Psychology for India

Psychology for India (2015) By Durganand Sinha with an introduction by Girishwar Misra and Ajit K Dalal, New Delhi: Sage Publications, Pp. 221 , Price : Rs.695 (Hardcover). ISBN 978-93-515-0367-5

TShould psychology in India be for the Indian people? By being disengaged from its own social and cultural milieu, will it not continue to be of little use in helping and healing the Indian psyche? Most of us will answer affirmatively to these questions. Need for making the discipline of psychology in India relevant for and connecting to the Indian scenario has been realized much earlier by the fraternity of psychologists in India. But there are very few scholars, who devoted their academic lives for arguing and advancing the cause of a psychology for India. The name and fame of Professor Durganand Sinha stands tall among the advocates of Indian perspective in psychology. Professor Sinha was an architect of a new kind of psychology for India not only through mainstream research and mentoring of many scholars including Ajit K. Dalal, Anand Prakash, R.C. Tripathi, R.K. Misra, Janak Pandey, Girishwar Misra, U. N. Agrawal, Meera Verma, Nisha Dhawan and many more, but also by making endeavours to convince the policy-makers, inspiring colleagues, building bridges of understanding with other sister disciplines, innovating measurement techniques for various psychological phenomenon, creating an ideal teaching-research programme, establishing international affiliations, and carrying psychological explorations to the doors of disadvantaged sections of Indian society.

Against this backdrop, Psychology for India brings out theoretical and methodological issues for indigenization of psychology in India, imparts research-based knowledge of human development in Indian society, and elaborates concerns for applying psychology in Indian scenario. It presents a comprehensive selection of Professor Sinha's writings on various issues and concerns particularly of...