Original Article

Review of General Psychology

2021, Vol. 0(0) 1–15
Coloniality and Psychology: From Silencing to © The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
Re-Centering Marginalized Voices in sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/10892680211046507
journals.sagepub.com/home/rgp
Postcolonial Times

Sunil Bhatia1  and Kumar Ravi Priya2

Abstract
We adopt a decolonizing framework in this article to examine how legacies of colonialism and coloniality continue to manifest in
Euro-American psychology. The population of India is now over 1.2 billion people with over 356 million young; they make up the
world’s largest youth population, but their stories remain largely invisible in Euro-American psychology. For this article, we
draw on a growing body of research by decolonial theorists and our ethnographic research. We argue that Euro-American
psychological science now reworks the old forms of imperialism and domination in neoliberal contexts of globalization. In
particular, we analyze (a) how mainstream psychological knowledge of “culture” and “diversity” have reinforced a neoliberal self
in postcolonial India; (b) the varied ways in which identities, values, and mental health experiences of marginalized communities
have been silenced and ignored through the application of Euro-American psychiatric and colonial psychological knowledge; and
(c) how persistent caste-based violence and exploitation in contemporary times reflects the “internal coloniality” of Indian
society.

Keywords
coloniality, marginalized voices, identity, Indian youth, suffering, violence, caste, dalit

Euro-American psychological science has largely positioned
itself as “The Universal Psychology” that represents all other
psychologies. It stands outside history as a psychology that
claims to speak for the majority of humanity. Every other
psychology is rooted, culturally embedded, indigenous, and
historical, but Euro-American psychology seeks cover and
refuge under the umbrella of science and is defined as being
impervious to forces of culture and history (Bhatia, 2002,
2018, 2020; Bhatia & Priya, 2018a; Priya, 2012, 2015). Arnett
(2008) concludes that US-based American psychology pro-
duces research that is based on 5% of the population of the
world; yet, these US findings are posited as having universal
applicability and relevance for 95% of the world. Another
much-cited study by Henrich et al. (2010) makes the point
that 97% of the population that American psychological
research represents tends to come from what they have now
famously characterized as WEIRD societies, which is
Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.
One of the points made by the WEIRD study is that an
American undergraduate student is 4000 times more likely to
be randomly selected as a subject for research than a random
non-Westerner. Our project aims to investigate how Euro-
centric psychology continues to operate, circulate, and export
its in-built conceptions of identity, personhood, and personality
through neoliberal globalization. In order to decolonize
psychology, we need to interrogate how coloniality shapes the
core theoretical and methodological foundations of the dis-
cipline of psychology and how it influences everyday cultural
practices:
Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which
the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of
another nation, which makes such nation an empire. Coloniality,
instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as
a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersub-
jective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the
strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality sur-
vives colonialism. Coloniality is different from colonialism. It is
maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic perfor-
mance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of
1
Department of Human Development, Connecticut College, New London,
CT, USA
2
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of
Technology, Kanpur, India
Corresponding Author:
Sunil Bhatia, Department of Human Development, Box # Human
Development/Bolles House, 270 Mohegan Avenue, New London, CT 06320,
USA.
Email: ssbha@conncoll.edu
2 Review of General Psychology 0(0)
peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our
modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe
coloniality all the time and every day (Maldonado-Torres, 2007,
p. 243).
We are interested in investigating how psychology spe-
cifically breathes coloniality in new contexts of neoliberal
globalization. What form does the coloniality of psychology
take in the Global South? If psychology played a role in
advancing European colonialism, what role does it play in
advancing cultural coloniality in postcolonial times? Colo-
nialism may be over, but the legacy of colonialism lingers on
in a postcolonial and neocolonial world through knowledge
frameworks that remain deeply connected to centers of
knowledge production in Global North.
We adopt a decolonizing framework in this article to
examine how specific Euro-American psychological dis-
courses of self and identity are now part and parcel of the
workforce in emerging neoliberal global economies such as
India. The population of India is now 1.2 billion people with
over 356 million Indians who make up the world’s largest
youth population, yet their stories remain largely invisible in
Euro-American psychology. We employ a decolonizing
framework to understand and delineate what Wade Pickren
(2018, p. 575) has called the contemporary “social imagi-
nary” of psychology and how the discipline of psychology
has contributed to promoting a neoliberal self.
The concept of “coloniality” sheds lights on how Euro-
American psychology appears as a dominant form of
knowledge across the world. One example of this dominance
is the export of Euro-American psychological knowledge—
personality tests, intelligence testing, performance evaluation
tests, and new psychological discourses of self-actualization,
peak experiences, mindfulness training, and flow that con-
tribute to the ideology of a neoliberal self (Sugarman, 2015).
Euro-American psychological science can thus be defined as
a global “psy discipline” (Rose, 1996) that exhibits a colonial
power structure that is taken to be representative of humanity.
