When Mad Tales from the Raj was first published in 1991, few historians worked on colonial psychiatry and medicine. It took another four years before McCulloch explored the role of ‘colonial psychiatry in Africa’. The scope of these first two major studies could not have been more different. One focused on a subcontinent, South Asia, the other on a continent, Africa. Mad Tales was concerned with the early nineteenth, McCulloch's Colonial Psychiatry with the early twentieth century. Crucially, one paid particular attention to the theories and practices of British psychiatry in relation to Europeans in India, while the other assessed the role of western psychiatry in relation to colonial racism and Africans. Unsurprisingly, subsequent work on South Asia and Africa has expanded beyond both, focusing on the treatment of the Indian mentally ill during later periods and on case-studies of particular African regions respectively. The history of psychiatry within the context of various colonial settings has clearly come of age over the last two decades. Some reflection on how this reprint of Mad Tales can be located within a fast developing field of study is clearly indicated. This requires an appraisal of the historiographic reconfigurations and conceptual developments that have characterized South Asian medical history in recent years.

In the 1980s, the study of medicine and colonialism was still in its infancy. Existing work drew on Fanon whose seminal book Black Skins, White Masks had been made available in a new English edition in 1986.