Spotlight on Indian artist D'Souza
A discovery by one of Bethlem’s volunteers has revealed new insights onto the artworks in Manasa Chitra, the current temporary exhibition.
Richard identified several quotations in one of the works in the historic collection by an artist called D’Souza. These quotations were from English and American literary works, and changed our understanding of this patient’s background and therefore developed our picture of who went to Bangalore Mental Hospital and where they came from.
The quotations are in the painting Life is a Mystery, a watercolour and pencil depiction of three figures resembling a family jumping hand in hand across a river running through a green landscape dotted with flowers against a mountainous backdrop.
In D’Souza’s other works, he uses Catholic imagery of saints and churches with frequent reference to ‘God’. He also uses Konkani in the Roman script in two of his works, a language which is spoken mostly in Goa but also in Mangaluru, a region of Karnataka, the state in which Bengaluru is located. These pieces of evidence, along with his name, strongly suggest he was a Konkani Catholic of Indo-Portuguese descent. This we established when researching the exhibition.
Richard’s discoveries, however, point to an English education. The quotations are from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Morte D’Arthur, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, and Benjamin Franklin’s Almanac, as well as a quotation from US author Harold W. Becker and a proverb of unknown origin.
The wide range of literary references suggest that D’Souza was well-read in addition to speaking multiple languages. Amission rates in the 1950s show that Indian Christians were overrepresented in Bangalore Mental Hospital, and that admission rates correlated with literacy levels amongst communities in urban populations, with Indian Christian populations showing relatively high literacy rates. D’Souza’s artworks support these findings and bring a very human element to this statistical trend.
This new understanding of D’Souza’s work provides deeper insight into the cultural diversity of Bangalore Mental Hospital in the 1950s. It brings the archive to life by conjuring up the image of an institution full of people interested in literature and poetry and putting this into their art. We can imagine patients chatting to one another about shared interests and favourite authors. It breathes humanity into an otherwise cold history of admission statistics and medical notes and shows the value of art for restoring a patient perspective to the history of psychiatry.
See some of D'Souza's artwork on display in the museum's current exhibition, Manasa Chitra, until 14 November 2026.
Written by Rachel Ditchfield, highlighting research by Richard Martin