The discipline’s psychological concepts, theories, and di-
agnostic instruments have become part of “Western man-
agement knowledge” (Ong, 2006, p. 211), and they have
reached beyond its borders, becoming synonymous with
maximizing corporate efficiency. These Euro-American
psychological instruments have entered the organizational
and social life of employees around the world. The coloniality
of psychological science has generated a new vocabulary that
Gauri Pathak (2015) calls “neoliberal subjecthood.” For
example, her research shows that learning “how to be pre-
sentable” in urban India involves altering one’s body, dispo-
sition, clothes, accessories, and exercising consumption-based
choices to acquire social status and prestige in work, family,
and social networks. In pre-liberalized India, a woman’s family
status, light skin, and normative beauty could give her mobility
and cultural capital in her society. However, presentability in
contexts of globalization “brings advantages to both men and
women for a much larger range of employment opportunities
and marital prospects. Presentability, as opposed to the genetic
lottery of beauty, is a form of contextual knowledge in-
creasingly vital in contemporary India” (Pathak, 2015, p. 323).
While paradoxes and contradictions are writ large in the very
cultural milieu of India, the imprint of neoliberal psychology
and enterprise culture in work and life is unmistakable in the
different regions of India (Gooptu, 2013; Oza, 2012; Pathak,
2015).
We use the concept of coloniality as reflective of the
modern knowledge-power nexus to analyze how (a) main-
stream psychology and cross-cultural psychology is, wit-
tingly or unwittingly, contributing to the production of
neoliberal self or neoliberal subjecthood in postcolonial India
and (b) the varied ways in which mental health experiences in
middle-class and marginalized communities have been re-
framed, erased, and overlooked through Euro-American
psychiatric knowledge. Finally, we show how caste-based
violence and oppression persists in India and has increased
during times of neoliberal globalization.
Our use of a decolonizing framework is intended to show
how psychology continues to play a role in globalizing the
neoliberal self and subjecthood in several parts of the Global
South. The term Global South is both a political idea and
refers to the populations of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and
Oceania. It refers to the people who live in these spaces, many
of whom are low-income and marginalized and are often used
as extractive labor by Europe and the United States. The
phrase Global South signals a “shift from a central focus on
development or cultural difference toward an emphasis on
geopolitical relations of power” (Dados & Connell, 2012, p.
12).
Decoloniality, while closely connected to the concept of
decolonization, involves understanding how “coloniality” as
an overarching framework continues to reflect the current
relations of power between the Global North and South, as
well as the diverse relationships within the various geogra-
phies of the Global South and North (Maldonado-Torres,
2007; Mignolo, 2007). An analysis of discourses of identity
formation in India illustrates how the colonial legacy of
framing Eurocentric knowledge as superior and as the con-
troller of knowledge production continues even in present
times.
We use two extensive ethnographic studies to investigate
how Eurocentric psychological discourses of self are being
imposed as a meaning-making framework to understand
complex and heterogenous culturally constituted identity
formation in India (Bhatia, 2018; Bhatia & Priya, 2018a; Priya,
2012; Viswambharan & Priya, 2016). The first ethnography
(Bhatia, 2018) was conducted in Pune, India, with youth that
belonged to three different social class communities: trans-
national and elite youth, middle-class youth, and working-
class youth. For the purposes of this article, we focus on
middle-class youth who work in the growing outsourcing
industry, such as information technology, business processing
Bhatia and Priya
offices, and call centers. We highlight how cross-cultural
psychology, psychometric personality tests, and the language
of “diversity” are used to exhort urban, English-speaking
Indian call center and IT youth workers to adapt and as-
similate to global cultural practices, which are explicitly
described as Euro-American. We analyze how global cross-
cultural psychology as a manifestation of Euro-American
psychological science now reworks the old forms of impe-
rialism and domination through neoliberal contexts of
globalization.
The second ethnography (Priya, 2012) conducted in
Gujarat, India, and an additional audio-visual ethnography of
a documentary (Viswambharan & Priya, 2016) explored the
experiences of trauma reactions, social suffering, and healing
among the children and their families who had survived
intense political and religious violence. We argue that the
sufferings of survivors in the post-disaster context are not
manifestations of individual mental illness or symptoms of
trauma as understood in Euro-American psychiatry. Rather,
we need to understand that their personal and social distress
originates from the disruption that is caused by political
violence and state-sanctioned indifference. Finally, we utilize
studies by Teltumbde (2010), Kottai (2018), and Pandey et al.
(2020) to illustrate how the neoliberal agenda for develop-
ment and mental health promotion has further reinforced
caste-based violence and disrupted the lives of dalit and
working-class communities in India. Through the use of these
three sets of studies in India, our goal is to unpack the logic
and assumptions that are embedded in the export of psy-
chiatric and psychological knowledge in the Global South.
Additionally, our aim is to reveal the internal forms of col-
oniality that produce oppression and social suffering in local
contexts.
