Spirituality and Indian Psychology: Lessons from ... - Mandhata Global

178 9 Epistemology and Ontology of Indian Psychology
consequences of different behavior. This leads to obtaining scenarios or episodes
constructed by a group of people rather than an individual. Disagreements would
need to be resolved by using other sources of data, thus showing the necessity of
multimethod approach to research. In this approach having some loose ends is
inevitable, and making use of familiar statistical tools may be difficult, if not
impossible. We need to appreciate research just as life is – messy. Thus research is
going to be messy and may not always fit into the experimental paradigm. Clearly,
Indian Psychology is holistic and much innovation will be needed to meet the
research need of people in India. In Chapter 10, various approaches to model building
from scriptures and classical texts are presented and discussed showing how
qualitative methodology can be used effectively in Indian Psychology.
Practice of Indian Psychology
It is clear that the researchers who are doing research to address the Indian ethos find
Indian Psychology inspiring. Sinha (2010) stated that he felt like “having a missionary
zeal” to discover cultural facets and was ever ready to refute the Western constructs
hoping to turn around Indian psychological research. Paranjpe (1984, 1986, 1988,
1998, 2010) has been bridging East and West, despite often being a lone voice in
Canada and the United States. Rao (2010) noted how he has migrated from following
the barren empirical paradigm in Parapsychological research to exploring the theoryrich
area of yoga research with excitement. Bhawuk (2010a) noted how his personal
life and research career have a natural symbiosis, and his career has far from suffered
despite the lack of appreciation from many quarters in his institutional existence in
the United States. And Dalal (1996, 2002), Misra (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007; Misra &
Gergen, 1993; Misra & Mohanty, 2002; Dalal & Misra, 2010), Cornelissen (2008),
Kumar (2008, 2010), and Varma (2005) have all committed to Indian Psychology in
their individual research programs. We can see quick practical applications of Indian
psychological research in the work of Sinha, and two are noted below.
Professor Durganand Sinha’s observations led Sinha (2010) to propose that India
needed to utilize people’s collective orientation for its growth since people are
always consulting each other about what seeds to use, when to prepare the field,
who to marry their son or daughter, when to go to visit a holy place, and so forth.
He enthusiastically presented Indian Psychology as a policy science, presenting the
idea that economic development should be channeled through human development.
He started a journal, The Social Engineer, to meet this objective, which is in its 14th
year of publication. He got sucked into studying and writing about Indian cultural
constructs rather unwillingly (“I used to suspect that such a past oriented preoccupation
would distract me from exploring the social reality in terms of contemporary
factors such as poverty, people’s habits, and social systems,” Sinha, 2010, p. 106),
but writing ten or so papers for Dynamic Psychiatry converted him and he began to
appreciate the resilience and relevance of the ancient Indian wisdom. He found
that concepts like cosmic collectivism, hierarchical order, and spiritual orientation
were quite meaningful and relevant to contemporary social behavior. Not only we see