ABSTRACT
Some thirty-five years ago, I first met Professor Anandalakshmy at a meeting at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi while on a psychoanalytic research project in India (Roland, 1988, 2011). At that time the pall of the colonial era still hung heavily over psychology in India. Almost all Indian psychologists were taking their psychological theories from either England or America, and then applying them to Indian relationships and child development. Implicit in these theories cross-culturally was a hangover from Social Darwinism, the prevailing theory of the colonial era. Northern European and North American cultures were seen as superior on the ladder of social development, while Asian and other cultures were viewed as primitive and inferior (Brickman, 2003). Thus, the norms of Western psychology were assumed to be normal and universal and, as a result, Indian psychological development and functioning generally came out to be inferior, if not psychopathological (e.g. Kakar, 1978, pp. 105–8, 135–7).
