Modern Psychology in India
1915
Girindrasekhar Bose (1887–1953)
As early as the mid-nineteenth century in India, there was interest in psychology as understood in the European sense. The prominent Indian scientist Mahendra Lal Sircar argued that psychology was important in understanding both the objective and subjective aspects of human mentality.
Psychology as an academic discipline was institutionalized in India early in the twentieth century, as indicated by the establishment of the country’s first psychological laboratory in 1915 at Calcutta University. Within twenty years, psychology was taught in at least one hundred Indian academic institutions. According to Indian scholars, much of the psychological science in India was derivative of Western psychology in the period between the world wars and for a period after its independence from Great Britain in 1947. On the other hand, Psychoanalysis in India developed in a way that expressed the richness of Indian cultural life.
The pioneer of psychoanalysis in India, Girindrasekhar Bose, transformed psychoanalysis to reflect the reality of Hindu family life and customs, with its emphasis on the mother-son relationship. Bose argued that the most important relationship for psychological development was that of mother and son rather than father and son, as in Freudian theory. Bose proposed that a child wishes to be both male and female; there is not the strong identification with the opposite-sex parent that is the basis for Freud’s Oedipus Complex. It is, in Bose’s view, the contending and opposite wishes that create the need for repression in childhood, the resolution of which holds the promise of healthy personality development. In this way, Indian psychoanalysis became a model for efforts since the 1970s to make Indian psychology reflective of Indian life and relationships.
After World War II, Durganand Sinha did for academic psychology what Bose had done for psychoanalysis. Sinha argued that Indian identity is primarily relational, and in order to be effective, psychology must originate from this basic, taken-for-granted truth of Indian life.
SEE ALSO Buddha’s Four Noble Truths (528 BCE), Bhagavad Gita (c. 200 BCE)
Tomb of the Mughal emperor Humayun (1508–1556) at dusk, Delhi, India. The country’s first psychological laboratory was established at the University of Calcutta in 1915.