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 Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry. He was a Commonwealth Fellow at
Cambridge University, UK, in 1993-1994, 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 the Tata Institute of Fundamental
Research), Bangalore, and now with Kasturba Medical College, Manipal. He
has been involved in volunteer work with both governmental organizations
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, specialized 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 organization working with chronic psychiatric illness, has also
been organizing 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 an 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.