Rather than the intellectual justification of the construction of European architecture in Asian colonies being a celebration of grandeur and cultural superiority, for the agents of the state actually on the ground, often their justifications could simply be due to the practical limits of their situation. Taking Rangoon’s asylum as a case study, we can see that the British were struggling to build the institution as they had hoped, and this was in large part due to the noncompliance of the colony’s population.
While the City Beautiful movement would be embraced across the British Empire a few decades after as a way of securing the permanence of British colonial superiority, as suggested by Robert Home and Peter Hall, and even at the time when the French were building European architecture across Indochina as an expression of their cultural superiority, as argued by Gwendolyn Wright, the superintendent of the Rangoon Lunatic Asylum was considering the use of European architecture in 1880 for a very different reason.[1] Ever since the institution had opened in 1871 there had been attempts made by the administrators of the facility to construct a dead-house within its compounds. While this had initially been a request which was not acted upon with much urgency, by the end of the decade death rates were equalling roughly 10% of the asylum’s population as epidemics and the general debilitation of the patients who had remained in the asylum for a number of years started to impact on the numbers dying, and so the asylum’s superintendent attempted to act upon this issue.[2] However, there was one particular obstacle which he encountered:
‘The dead-house, which was asked for eight years ago, has not yet been erected. The money for a wooden structure has been long ago sanctioned; but the Burmans and Chinese decline to build it, because, as they say, men and women are cut up in it. To get over this difficulty it was suggested that it should be built of brick.’[3]
While this statement does not provide any illumination as to why the construction of the dead-house out of brick would be a way of circumventing the issues facing the superintendent, we can provide a suggestion as to why this may be the case by examining the other buildings within the compound. As a way of housing the non-criminal inmates, the asylum offered a number of wooden cottages, and these cottages would be raised above the ground by poles, the reason for this being that during the monsoon rains it would keep the structure away from the groundwater and prevent them from rotting or dampening the interior.[4] We could suggest, therefore, that the only workers who knew how to build this particular kind of raised structures with the wood particular to that area of the world were the populations who had lived and built towns in the area for generations: the Burmese and Chinese. Therefore, the suggestion to construct the dead-house with brick as a response to these populations’ refusal to build it out of wood could be an implicit suggestion that the superintendent must now rely upon other populations present in the town, probably the Indian labour force, who would be under the instruction of a British engineer, who presumably had no knowledge as to how to construct these buildings with these materials as they would have lacked the cultural knowledge which the local geography had made necessary.
This surely was a setback for the British colonial agents as not only were brick buildings more expensive to construct than wooden ones, but also the previous superintendent had praised how effective the local architecture was at providing easily cleanable and good quality housing for the inmates, helping to keep their disposition from turning violent, and the superintendent quoted above lamented as to the ineffectiveness of the asylum’s brick buildings at keeping the rains out of the cells.[5] This is just one example of how the attempt to impose British ideas as to how the state should respond to mental health were rejected by local cultures. Other examples include when the local populations resisted providing payment for the care of their friends and relatives incarcerated within the asylum, and they also resisted requests from the asylum’s authorities to return escaped patients, who were only returned once the asylum’s staff happened upon these individuals in the town by chance, but neither of these other two incidents were exhibited through the architectural presentation of the asylum.[6] Now, however, the inability to convince the local populations to embrace European conceptions of medical practices as a part of their culture was now visually represented. Not only were the practices within the building alien to these cultures, but, due to this act of resistance by local builders, so was its façade, making the distance between the British and the people whom they were trying to govern obvious to all, and leaving this failure of the asylum’s administration, with all of its implications for its future running, as a mark upon the layout of the facility.
[1] Robert K. Home, “Miracle Worker to the People” in Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities (1996) Peter Hall, “The City of Monuments” in Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design since 1880 (2014, 4th Ed.); Gwendolyn Wright, “Indochina: The Folly of Grandeur” in The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (1991).
[2] G. D. Burgess, Report on the Rangoon Lunatic Asylum: For the Year 1880, (Rangoon, 1881), p. 17.
[3] Ibid., p. 1.
[4] G. D. Burgess, Report on the Rangoon Lunatic Asylum: For the Year 1879, (Rangoon, 1880), p. 1.
[5] Ibid., p. 1; G. D. Burgess, Report on the Rangoon Lunatic Asylum: For the Year 1880, p. 1.
[6] G. D. Burgess, Report on the Rangoon Lunatic Asylum: For the Year 1879, pp. 4, 8.