I want to start at the psychiatric space. The psychiatric clinic in Sunflower Hospital, Juhu Scheme, Mumbai. In the basement of the hospital, hidden underneath the superstructure of our lives, I want to visit the countless upper middle class families who come to this clinic to discuss their “private” problems in private. Each space leads to a smaller cell to hide and the more you’re hidden the more comfortable you are. Outside in the waiting room, everyone is a partner in an imperfect ideal.
Starting at the healing or remedial space, where families come to unite their fragments, usually the fragments in their mother’s, wife’s bodies, I want to explore the construct of the hysterical, irrational wife in the psychiatric space where these treatments take place. The body to be "treated" is usually her body. The domestic space, hidden from the world, through the psychiatric space, further gets enclosed, gets undiscovered and mystified into the darkness of the human mind.
Why?
Where hysteria has been perceived as an "illness", I want to understand hysteria as a form agency for bourgeois women in India. Families usually go to the psychiatric space when there is a break down in the family, in the domestic sphere, when the patriarchal household is consumed by the hysteria of the wife, mother. Her agency takes the most painful form here, for that moment in time; she claims subjectivity through pain, through the avowal of her pain. (The psychiatric space is the space of disavowal of her agency, where patriarchy regains control, sometimes at her wish, sometimes not). At that point, pain is her only self, it is the pain of expression of subjugation, domination, powerlessness, unrealised, unfulfilled desires, that is avowed...What kind of opening does it create? I dont know yet...