The term Global South as a geographical space and po-
litical project is a continuous reminder that colonization did
not cease when the flags of the European nations were re-
placed by the flags of the colonized nations. Colonialism and
empire-building were created out of centuries-long conquest
of extensive regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and
by exploiting local labor, extracting raw materials, engaging
in genocide of native peoples, implementing unjust economic
and social laws, and imposing the colonizer’s language and
education. Decolonizing psychology means naming and
making visible those enduring structures of colonial power,
violence, and injustices that have shaped the lives of people in
the Global South, intentionally de-linking from modern co-
lonial knowledge systems, undoing the damaging conse-
quences of colonialism and coloniality inherent in WEIRD/
Euro-American and modern epistemologies. Acts of de-
linking from coloniality means reclaiming indigenous sov-
ereignty and rights and reaffirming indigenous modes of
knowing, being, thinking, and feeling (Maldonado-Torres,
2007; Mignolo, 2010; Smith, 2012). The project of decol-
onization involves reimagining a psychology that focuses on
the lives of the oppressed and marginalized in the Global
3
South, postcolonial and settler societies, and indigenous
communities. Our modest project thus aims to expose the
“hidden curriculum of psychology” (Kiguwa & Segalo, 2018,
p. 13). We draw on decolonial scholarship to interpret and
explain the stories of people from the Global South, whose
lives are invisible in the Western psychological cannon, but
yet shaped by global imperial forces that are mainly con-
trolled by centers of economic and political power that
emanate from the Global North.
Decolonizing and Decolonial
Conceptual Frameworks
A decolonizing perspective (as a verb) shows how con-
temporary psychological science and psychological theories
of culture, identity, and human development are inextricably
linked to the legacy of colonialism, orientalism, and Euro-
centric assumptions (Adams et al., 2015; Bhatia, 2018; Bhatia
& Priya, 2018a; Bulhan, 2015; Watkins, 2015). Decolonizing
theories emerge out of native studies on settler colonialism,
decolonial theory from Latin America, and postcolonial
theory that is rooted in European colonialism of Africa and
Asia.
Decolonization within the broader field of indigenous
studies is anchored in the framework of settler colonialism
and is primarily concerned with issues of land, sovereignty,
and territory (Grande, 2015; Tuck & Yang, 2012). Decolo-
nization refers to the historical era when leaders and people of
the previously colonized countries, mainly in Africa, Asia,
and the Caribbean, collectively mobilized to break free from
the physical and psychological shackles of European colonial
powers. The process of decolonization refers to the creation
new postcolonial nations in which the previously colonized
people rewrite histories, geographies, and politics and par-
ticipate in self-governance that is devoid of the cultural
imperialism or the ideals of the colonizer (Bhatia & Priya,
2018a).
Coloniality does not merely refer to the colonization of
indigenous culture in the Americas, but instead it refers to a
whole system of thought, a mentality, and a power structure
that constructs “the hegemonic and Eurocentered matrix of
knowledge” (Mignolo, 2010, p. 11). That is why Mignolo
argues that “Coloniality, in other words, is constitutive of
modernity–there is no modernity without coloniality” (pp. 2–
3). Decolonial thinking then becomes an incessant conceptual
and epistemic effort to understand the structure, practice, and
logic of coloniality that is embedded in the interlinked
structures of modernity, capitalism, and neoliberalism. In
building a vision of a decolonial future, Anibal Quijano
(2007) and Walter Mignolo (2011) ask us to peer into the
darker side of modernity. Their scholarship offers a glimpse
of how knowledge and power were used to colonize, sub-
jugate, and erase the lives of indigenous people and people of
color. In his classic article, Quijano (2000) observes that one
of the fundamental pillars linking global modernity with
4 Review of General Psychology 0(0)
coloniality is the social categorization of people around the
concept of race. Colonial domination and its specific logic of
Eurocentrism since the 16th century is grounded in the idea of
race as a “way of granting legitimacy to the relations of
domination imposed by the conquest” (Quijano, 2000, p.
535).
We argue that over the last century, psychology has
played a pivotal role in creating and validating Orientalist
ideas about racial and cultural “Others” as primitive, lazy,
and backward (Bhatia, 2002). The calls from postcolonial
and decolonial theorists to decolonize Eurocentric knowl-
edge do not involve a rejection of the so-called advances of
modernity, but they do draw attention to how modernity and
Western concepts of progress and development emerged out
of colonialism. Euro-American psychology, with its focus
on individualism, is born from modernity’s preoccupation
with “progress” and the unfolding of Western self as con-
tained, atomic, and separate from community and history.
The classical period of colonialism may be over, but col-
oniality is still alive in the knowledge production process
and in the asymmetrical living conditions of the Global
North and South (Bulhan, 2015). There may be epistemo-
logical differences in indigenous, decolonial, and postco-
lonial approaches, but there are some threads common to all
three frameworks, and they provide us with radical possi-
bilities in unsettling and undoing the effects of colonization
and specifically undoing the coloniality of psychological
sciences.
