Indian Societies Through Foreign Lenses

Part 3 of the Indian-Collectivism Essay Series

How psychotherapy has its roots in colonial philosophies. 

Written by Alekhya Velidanda

There’s crumbs on my keyboard and an empty coffee cup that’s due for a refill. I feel absolutely unearthly being up at this time of the night.  I’m glancing at the Cambridge Library archive looking for some Indian colonial literature. 

“A duly qualified man can obtain more knowledge of India in one year in his closet in England than he could obtain during the course of the longest life, by the use of his eyes and ears in India.”   -James Mill

Get a load of this guy. I’m spending my sleeping hours researching a dude who chose to plant his buttocks in a Pentonville armchair, telling me about my culture.

His writing of The History of British India- quite ignorantly, might I add- managed to get him a seat at the British-Indian administration.  James Mill wrote three editions and several volumes  of this text over the span of his life. He described Indian people as “backward” and Hindu customs as oppressive and superstitious. 

On the surface of it, it looked like James Mill vouched for the equality of men and women in the Indian subcontinent. His opinions strongly influenced the ban of Sati- a practice where newly widowed women self-immolated to preserve their honour. Yet, when you take a look underneath, you’d see that his attitude towards the Indian people was not all that adoring.

He wanted the administration to tighten its stronghold on Indians. He didn’t think Indians were capable of creating good governments. To him, Indians had strong religious and cultural identities that “poisoned” their worldviews and softened their ambitions. He depicted India as a passive State, one that was ripe for British domination. 

Colonial officers who were stationed in India felt justified to rape women and dismiss Indians’ systemic needs. They believed that they were dealing with an “inferior population”, and this bred the idea that India was a moral exile. Anything they could possibly do on this land would be exempt from the judgement of God and the Crown. What happened in the moral exile, stayed in the moral exile.

Ideologies of this self-supremacy against Indian cultures and religions have been traced back to the influence of Mill’s work, to some extent. 

I want to point to an impossible colonial dynamic that had marred the reputation of minority communities. The people of conquered lands were painted as unruly, perhaps to justify the violent extents to which colonisers went to capitalise on the resources of these lands. When the conquered folk resisted this raid, they unwittingly furthered the racial biases that were held against them- ones that portrayed them as aggressive and arrogant people. 

Surprisingly, I notice the same pattern unfold between the therapist and the patient. 

James Mill was one of the many intellectual penises of British colonialism.  I believe that traditional psychotherapy and liberal feminism are long-standing penile remnants of the same colonial outlooks. With each of these movements, there’s been an influential person or group of people who decided what was wrong and right in a culture of which they have limited knowledge. They propagated their uninformed views about distant nations under the garb of good will.

In my first year of therapeutic practice, I spoke to hundreds of people who had complicated relationships with their native culture and sociology. Young women terminated serious romantic relationships to marry a person of their parents’ choosing. Middle-aged men felt apathetic towards their jobs that had been encouraged onto them by their families. Mothers felt resentful for having to keep up with the pressures of being perfect earners and perfect parents. In all of these cases, I felt the need to validate their pain through a parent-blaming dialogue. It became a culture-bashing party of two. The only path to healing that I could envision for them was to have them recognise that their “true selves” wanted something different from what the Indian collectivistic culture demanded from them. 

Just the word “in-laws” made my gut clench in rage too many times to count. In my interventions, I was picking the parts of their culture that I wanted to do away with, and proceeded to ask my clients to simply do away with them. I was dictating, from an emotional distance, how they should escape their backward family systems. This was coming from someone who had been given enough and more independence in her childhood, and rarely experienced any family pressure. 

I was also an intellectual penis of colonial ideology (I think I still am, but that’s a conversation for another time). Hardly any of my clients felt empowered by the direction we took in therapy. A lot of them felt empty and anxious when they tried to let go of the culture they were raised in. They were hollow without the roles, meanings, rituals and people that had defined their existence.  Their participation in family life gave them a profound sense of purpose. They abandoned therapy, because I failed to understand their complicated cultural truths. I abandoned hope with them, because I thought of them as too resistant for therapy. 

Feminism and progressiveness are rooted in extreme individualism, and that’s often the reason why people from collectivistic cultures don’t fight against legitimate injustices. 

Even though the goal of our psychotherapy is not to specifically mobilize our clients or co-conspire against an ideology, we find ourselves wanting to ask the pressing rhetorical questions that outrage us.  “Why don’t people leave their homes?”, “Why do they care about the judgement of a society that is oppressive?” 

There are real resources that are lost when someone violates the social fabric of their life: money, food, shelter, friendship, love, sex, purpose, community, participation, God, and social devotion. People make the tough decision to exit their collectivistic social confines every day, but it’s theirs to make and theirs alone. 

Exploring individuation in Indian societies can be a far more volatile, emotionally-charged and intellectually-violent discussion than it is in American or English societies. It must be done less often and with utmost delicateness. 

My first mistake was thinking that collectivistic culture was inherently abusive. I trace this back to colonialism as well. There’s a philosophical approach called “Egoism” that gained traction among European philosophers.  It focussed on self-interest, self-welfare and self-preservation, It proposed that people should feel liberated to do anything which makes them happy, at any cost. Later, the “Utilitarian” approach became more popular, which continued to validate personal fulfillment, but it also emphasized social caution. In other words, it stated that people must consider the consequences of their actions upon others before acting. It sounds like a close cousin of egoism. 

It was this Utilitarian approach with which European colonialism set out to conquer and “liberate” cultures from practices which they considered oppressive and outright wrong. 

“How can a woman thrive if her role is cast to domesticity?”

“How can a son become an adult if his archetype of paternalism castrates his personal agency?”

Not terrible questions to ask- and while this British ideological push brought the ban of Sati and the introduction of democratic governance, it also came with a souring scrutiny of close-knit familial systems. 

It was the Utilitarian philosophy that gave James Mill and other colonial propagandists the unwarranted license to deem cultures unfit and unworthy of surviving independently.  Today, we have second and third-wave feminism activists who have narrow ideas of Indian culture. They believe it to be entirely collectivistic and passive. In their attempts to “save” the distressed widow, daughter and mother-in-law from the grips of Indian society, they forgot to ask these women whether they needed saving. They forgot to check in with the men who struggled in these rigid systems. The noticed certain abuses within the system and thought that the entire system was poisonous. So did I. So did many other psychotherapists who buried their noses in books that came from the Global North. 

This leaves us with a big gap in knowledge about Indian therapy for Indians. What is a therapist to focus on and work with, when the self and community are intertwined? What does therapeutic work look like when a client shows up in your room, but the community, responsibilities, and people with whom she defines her purpose do not enter the room with her? 

Does it make you uncomfortable, ending with this brutal punch? Before you look into other texts, supervisors and saviours to fill this gap in knowledge, you might want to look deeply and transcendentally towards the Indian client sitting on your couch. 

Hello! If you’ve come this far, do let me know! Your feedback and readership mean a lot to The Trade of Therapy. TOT strives to create illustrative and critical content that helps our new age of urban thinkers understand their inner and outer worlds. 

Up next, we will be exploring the unspoken negotiations that empower individuals to survive under collectivist moral structures.