Recovering wisdom of the ‘ancient rishis’: Girindrasekhar Bose, Indra Sen, and the psy-disciplines in modern India

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe early history of the psy-disciplines has been often examined preponderantly in terms of distinctive cultural variations and/or adaptations of Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) psychoanalysis in different parts of the globe. Relatively recent interventions, however, have also drawn attention to the non-Western epistemological genealogies of some of these disciplines, albeit at times in broad-brush terms. Taking a cue from this rather general premise of the salience of non-Western intellectual traditions, I emphasise in this article the imperative to go beyond both the conceptual frameworks of mere variations or adaptations as well as that of colonial medicine/clinical psychiatry. I focus here in particular on the nature of epistemologies that were invoked since the early twentieth century by two major proponents navigating primarily within, but also beyond, the extended family of the psy-disciplines. Girindrasekhar Bose (1886–1953) and Indra Sen (1903–1994), I argue, sought to bring the evolving psy-disciplines in dialogue with key aspects of South Asian religious and philosophical traditions superimposing, at times, their own intellectual predilections onto an evolving disciplinary constellation. This then is a history of not only entanglements of Indian and Western intellectual traditions, but also that of individual doxographic propensities and not least academic disciplines even as the latter were ‘worlded’, in the Heideggerian sense, and their boundaries redrawn.