Colonialism’s Legacy: Progress,
Development, and Science
Decolonization specifically means interrogating what we
mean by progress, advancement, and development. Even
after classical and territorial colonialism ended, European
modernity became associated with progress and development
in the newly formed nation states of Asia and Africa. Sci-
entific “progress” was one of the main weapons of the civ-
ilizing mission during colonialism, and, after the Second
World War, “development” became its “successor.” The creed
of Western notions of “development” created new forms of
colonial difference and asymmetries of power (Mignolo,
2011, p. 162).
What is important to remember is that “imperial narra-
tives” became entangled with “national narratives” after the
emergence of the modern European national states (Mignolo,
2011, 162). Modern Euro-American psychology, directly or
indirectly, contributed to validating the large project of co-
lonialism. Euro-American psychology, over a century, be-
came instrumental in providing the raw material from which
the psychological portraits of the non-Western “Other” were
constructed (Bhatia, 2002). One of the legacies of colonialism
is that newly formed nation states in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America adapted the colonizers’ language of progress,
development, and scientific advancement. Nandy (1983)
argues that the arrival and invention of European conquest
of Asia, the subsequent rise of the Western powers, and the
particular British colonization of India, was considered a
linear, natural development of progress and modernity’s
outward movement from its so-called birthplace in the West
to the non-West. The postcolonial cultural and political
practices in newly formed India and other Asian and African
colonies is made up of what Nandy (1989) has described as
“second colonization” (p. xi). This kind of colonialism, he
argues, colonizes the mind as well as the body and “helps
generalize the concept of modern West from a geographical
and temporal entity to a psychological category. The West is
now everywhere, within the West and outside; in structures
and minds” (Nandy, 1989, p. xii). He further makes the
point that this second form of colonization is as dangerous
as the first kind, because it is “almost always unconscious
and almost always ignored . . . it creates a culture in which
the ruled are constantly tempted to fight their rulers within
the psychological limits set by the latter” (p. 3). Nandy’s
(1989) remark captures the state of Indian psychology in the
postcolonial context. One legacy of the dominance of
Eurocentric psychology in postcolonial societies is that
psychologists in India were skeptical of their own indig-
enous psychology (Misra & Paranjape, 2012). Indian
psychologists dismissed their ancient cultural psychologi-
cal frameworks because psychology “was thought to be
culture-blind and psychological processes as distributed/
shared uniformly across diverse cultures and sub-cultures”
(Misra & Paranjape, 2012, p. 13).
Similar arguments about the effects of “second coloni-
zation” have been made within the context of African
psychology. Ratele et al. (2018), for example, write that
Eurocentric knowledge and Euro-American psychology
overlook the impact of imperialism, wars, politics, and local
cultural values. They argue that we need to engage in a
“productive debate as to how to decolonize African psy-
chology and to work towards Africa(n)-centered psychol-
ogy as situated decolonizing practice and knowledge” (p.
332, emphasis added). Thus, decolonizing psychology
highlights the located-ness of knowledge production, (neo)
colonialist assumptions that are embedded in “mainstream”
psychology, and the need for contextualized epistemologies,
methodologies, and practice (Macleod et al., 2020). A
crucial element of the project of decolonization is to in-
vestigate the “processes and mechanisms” (Dutta et al.,
2016, p. 6) through which unequal and oppressive struc-
tures are internalized as individual experiences. Decoloni-
zation as praxis constitutes both a structural and embodied
form of resistance. The decolonial projects that we outline
below focus on praxis and highlight the ways in which
social and individual suffering are connected to histories and
their legacies endure in the present moment in our post-
colonial communities.
Bhatia and Priya
Cross-Cultural Psychology and
Neoliberalism as Tool of Coloniality in India:
Ethnographic Case Study I
Cultural and economic globalization occurs through the
application of a neoliberal ideology in the developing and the
developed nations (Kinnvall, 2004). Decolonial scholar,
Walter Mignolo (2011) argues that “currently, the transfor-
mation of colonial differences is entrenched in what we now
call global coloniality. It continues to be reproduced by global
capitalism…” (p. 161). Several scholars in the social sciences
have noted that 1991 marked an important cultural and
economic turn in India, when India embraced a neoliberal
economic model. A staunch advocate for implementing
neoliberal policies, Das (2002) wrote that India became
successful by opening itself “to foreign investment and trade;
it dismantled import control, lowered custom duties, and
devalued the currency; it virtually abolished licensing con-
trols on private investment, dropped tax rates, and broke
public sector monopolies” (p. x). Mignolo and Walsh (2018)
argue that when decolonial scholar Anibal Quijano intro-
duced the coloniality/decoloniality thesis in 1990, the Cold
War was coming to an end and the era of “neoliberal global
designs” was opening up (p. 6). Neoliberalism, which has
now been embraced as a dominant economic model across
the world, is based on 21st century capitalism. This economic
doctrine is grounded in a “politics and economy of ex-
tracitvism that advances the destruction of land-beings-
knowledges” and it continues to further coloniality (Mignolo
& Walsh, 2018, p.6).
