Making Sense of History:A Panel Discussion
Dear HumanDHS network friends
The Heinrich Boell Foundation, the India Habitat Centre, Max Mueller Bhavan and Zubaan are pleased to invite you to the ninth programme in their series Partition: The Long Shadow.
Kind regards
Brian Ward
Making Sense of History:A Panel Discussion on Psychiatry and the Partition of 1947
Casurina, India Habitat Centre, 6.30, Saturday 28 June 2008
Speakers:
Dr Sanjeev Jain, Psychiatrist, NIMHANS, Bangalore
Dr Indivar Kamtekar, Historian, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi
Sanjeev Saith, Photographer, Delhi
Dr Alok Sarin, Psychiatrist, Sitaram Bhartia Hospital, New Delhi
Over the past few years, there have been a number of joint medical initiatives between India and Pakistan. These have mainly involved conferences and joint teaching programmes. Psychiatry has been a medical specialty in the forefront of such initiatives. What has been intriguing, however, is the fact that all these conferences and workshops have been virtual blueprints of other programmes conducted the world over.
This would be fine in any other context, but when it comes to India and Pakistan, this is intriguing. These are two countries, split from one whole, which have only half a century ago witnessed the largest, most traumatic transmigration of populations in the history of humankind, and which have yet to come to terms with their shared and troubled past in many ways.
The two countries have a deeply ambivalent, conflicted history, with extreme warmth at one level and an equal distrusting antagonism at another. For many, this ambivalence has been a way of life. Medical psychiatry, with its focus on syndromes, diagnoses and psychopharmacology, has, in various ways, overlooked the huge impact of partition and its sequelae. It has in fact been left to history, sociology, literature and the arts, to attempt to address these issues. Psychiatry, with its medical roots has been conspicuously silent on this issue.
With the opening of many sub-continental dialogues, the time may be good to begin the process of looking at these issues. This attempt can only be the beginning of a process, and it will be interesting to see where this journey takes us.