INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR INNOVATIVE RESEARCH IN MULTIDISCIPLINARY FIELD

Literature, through the creative medium of language, reflects society with clarity, depth and emotional precision. Contemporary literature is more focused and clearer about the objective to discuss the societal issues. With the growing trend of self-writing and first-person narration, literature often gives way to explore what is hidden behind the human psyche and mind. The core aim of this research paper is to talk about mental health, which is a serious concern of 21^st century that needs the attention from the government, society as well as researchers and educators. Hence, this paper critically examines the delineation of mental health in How to Travel Light: My Memories of Madness and Melancholia by Shreevatsa Nevatia, an Indian English memoir published in 2017. Specifically, it seeks to understand the ‘epistemic injustice’ done to ‘mad’ individuals in the society, which is a key characteristic of doing ‘mad studies.’ This memoir is analysed as a cite of mad knowledge production that challenges the dominant biomedical psychiatry, centring lived experiences of mentally ill in society. It candidly provides glimpse into the world of Shreevatsa Nevatia, who is a survivor of mental illness. Nevatia, a young journalist, was diagnosed as bipolar at the age of twenty-three. A very close textual analysis reveals that his portrayal is not linear but an ongoing process of struggles for a decade within cycles of depression and euphoria and not a condition that leads to cure or recovery. Rather than looking at it as a clinical or diagnostic account of mental illness, this mad studies reading portrays it as a narrative of lived psychological distress that resists pathologization and medicalization. In a nut-shell, this paper is an attempt to present the repercussions of ignorance to the mad voices through understanding the testimonial and hermeneutical injustice done to ‘Mad,’ as reflected in the memoir, which sincerely contributes to the field of mad studies that contends madness not as a pathological condition to be cured but as a complex, lived condition. In addition to that, it adds to mad studies scholarship by illustrating how literary memoirs can lead to non-clinical, experiential understanding of mental illness as well as social, cultural and political factors affecting the individual experience of distress. This study is an attempt to make society consider ‘Mad’ individuals as credible ‘knowers’ and ‘interpreters’ of their own experiences and knowledge as well as to give voice to their oppression, discrimination and marginalisation in all the speres of society.