Trauma of India's Partition Metaphor for Madness

Sanjeev Jain did his undergraduate medical studies at the University of Delhi (Maulana Azad Medical College), and post-graduate specialization in psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bangalore, where, after many years as tenured faculty, he is now an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry. He was a Commonwealth Fellow at the Cambridge University, UK, in the 1993-94, where in addition to learning research methods in genetics, he developed an interest in the history of psychiatry. He is a clinician and a teacher, researches the genetic correlates of psychiatric and neurological disease, and helped establish the molecular genetics laboratory at NIMHANS. He was an adjunct faculty at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (part of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research), Bangalore; and now with Kasturba Medical College, Manipal. He has been involved in volunteer work with both governmental organisations and NGOs, and was a member of the committee for drafting the Mental Health Policy document for India. He has been researching the history of mental health services in India, from the colonial period to the contemporary times. This work has helped understand the interface between science and medicine, and social responses to mental illness in India.

Alok Sarin did his graduate and postgraduate studies at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, specialised in psychiatry and has been in active clinical practice for the last 40 years. He has been an active member of the Indian Psychiatric Society and has written and published widely; he too was a member of the committee that developed the Mental Health Policy for India. Apart from clinical practice, he has been particularly interested in areas of psycho-social rehabilitation and in involving the larger community in public discourses on mental health and disease. He has been the Chairperson of the National Board of The Richmond Fellowship Society, a voluntary organisation working with chronic psychiatric illness, and has also been organising the acclaimed lecture series The Canvas Askew. He has been a Senior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Teen Murti House, and was awarded the fellowship for research on the mental health aspects of communal conflict. He has been adjunct faculty at the Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health. He has also been actively involved in researching the history of psychiatry in India, with a special interest in the history of the mental hospitals.