Disability Matters Hybrid Seminar with Dr Santosh Kumar

The common beliefs about mental illness are wide-spread. Reaume (2000: 182) observes that “No term in the history of madness is neutral, not mental illness, madness, or any other term.” This observation seems to be true for the terms across all languages. This paper argues that even the places associated with mental illness tend to get negative connotations in popular imagination in paroemias. Paroemias are proverbs, proverbial expressions, and similar sentence units (Meterc 2017, 9) that keep a more or less fixed structure and meaning, perpetuating the societal stereotype of the phenomenon. The paper traces a proverbial expression Barelii jaane kaa kaam karte ho? (‘Your deeds will take you to Bareli!’) (S. W. Fallon, Dictionary of Hindustani Proverbs (1884)) referring to the newly established mental asylum in Bareilly in the United Province of British India.

This paper problematises this expression with similar expressions found in other Indian languages about different mental asylums established by the British after the enactment of Indian Lunacy Act 1858. For instance, another expression in Hindi: Ranchi jana hai kya? (Do you wanna go to Ranchi) and its equivalent expressions in other Indian languages such as in Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Gujarati, Marathi, Nepali, Maithili, Meiteilon. These expressions are said to someone who does something ‘stupid’ or talks ‘non-sense’ in either to express disgust or friendly banter. The data from other languages is collected through an email thread shared with the members of Disability Studies India mailing list and author’s self-reflection on the usage of these expressions with the friend in his adolescence. This paper questions why and how do the places where mental asylums established by colonial regimes transform into metonymic expressions for mental illness? Why did Fallon take this new idiomatic expression into consideration and put it in the dictionary? Why did metonymic expression become a pan-linguistic phenomenon and what does its prevalence suggest? These questions lead to conceptualizing oral history of mental illness as well as colonialism in India. 

Bio:

Dr. Santosh Kumar, Assistant Professor at the department of English and Cultural Studies, Christ deemed to be University, Bangalore. I am interested in exploring the usage of language and metaphors to represent a disability and other marginalised sections of society. My articles are published in Disability and Society, Indian Linguistics; Economic and Political Weekly, Contemporary Voice of Dalit, Quarterly Review of Film and Video and Anthropology News (American Anthropological Association, USA). My book chapter Metaphors Goes Far: Materiality as Metaphor is part of Disability in South Asia: Knowledge and Experience edited by Anita Ghai from Sage Publication. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9243-4441