A Social Science Perspective on Childhood Experience in India

Abstract

From an outsider’s perspective, contemporary social science research in India seems dramatically unbalanced, with many outstanding specialists in the mathematical fields of statistics, economics, and demography, a smaller number in social anthropology, and a general lack of development in the disciplines dealing with the human psyche. The question of why this should be so, given the early efforts of Dr. Bose in psychoanalysis (Kakar, 1990) and ancient traditions of philosophizing about the self and the social order, is not the focus of this issue, but the fact that it is so frames its discussions. Relatively little is known about the psychology of India’s large and diverse population, and evidence concerning normal and abnormal childhood experience is sketchy, as Dinesh Sharma shows in his introduction. This leaves us in a tenuous position to resolve disputes over the psychological development of Indian children. What does it mean to know something about the psychology of a population and its normal patterns of childhood experience? Do we have such knowledge about any country? In fact, it must be admitted that these matters remain contested and that the cultural psychology movement in the United States is an effort to demonstrate that what has been (and to a large extent still is) considered knowledge about human psychological development in general is actually knowledge about the U.S. middle class. What we know is that there are patterns of development that are considered normal in particular contexts; and