Historicizing Indian psychiatry

Our historical endeavour to map Indian psychiatry has largely remained linear, positivistic and evolutionary. Whether it starts from the ancient times or modern, it shows our past as a tale of victory for the western science, without questioning the borrowed paradigm. The use of historical methods for serious enquiry of psychiatry has been ignored. Emergence of a new genre of historicism that is critical of both colonialism and psychiatry as a universal science, has raised hopes to critically review the emergence of psychiatric knowledge.