Indian Psychology

Indian psychology refers to an emerging scholarly and scientific subfield of psychology that retrieves psychological ideas embedded in indigenous Indian religious and spiritual traditions and philosophies and expresses them in psychological terms that permit further research and application; the term does not mean the psychology of the Indian people or psychology as taught at Indian universities. Some scholarship in the field dates to the 1930s, but activity intensified after the 2002 Manifesto on Indian Psychology, issued by more than 150 psychologists gathered in Pondicherry under the leadership of K. Ramakrishna Rao and Girishwar Misra, among others, who declared that Indian psychology is pregnant with possibilities for new models rooted in India's own intellectual heritage. Topics addressed by the field include values, personality, perception, cognition, emotion, creativity, education and spirituality, alongside applications such as meditation, yoga and ayurveda, and the field follows an inclination toward higher consciousness as a way of understanding the self and the theory of mind, employing both objective experimental approaches and phenomenological inquiry as complementary to, rather than opposed to, modern Western psychology.