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ADITYA KAILASH JAIN with the latest in our international series.
INDIA is one of the world's oldest civilisations and fastest developing countries. Although it occupies only 2.4 per cent of the world's land area, India supports over 15 per cent of the population, almost 40 per cent of whom are under 15 years of age. Over thousands of years of its history India has been invaded from the Iranian plateau, Central Asia, Arabia, Afghanistan, and the West (Britain was the last invader and ruled India for 200 years, until 15 August 1947). Indian people and culture have absorbed and shaped these influences to produce a remarkable racial and cultural synthesis. Religion, caste and language are major determinants of social and political organisation, and psychology has to attempt an understanding of behaviour in this context.
East meets West
Calcutta University established the first Department of Psychology in 1915 under the leadership of Dr N.N. Sengupta, who had worked under Professor Hugo Munsterberg, a former student of Wundt. Due to the fact that Calcutta University became the first centre of psychological research and teaching in India, it was able to play a key role in the development of psychology in the country (Kundu & Chakrabati, 1979). As most psychologists working in other centres had graduated or received short-term orientation in Calcutta University, diffusion of Wundtian influence to other centres was only natural (Sinha, 1990).
Before independence British universities greatly influenced the directions that psychological research took in the country, this being due in the main to Spearman, Burt, Eysenck, and so on (Sinha, 1994). Research interests of psychologists in the period before independence give the impression that they were at best reflections of research done in British and, later on, American universities. This psychology, transplanted to India as part of the total imperialist domination by the West, came as a ready-made intellectual package in the first decade of the century (Nandy, 1974). In doing so it almost entirely replaced the intellectual traditions and indigenous systems that had existed for thousands of years - religious and metaphysical systems that contained elaborate theories about human nature, actions, personality and interrelationships with the world. For instance, mentally ill patients in India were historically treated using various approaches such as...