Toward Psychological Decolonization: Colonial Self-Discrepancy among Indian Youth and Spiritual Reintegration

More than seven decades after independence, British colonial influence continues to shape the identity, aspirations, and self-perception of Indian youth. The persistence of colonial modernity within India’s political, educational, and cultural institutions has produced a distinct form of identity conflict rooted in internalized colonial standards of value and success. While postcolonial scholarship has examined the political and cultural dimensions of colonialism, its psychological impact on youth identity remains insufficiently explored. To address this gap, the study adopts an interdisciplinary qualitative and interpretive conceptual approach to examine identity conflict through E. Tory Higgins’s Self-Discrepancy Theory and introduces the concept of ‘Colonial Self-Discrepancy’. It argues that Colonial Self-Discrepancy manifests through emotional fragmentation, cultural ambivalence, and dependence on externally constructed standards of recognition and success. The study further examines how globalization and digital culture intensify this condition through exposure to colonial-modern ideals of aspiration and self-worth. Adopting a decolonial perspective, the paper examines Indian spirituality as a framework for spiritual reintegration and conceptualizes the resolution of Colonial Self-Discrepancy through spiritual engagement as ‘Psychological Decolonization’. This paper contributes to postcolonial political psychology and contemporary debates on the decolonization of the Indian mind by connecting postcolonial theory, political psychology, and Indian philosophical thought within a common conceptual framework.