Manasa Chitra: the Art of Mental Health from Bengaluru to Bethlem

The experience of mental health conditions is always shaped by the various cultural contexts in which it occurs. Not only so, but different cultures have their own resources from which self-understanding and support may be drawn.

The pictures in this exhibition illustrate the range of sources on which artists from India with lived experience of mental distress have been able to call for the sake of their wellbeing. A number were drawn by patients at what in the 1950s was known as Bangalore Mental Hospital, as part of occupational therapy. Others are the creations of people living with mental health challenges in and around Bengaluru today.

The works from the 1950s found their way to England due to the friendship between M.V. Govindaswamy and German emigré psychiatrist Wilhelm Mayer-Gross, whose work in India in that decade were instrumental in the establishment of Bangalore Mental Hospital alongside Govindaswamy (later, the National Institute for Mental Health and Neurosciences). The contemporary works were exhibited at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bengaluru, in 2025, and belong to their respective artists.

The pictures are full of movement and colour, humour and joy. They tell stories of people and places, homes and religions, and seem to celebrate everything that makes for identity and resilience in the face of distress and despair. The message they share is one of hope and it is authentically one of India. 

Image: The Superintendent, N.G.J, 1957

Supported by Garfield Weston Foundation

Parle's Biscuit Factory, Bombay, Anonymous, 1957