Neoliberal or economic globalization entails economic
activities largely shaped by the profit-interests of capital
based mostly in developed nations. With the focus on indi-
vidualized discourses of the autonomous self, psychology has
been complicit in uncritically promoting the ideology of
neoliberalism and making it accepted as unquestioned
common sense (Rose, 1996; Sugarman, 2015). David Harvey
(2005) defines neoliberalism as a “theory of political eco-
nomic practices that proposes that human well-being can best
be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedom
and skills within an institutional framework characterized by
strong property rights, free markets and free trade” (p. 5).
Contemporary economies around the world are shaped by the
economics of disposable labor. This growing class of contract
workers are often temporary or part-time workers who consist
of transnational knowledge workers, customer service
workers, labor workers, and tourism workers. The “mobility
of capital without the mobility of labor” (Mirchandani, 2012,
p. 2) is one of the key drivers of neoliberal globalization. As
capital snakes its way across borders and across geographic
spaces, it pursues “new sites of investment and new markets,
it invokes, plays upon, appropriates, and transforms pre-
existing cultural tropes and images, creating and recreating
new forms of cultural difference and social identities”
(Upadhya, 2008, p. 102). These new offshore locations and
5
outsourcing economies in the Global South are shaped by
national and colonial histories, specific economic conditions
on the ground, education, geographic convenience, and by a
large cadre of mobile professionals, managers, engineers, and
global workers.
The story of the rise of India as one of the most globally
desirable locations for offshore offices is part of this narrative
of global capitalism. IT and Business Process Management
form an important part of the outsourcing industry in India
and provide employment to about 3.5 million people
(NASSCOM, 2017). Since the embrace of neoliberal reforms,
India has consistently experienced an annual economic
growth of more than 6% (Nilekani, 2008). The changing
economic landscape of urban India has reflected in the rapid
development of malls, shopping centers, business processing
offices, call centers, IT parks, and gated communities.
Neoliberal globalization has led to the creation of new
forms of management systems, mobile labor, a technology
enabled outsourcing economy, and a subsequent transfor-
mation in social and psychological practices in the realm of
family, work, and community. What we are witnessing is a
creation, promotion, and export of a psychology that
Sugarman (2015) characterizes as the neoliberal self. He
describes this self as “a set of assets – skills and attributes – to
be managed, maintained, developed, and treated as ventures
in which to invest” (p. 104, emphasis added).
People are seen as enterprising subjects who become
valuable through education and acquiring credentials. Human
worth is measured through the language of management and
performance such as satisfaction, productivity, effectiveness,
skills, goals, risk, networking, and so on. We are expected to
invest in our fulfillment, growth, and potential by seeking
guidance from experts such as “psychotherapists, personal
trainers, dieticians, life coaches, financial planners, genetic
counsellors” (Sugarman, 2015, p. 104). There is a new
cultural turn in the neoliberal knowledge economy that relies
on organizational psychologists and cross-cultural psychol-
ogy trainers to cultivate in employees a “neoliberal self,” in
which there is an alignment and congruence between indi-
vidual goals and company goals (Upadhya & Vasavi, 2008).
The indoctrination of corporate culture is constructed through
the specific invocation of universal psychological discourses
of self through training sessions and workshops on cross-
cultural psychology.
Euro-American Psychological Tests and the New
Measurement of Self
Multinational corporations have frequently relied on Euro-
American psychological tests to assess, recruit, and retain
employees with a view to create a nimble, productive, and
efficient Westernized workforce. For example, Sathaye
(2008) writes, “All in all, psychological prescriptions and
descriptions offered by experts in the field of psychology and
management appear to have become as integral as technical
6 Review of General Psychology 0(0)
training to the business of business” (p. 137). Sathaye (2008)
argues that Western universal scientific psychological con-
cepts are used to facilitate group cohesion and to achieve a
good fit between the individual and the organization. The
battery of Western psychometric tests is used to quantify
different personality types, so Indian IT employees can learn
how to carry the emotional burden of working with Western
clients. The imparting of soft skills through self-help courses
to Indian workers in the software industry, BPOs, and call
centers essentially occurs through an erasure of “Indian
values.” Sathaye (2008) writes:
Indian values are conspicuous by their absence in this
version of self-help courses. Indeed when Indian meanings,
concepts or feelings do crop up in the course of sessions,
employees are taught to relearn those in favor of more
‘universal’ – typically American – understandings. The can-
do interpretations of intangible phenomena taught in soft
skills training run smoothly alongside management tech-
niques, which place a high premium on individuality (p. 138).
This new psychological language of self and identity has
also altered urban youth identity and their social relationships
in the contexts of work and community. Urban Indian workers
are expected to largely follow the ideology of Western cor-
porate culture through individual transformation, embracing a
self-Orientalizing framework, acquiring new behaviors of
increased emotional intelligence, assertiveness, flexibility,
productivity, and self-regulation. Companies utilize soft skills
and psychological growth workshops to create assertive,
confident, happy, and self-reliant workers (Vasavi, 2008).
