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Letter
A psychiatrist on the cusp of independence: Owen
Berkeley-Hill on how to nudge social change in
India, Jain et al
Sanjeev Jain and Alok Sarin
Keywords
A psychiatrist on the cusp of independence: Owen Berkeley-Hill
on how to nudge social change in India.
Copyright and usage
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on
behalf of Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Colonial psychiatry carries a whiff of opprobrium, but that should not
detract from the contributions that many psychiatrists made to their
place of work. Lt. Col. Owen Berkeley-Hill (1879–1944), a psychiatrist
in India, joined the Indian Medical Service (‘scraped in as the “last but
one”’ in the qualifying exam) in 1906, served all over India and East
Africa, and was the Superintendent of the Europeans-only mental hos-
pital in Ranchi.
1
An inveterate iconoclast, nothing seemed to please
him more than pointing out the absurdities of the Colonial
Government, and both Indian and European society. His colleagues
and superiors were often the target of his sharp wit and apparently
‘scandalous’behaviour. He was quite rooted in his life in India, and
contributed extensively to the intellectual life of not just the Bengal
Presidency, but well beyond. Berkeley-Hill had a great interest in psy-
choanalysis, was a proponent of mental hygiene and positive mental
health, and helped establish the Indian branch of the Royal Medico-
Psychological Association (RMPA),
2
the first outside of Britain in
the Empire. He seems to have made a sincere effort to understand
the complex and confusing times and place that he lived in. He was
fluent in many languages, including Hindustani and Telugu, in add-
ition to being familiar with Arabic, Bengali, Malayalam and Swahili;
and of course Latin and French. His household included relatives
and staff from all over India, Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa.
He was married to Karimbil Kunhimanny (Janaki), from
Cannanore (now Kannur, Kerala) under Brahmo Samaj rites, as he
did not want her to have to convert to Christianity, and the customs
of the Thiyya community did not have any specific rules for marrying
across religions. This ‘scandalous’behaviour distanced him from the
rigid hierarchies of both British and Indian society. He was well aware
of the canker of communal and caste divisions in south Asia, and
even hinted that it would be a constant blight, unless resolved. One of
his more seemingly outrageous and quixotic suggestions (to try to
resolve the Hindu–Muslim conflict) was to invite everyone to a commu-
nal feast, so that this most entrenched of social barriers could be broken.
3
At that time, eating across the social divide was almost taboo, and
railway stations had separate taps or water-carriers for different com-
munities!This suggestion was probably influenced by his awareness of
SahodaranAyyappan(1889–1968) and the ideas of Ayyankali and
many others who had protested against the ‘lunatic’‘mad-house’of
distinctions that Swami Vivekananda had chastised against, and that
contemporary Indian society represented.
4
Sahodaran Ayappan had
practised a simple effective manner of overcoming the ‘caste
madness’, by encouraging and hosting communal meals (panthibho-
janam) in 1917.
5
Berkeley-Hill perhaps became aware of these
through his extended family, and incorporated this into his writing,
proposing that the Hindu–Muslim conflict be treated accordingly,
while also dressing it up in psychoanalytic terms.
Professor Edward Mapother, on his visit in 1937 to India, found
Owen Berkeley-Hill to be the most brilliant mind, but someone who
had unfortunately rubbed everyone in authority the wrong way and
could thus not be entrusted with carrying out the reforms that were
necessary.
6
Berkeley-Hill died in 1944 after a brief illness, sur-
rounded by his family and his friend Mr Ramalingam, an officer
in the Bengal-Nagpur Railways. He is buried in Ranchi, where his
tombstone reads ‘The Care of the Human Mind is the Noblest
Profession of Medicine’. The life and career of Lt. Col. Owen
Berkeley-Hill shows that the walls of the asylum, and the identities
of colonialism, were often porous and permeable, and these inter-
sections of mid-20th-century India encouraged psychiatry in
south Asia to be cosmopolitan and inclusive.
Sanjeev Jain , Department of Psychiatry, National Institute of Mental Health and
Neuro-Sciences (NIMHANS), Bangalore, India; Alok Sarin, Department of Psychiatry,
Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science and Research, New Delhi, India
Correspondence: Sanjeev Jain. Email: sjain.nimhans@gmail.com
First received 15 Jan 2024, accepted 23 Jan 2024
Funding
This work was supported in part by a grant from the Wellcome Trust (WT096493MA).
Declaration of interest
None.
References
1Berkeley-Hill O. The Ranchi European Mental Hospital. J Ment Sci 1924; 70:
68–76.
2Jain S, Murthy P, Sarin A. The brief existence of the Indian section of the Royal
Medico-Psychological Association: a historical note. Indian J Psychiatry 2018;
60(suppl 2): s284.
3Berkeley-Hill OAR. Hindu–Muslim Unity. In Collected Papers: 149–56. The Book
Company, 1933.
4Harikrishnan S. Communicating communism: social spaces and the creation of
a’progressive’public sphere in Kerala, India. TripleC Special Issue 2020; 18(1):
268–85.
5Kulirani BF. The role of panthibhojanam in the Navodhana movement of
Kerala. In Food and Power: Expressions of Food-Politics in South Asia
(ed K Mukhopadhyay): 127–40. SAGE Publications, 2020.
6Mapother E. Suggestions as to some Possible Projects for the Promotion of
Psychiatry in India (Royal Bethlem Hospital Archive: EM–01, Papers of Edward
Mapother). Bethlem Museum of the Mind/Maudsley Hospital, 1938.
The British Journal of Psychiatry (2024)
224, 179. doi: 10.1192/bjp.2024.27
179
https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2024.27 Published online by Cambridge University Press
