised. And again, much of this knowledge is useful once we consider history is a way to access past for the present. In this backdrop, Ajita Chakraborty’s book takes us to nuanced narratives of a microhistory of Indian psychiatry and Indian Psychiatric Society. Ajita, one of the first two woman psychiatrists (the first perhaps is Saroja Bai) in India is more known for her serious concerns about the social and cultural aspects of psychiatry, an area less travelled by majority of her fellow colleagues. Who else could write the foreword of this book other than Ashis Nandy? A street-fighting public intellectual, who convincingly transformed his training in psychology to create a discourse of political psychology as a powerful social critique. Nandy in this original piece, opened by saying that “no account of a society is complete without a profile of its subjectivities. This is particularly true for India, which has for centuries lived with diverse, highly developed theories of the mind and techniques of intervention in human consciousness” (p. vii). He notices the paucity of data on those pioneers who tried hard to adopt this new science in a culturally diverse non-modern society to make their profession meaningful in its new social context, and laments that: “we are now left with predominantly de-cultured, asocial, overtly medicalised psychological disciplines studying subjectivities in this part of the world” (p. ix). Nandy noted that, Ajita did not try to blur the distinction between normality and abnormality like her ‘Guru’ Ronald Laing and his anti-psychiatry group. Rather, “she retains the difference as a therapeutic reality and a tool of social criticism” (p. xii). Nandy has pleaded to read this book keeping this context in the mind. Ajita’s book is divided into two parts: memoirs and essays. Memoirs are organised in seven chapters (‘My Early Days,’ ‘Time Abroad,’ ‘Life and Work in Calcutta,’ ‘Psychiatry and the Indian Psychiatric Society,’ ‘Transcultural Psychiatry,’ ‘Deconstructing and /or Analysing Myself,’ and ‘People and Organisations’). In the essays section she has provided eight essays where the last two (‘My Views on Psychiatry in General’ and ‘Cultural Psychiatry, and Understanding Self and Identity’) are being published for the first time. The reader will realise that her autobiographical narrative is theoretically argued and evidenced in her essay section making the volume a well organised narrative. Starting with her birth date she commented: I was born on 31st October, 1926, 9 pm, Sombar, Sashthi. Mother [Tamalini Devi] had written that information in a tiny handmade notebook of some antiquity that I have preserved. The year of birth written by my mother is 1927; I had disputed and corrected it to 1926 when I was 11 years old, after having checked it with cousins near my age. The birthday came under a strange cloud some years later. (p.1) An astrologer, who visited her as a client persuaded her that he wants her horoscope prepared by his guru and with much hesitation she provided her birth information to him. A few days later he came back to report her that the date is faulty: Kartik 14 did not match either Sombar (Monday) or Sashthi (the sixth day since the new moon) of that year. I told him about the confusion over the year of my birth. He came again; saying, that the day and date recorded by my mother matched neither the Greǵorian nor the Bengali year…Confusion and missing out became a part of my life, while the ‘real’ things eluded me. Even my birthday was a contentious issue. (pp. 1-2) Her father, Khirode Behary Chuckerbutty came from a humble family of Jajmans (village priests) who, having committed the sin of eating chicken ‘fell out with his family and ran away from his village. He became a khalasi in a ferry service, and later purser with a coastal shipping company.’ However, he managed to get a BA degree and switched his career as a resident tutor in affluent families. He used the dowry for his marriage to start an electrical goods manufacturing which later on became well known as Clyde Fans. In spite of its initial success, Clyde Fan sank and Ajita’s father moved to the shade of the factory calling himself sansar tyagi (one who has denounced the family life) and put his wife and children in a small rented