One of the most commonly used psychological tests in
Indian companies are Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
and Transactional Analysis (TA) (Vasavi, 2008). The MBTI
personality test is constructed on Jungian archetypes and is
formulated on four essential grids with binary universal
personality styles. These are extrovert/introvert (E or I),
sensing/intuitive (S or N), thinking/feeling (T or F), and
judging/perceiving (J or P). Transactional Analysis is not
based on universal personality traits, but it is used to teach
participants the difference between “Ego States” and “Life
States.” Bhatia and Priya (2018a) analyzed how the MBTI is
often used by Human Resource departments in Indian IT
corporations and call centers because they are seen as pro-
viding companies and trainers a method for scientifically
measuring and quantifying personal growth and actionable
goals. These psychometric tests give participants a chance to
document their goals and help them “plot their responses to
situation[s] so as to ‘discover’ their true states-of-being or
personality types” (Sathaye, 2008, p. 144). The participants
are provided an “action plan” after each workshop so they can
reflect and monitor their inner states and responses at home
and work. Indian IT workers and other employees were often
told that they needed this psychological training because
“they have lost touch with their feelings, their relationships,
their values – a fact exacerbated by the technology boom and
longer working hours” (Sathaye, 2008, p. 148).
The importation of Eurocentric psychological tests was
largely based on their scientific validation and success in
Western companies. These psychological tests, workshops,
and soft skills workshops have created what Teo (2018) calls
“neoliberal subjectivity.” The organizations believed that the
social, professional, and spiritual dimensions of the em-
ployees’ lives could be significant changed while maximizing
employee efficiency and productivity at work. The software
projects that are outsourced to Indian companies are mostly
carried out by groups of Indian software development en-
gineers who often virtually interact with other customers,
colleagues, and supervisors usually located at the client site or
at their company’s site, which is located in the US or Western
Europe. The transnational integration of the global economy
has led to a greater interaction of multinational employees
from different parts of the world. Yet, this cross-cultural
exchange has not let to inclusive or culturally diverse un-
derstanding of selfhood. Rather, by promoting practices that
enable the constitution of the neoliberal self, multinational
companies in India become vehicles to reify and validate a
homogenized and universalized Euro-American psycholog-
ical discourse.
Advanced Selfhood: Accents, Language, and the
Coloniality of American Psychology
The justification of market expansion in the developing world
by global economic powers is founded on providing not only
better technological solutions for economic development, but
also a more “advanced” worldview of a selfhood or identity
(neoliberal self) as chiefly constituted by acquiring marketable
skills or abilities (Upadhya, 2008). The experiences of urban
Indian youth working at call centers demonstrate how neo-
liberal and outsourcing practices have played a role in shaping
contemporary middle-class, English-speaking, urban youth
identities (Bhatia, 2018). Indian call center workers were
subjected to hours of training in accent reduction, commu-
nication style, voice modulation, personality development, and
so on. An Indian customer service worker carries the burden of
being far away from their Western client while simultaneously
being intimate in their conversations; they have to come across
to their clients as workers who are capable of understanding
and empathizing from a distance (Mirchadani, 2012). Training
in language and communication in call centers is imparted on
the assumption that Indian English is inferior and deficient and
needs to be “cleaned up,” recalibrated, and adjusted to meet the
demands of the foreign customers. Thus, accent neutralization,
removal of MTI, and speaking with the “correct rate of
speech,” and bringing emotions of calm, happiness, and
warmth in the conversation are considered to be the goals of the
call center training (Mirchandani, 2012; Nadeem, 2011;
Ramesh, 2008; Shome, 2006).
The first author interviewed a young man named Vijay
who worked at a call center in Pune. He explained how MTI’s
are seen as a form deficient speech and IN need OF remedial
Bhatia and Priya
correction: “The mother tongue influence is not acceptable at
all. For example, if ‘e-f-f-e-c-t-i-v-e’ is “effective,” and a
Maharashtrian . . .will pronounce it as “effect-tew.’” Most
people from the US, UK, or Australia or any country, Vijay
emphasizes, will sometimes not understand Indians because
of their strong MTI’s.
Vijay explains that companies want agents who can speak
with an American, British, or a “neutral” accent. If they can
pull off the mimicry or imitation, then there are many ben-
efits, but what these call centers want are agents “who can
speak neutral English.” In India, there are over 22 languages
and over 2000 dialects, so Vijay argued that the influence of
the mother tongue interference is widespread and most
candidates do not make it through the first round. There are
several major educational institutes across India that provide
training to candidates interested in seeking jobs at call centers
so they can master the call center speech—where the requisite
MTI’s are erased and Indian intonations and accents are
considered deficient.
Undoubtedly, the selection process is competitive, but
Vijay made it sound far more challenging and ruthless,
“Because all these are elimination rounds. You do not clear
one round, you’re out.” The fourth round, he said, is a final
interview with the Assistant Vice President and then the
candidate is selected. One challenge every call center worker
had to be prepared for was to be subjected to racial abuses and
taunts customers from abroad would hurl at them. Vijay noted
that most customers are demanding but not racist. If the
clients are not satisfied with the interaction, they will
sometimes resort to making racist remarks, “‘You bloody
Indians’, yes, they do speak that way!” Furthermore, he said
that he has his share of angry, racist interactions on a weekly
basis.
