That psychotherapy is colonial is a prevailing stance within and beyond psychology in India. Such a position risks aligning with essentialist binaries like ‘East/West’ espoused by Hindu nationalism. Although its practice began in the Indian subcontinent during the late colonial period, examining the history of psychotherapy suggests that it was more than merely a ‘Western’ import. Ethnographic data from participant observation and interviews at a psychotherapy training programme in Bengaluru show that the contemporary practice of psychotherapy in India similarly resists such accusations of colonization. New entrants into India's urban middle classes are enthusiastically opting for therapy. Reading their participation as a continuation of colonization would deny them agency and potentially erase their capacity to define what decolonizing means to them. Furthermore, erstwhile colonies may be internally varied through differentials of power, thus making ‘coloniality’ a condition that cannot be easily divided into clear divisions between the Global South and the Global North.
Meghna Roy (Wed,) studied this question.