Indian psychology Vs Scientific Indian Psychology

 Indian psychology does not mean going back to ground zero…

Indian society is in crossroads today. There is a strong move from many quarters to rewrite the history to safeguard the lost pride of India. Though this movement silently started long back, due to political security in recent years, it has taken a gigantic move. The early coloniser's impression of India as a land of savages gave a negative opinion about the country. Therefore, besides looting the wealth of the country, the colonisers took the task of civilising the people directly and indirectly. This led to the intense inferior feeling in the Indian psyche, among intellectuals as well as ordinary citizens. Due to this psychological condition of the people, a nationalistic concept started to spread in every sphere of life, with political backing. The notion of polarisation that a person who is not a Hindu is an anti-national slowly started to spread. National security, territorial integrity, one nation-one culture concepts are originating from this backdrop. The initiatives taken for developing Indian psychology are not free from this nationalistic ideology, and it needs to be understood from this historical background of the Indian psyche.

Indian culture-specific approach to psychology started as early as the first half of the 20^th century. It was initiated as ‘Indian psychology’ by Jadunath Sinha (1892-1978), a philosophy graduate and a lecturer with a blatant philosophical dependence (Sinha, 1956, 1986). This philosophical slanting of Sinha is evident from his plagiarism accusation against Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan who allegedly stole the first two parts of his thesis Indian Psychology of Perception and published as Indian philosophy (Aich, 2016; Venkatesh, 2018). From this unfortunate scrambling in the 1920s, Indian psychology never became an independent scientific pursuit; instead, it is begging at the doors of philosophy for all its quest. A good number of prominent psychologists, as well as psychology aspirants in India, honestly believe today that Indian psychology is exploring the past glories of the ancient philosophical and Hindu religious writings (Rao, 1962; Safaya,1975; Sinha, 1986; Kuppuswamy, 1993; Paranjpe, 1998; Rao, Paranjpe & Dalal, 2008; Dalal, 2010; Sinha, Mishra and Dalal, 2015; Rao & Paranjpe, 2016). Thus, the pursuit for culture-specific scientific Indian psychology missed its objectives down through the centuries. Similar attempts for a sectarian Islamic psychology have been made in India and abroad (Vahab, 1996; Haque, 2004; Siddiqui & Malek, 1996). Buddhist psychology is also popular among some circles (De Silva, 1991; Anacker, 1984). Christian psychology or Biblical psychology based on Biblical theology and Christian writings is prevalent in some countries (Dansby, 2019; Roberts & Talbot, 1997; Chambers, 1995).  

In the recent past, an initiative by the delegates of the National Conference on Yoga and Indian Approaches to Psychology came up with a ‘Pondicherry Manifesto of Indian Psychology’ (Cornelissen, 2002). It clarifies Indian psychology as ‘a distinct psychological tradition that is rooted in Indian ethos and thought, including the variety of psychological practices that exist in the country (Cornelissen, 2002). This initiative sounds more like a spiritual, Hindu psychology than scientific Indian psychology per se, old wine in new wineskins.

The problem with many scholars who exert their efforts in defining Indian psychology is that they magnify some ancient mystical, mythological and puranic cosmological thoughts and the related religio-philosophical systems as glorified psychological thinking and evade from providing practical and pragmatic principles guiding to comprehensive theories of human behaviour as per the emerging worldview in the changing society. Therefore, Indian psychology remains today as a primordial, intuitive, and unscientific thought pattern of bundled subjective assumptions and metaphysical assertions of a particular religion, eluding concrete empirical investigation.  

Is their any possibility to have scientific psychology? I purposely write scientific psychology because Indian Psychology is a term misunderstood today as scientific psychology and many groups of scholars will jump into the fray saying we have everything in the Vedas, Upanishads etc... etc… I am fed up with this bhajan...

The various initiatives taken in India has its controversies because the vested agenda to glorify ancient myths and traditional religio-philosophical thinking which are far from being scientific, not relevant today and meaningless in explaining human behaviour. There is also a systematic move to glorify the Indian past by highlighting legends and sacred lore as scientific historiography and many eminent scholars fall prey to that. 

There are lot of unscientific claims by various higher authorities that push the Indian scientific approach in the backseat. As Sharma (2019) reports, the five-day Indian Science Congress in 2019 ended with the questioning of Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton’s theories and the erroneous assertion that ancient Indians were adept at stem cell technology. Sharma further claims that the major promoter of unscientific claims is Indian premier himself who claimed that Lord Ganesha’s head must have been fixed by some plastic surgeon and that Karna was a test tube baby (Thapar, 2014). 

Rajasthan Education Minister repeatedly claimed that cows are the only animals that inhale and exhale oxygen and cold and cough can be cured just by going near it (Vyas, 2017). God ... save me...

In the Indian Science Congress Captain Anand Bodas, a retired principal of a pilot training facility claimed that the world’s first plane was invented by the Hindu sage Maharishi Bharadwaj which had 40 small engines, had a flexible exhaust system that modern aviation can't even approach (Lakshmi, 2015). While addressing the inaugural session of the 105th Indian Science Congress, Science and Technology Minister claimed that cosmologist Stephen Hawking said that the Vedas have a theory that is superior to Albert Einstein's equation e=mc^2 (Ramesh, 2018). 

A Vice-chancellor of a University in the 106th  edition of the Indian Science Congress elaborated that the mythical story in Hindu epic Mahabharata, where 100 Kauravas were born to Gandhari, was due to stem cell and test tube technology; he further claimed that a demon king of Sri Lanka was battered by Ram by weapons which would chase targets, hit them and return just like modern-day guided missiles (Khaira, 2019). This popular toxic mix of mythology and pseudoscience at various science forums, in the name of nationalism and patriotism, tend to think that some pressure groups are pulling the Indian society to the unscientific realm. 

Pressure groups are collections of people with a parallel set of values and beliefs generally based on ethnicity, religion, political philosophy, or some common goal. 

Pressure groups are potentially beneficial to any democratic society, in which they pressurise the government for more action. In India, however, pressure groups with a narrow notion of nationalism and also a clubbing religion with nationalism create communal tensions. Even a committee that was formed by the Ministry of Culture to study the origin and evolution of Indian culture dating back to around 12,000 years has its controversy (Nayar, 2020). In this juncture, a genuine question that needs to be answered is: is it an Indian cultural element to be centred on myths and superstitions or does Indian mind need a paradigm shift towards scientific approach towards life.

I doubt whether Indian psychology ever become scientific.