The Indian customer service agents were expected to do
“authenticity work” on two levels. First, Indian workers were
expected to appear to their Western customers as workers
who are “legitimate colonial subjects,” who are in awe of the
West and are not threatening Western jobs. Second, the Indian
agents were expected to come across as cultural clones of the
West so they could establish an easy familiarity and con-
nection with their Western clients (Mirchandani, 2012, p. 8).
Additionally, customer service call center work requires
establishing a connection with the client and being deferential
to them, even in contexts when the customers are being racist.
These workers are told to respond to racist invectives with
empathy and not with argument or anger. Those call center
agents who respond to racism with anger are often considered
deviant and not fit to work in the company. All kinds of
psychological testing and training sessions are deployed to
identify individuals who will deviate from the company
norm.
The call center youth’s participation in these programs are
reminders of how language (vocabulary, intonations, accents,
phrases, and professional usage) can function as tools of
coloniality and for creating new forms of neoliberal
7
subjectivity. In the following two sections, we consider how
neoliberal ideologies expect individuals to take responsibility
for their livelihood, health, and well-being and how Euro-
American psychiatry and psychology are complicit in pro-
moting such an ideology. Such collusion between neoliber-
alism and Euro-American psychiatry not only overlooks
structurally induced suffering, but also renders vulnerable
populations as a burden on economic development. We take
two case examples from communal and caste-based violence
to illustrate such silencing of the sufferers. Additionally, we
show how the neoliberal model of globalization as a process
of “accumulation by dispossession” has increased poverty in
India and strengthened caste identities, and it has led to anti-
dalit atrocities and prejudices (Teltumbde, 2010, p. 32).
The Primacy of Euro-American Psychiatric
and Psychological Knowledge in
Post-Godhra Riots in Gujarat: Ethnography
Case Study II
In 2002, Gujarat, a state in western India, found itself in the
grip of inter-communal Hindu-Muslim violence for months.
The Sabarmati Express train was at Godhra station on February
27, 2002, and the violence led to the killings of 59 people
including 12 children and 26 women. The passengers who died
were Hindu devotees and pilgrims, and a group of Muslim men
were alleged to be the perpetrators. As an immediate conse-
quence, communal sentiment began to run high and Muslims
were targeted in violent attacks by Hindu mobs. As per Hashmi
(2007), about 2000 Muslims were put to death and about 2500
of them were missing. Rape, rupturing the abdomen of
pregnant women by sword attacks, and children burned alive
were some of the heinous acts of violence experienced by the
Muslim community. The Muslim community suffered for
several months after the violence as the government was
negligent in providing timely relief and rehabilitation for the
survivors (Chandoke et al., 2007; Priya, 2012).
The response of the Indian psychiatrists and psychologists,
who were mostly trained in Eurocentric biomedical knowl-
edge systems, was to take an apolitical stance, which meant
not acknowledging or addressing the injustice-driven distress
that was experienced by the survivors (Priya, 2012). The
mental health professionals’ subtle disengagement and lack of
empathy with the social suffering of the survivors was di-
rectly related to their heavy reliance on universalistic and
individualistic Eurocentric diagnostic categories to psy-
chologize (and thus commodify) the stress and violence that
primarily arose from sociopolitical conditions. Additionally,
the survivors’ social suffering in the post-conflict period was
exacerbated due the government’s inability to provide a
social-safety net, public services, and meaningful psycho-
social rehabilitation. In the aftermath of the violent riots, the
Indian psychiatrist, Harish Shetty (2002) wrote the following
in the journal, Medical Ethics:
8 Review of General Psychology 0(0)
In Gujarat, the mental health fraternity was silent fearing the
disruption of “therapeutic neutrality.” This is actually a denial of
professional responsibility. Mental health professionals need not
be sloganeers, but they must raise some voices during difficult
times. A small minority has made active efforts and taken stands,
but on the whole, silence has transformed the profession’s
empathy into apathy. This collective silence must be broken with
concerted action toward healing and prevention. (p. 50)
This was a stark and bold reminder issued by an Indian
mental health expert to the community of professional psy-
chiatrists and psychologists to suspend Western ideas of
therapeutic neutrality and their collective silence. Traditional
ideas of therapeutic neutrality emerge from Freudian psy-
choanalysis. By assuming a stance of neutrality, the therapist
does not take sides with the inner conflicts of the patient and
“portrays the analyst/therapist as distant, indifferent, and even
cold” (Gelso & Kanninen, 2017, p. 331).
