Farah Yameen from "The Hindu Business Line", who reviewed the book thinking it was a novel and not a collection of short-stories, feels that the author has done injustice to his work and that he should have explored more on the question of hundreds of mental patients who died of cholera in asylums or how did the partition cause collective psychosis. She also complains about the cliched cover of the book which displays a silhouette of a man with a tunnel going through it. Ranjit Powar's review in "The Tribune" called the book a must read for those who should know what happened and those who still feel the phantom limb pain of Partition and have inherited the loss of unrequited relationships through a collective subconscious. Nirupama Dutt wrote in the "Hindustan Times", "Psychiatrist Anirudh Kala's 'The Unsafe Asylum: Stories of Partition and Madness' in interlinked episodes explores the impact of Partition on mental health in both countries, and even of the future generations." Sakoon Singh reviews the book in DNA thus, "In a new offering, Anirudh Kala in "The Unsafe Asylum: Stories of Partition and Madness", amplifies the voice of purported "lunatics". The naivety of "the rear end of humanity" duly punctures the sophistry of arguments advocating Partition. The book comes from the space of an insider, Kala's empathy drives this history from below. Overall, a sage addition to the existing and growing corpus of partition writing."