Making an appeal for disavowing Western ideas of ther-
apeutic neutrality in times of political conflict, Shetty (2002)
argued that any diagnosis must be made with keeping in
mind indigenous community norms and a sensitivity to
religious identities. He further stated, “Reports are common,
of insomnia, startle reactions, fearfulness, intrusive memories
and sadness. The commonest coping method has been of
prayer . . .” (Shetty 2002, p. 50). The role of spirituality, prayer,
and other indigenous forms of healing were often not con-
sidered as scientific forms of psychological coping. For in-
stance, the study by Mehta et al. (2005) focused on merely
endorsing the cross-cultural validity of post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) among the women survivors of post-Godhra
riots. There was no mention of the social determinants of
mental health problems, and what was largely left out of the
analysis was how the acts of injustice and impunity for the
perpetrators created sustained suffering, social exclusion,
collective anger, and fear in Muslim communities (Priya, 2012;
Viswambharan & Priya, 2016). Several researchers and mental
health professionals have pointed out that understanding the
healing and recovery of survivors of political and communal
violence includes paying attention to their livelihood, feelings
of exclusion, poverty, gender, literacy, effects of violence on
survivors’ ethnic or religious identity, and their children’s
access to education (Bracken et al., 1995; Jacob, 2016; Priya,
2015; Summerfield, 1999; Viswambharan & Priya, 2016).
Religious Conflict, Social Suffering and Euro-American
Psychiatric Diagnosis
We present below brief excerpts from a qualitative research
study by Priya (2012) and Viswambharan and Priya (2016) to
highlight how the understanding of trauma, social suffering,
and healing among the survivors requires us to focus on social
and cultural practices and not solely employ Western con-
ceptions of individual therapy and psycho-pharmacological
recovery. Social suffering as a concept has been used to study
the lived realities of mental health experiences of the sur-
vivors. According to Kleinman et al. (1998), social suffering
can be understood as the “human problems that have their
origins and consequences in the devastating injuries that
social force can inflict on human experience” (p. ix).
Kleinman (1988a, 1988b) has defined healing as the expe-
rience of gaining meaning or value for one’s experience that is
facilitated by cultural symbols and practices.
In their qualitative study, Viswambharan and Priya (2016)
analyzed a category of social suffering experienced by the
survivors that they described as “living forced identities.”
This category reveals the “distress of being forced to live the
identity of being problematic, harmful or hated ‘other’ in the
society at large and at the places of residence and work”
(Viswambharan & Priya, 2016, p. 51). The public display of
pejorative images of the Muslim community by Hindu priests
as well as by the leaders of right-wing political parties allied
to Hindu fundamentalist groups constituted examples of
being “lived with forced identities.” For instance,
Viswambharan and Priya (2016) point out that in the post-
Godhra conflict one the leaders in the community, who be-
longed to the dominant Hindu group, proclaimed in a public
meeting, “Our Muslims are like ‘our disease’… ‘our head-
ache’… ‘our problem’” (p. 53). Such bigoted public dis-
courses of “us” versus “them” from the dominant and
powerful Hindu groups had the tacit approval of the state, and
thus, social and institutionalized discrimination became one
of the main sources of Muslim social suffering.
A popular sentiment that some members of the Hindu
community expressed against the Muslim community was
that they did not belong to the country and Muslims should go
to Pakistan. When the British left India in 1947, after cen-
turies of colonization, they divided the country into two
nation states of Hindu-majority Indian and Muslim-majority
Pakistan. This bloody partition led to a mass migration of
Muslims to the newly formed Pakistan and many million
Hindus and Sikhs made their journey to India. Thus, when the
Hindu priests and leaders in the community stated that
Muslims belonged to Pakistan in the post-Godhra context, it
was a move to cast Muslims as others, outsiders, and ille-
gitimate citizens of India. One of the Muslim survivors,
whose niece and nephew were killed in the riots, expressed
how the grief and pain of the riots lingered on in his family.
He remarked that the Hindu hatred for Muslims in the post-
Godhra conflict is so intense and widespread that nothing
except his Election Identity Card could come to his rescue in
order to prove that he is a citizen of India and not of another
country:
I am an Indian, I will remain an Indian. See my card number. If I
lose this, it will be difficult to get another. My name is Indian L. A.
Khan, an Indian. This is my identity. If I lose this card how will I
give India the proof of my being an Indian? If I have this, I can at
least say I am an Indian. … [sobs] … I love India. India is my
country and I love it. (Viswambharan & Priya, 2016, p. 53)
Bhatia and Priya
When Muslim community members applied for jobs, they
faced rampant discrimination in the hiring process and this
exclusion was a real threat to their sense of citizenship, re-
ligious identity, and livelihood. A Muslim youth expressed
his anguish about experiencing discrimination due to his
Muslim name:
Educated Muslims do not get jobs. First, they ask you your name.
The name itself gets a reaction … ‘M-class [Muslim class]!
Muslims! We do not need you. H-class [Hindu class]! Hindu is
fine!’ (p. 53)
Priya (2012) has analyzed how the experience of healing
among the children of these survivors is marked by a longing
to rebuild friendship across religious identities. He high-
lighted such experience of healing through a category of
“openness to a relationship across religious boundaries” (p.
205). Here are some excerpts from the Muslim children’s
narratives about such longing for their friendship with their
Hindu friends:
Anwar: “Yes. I miss playing with them. I want to go back
amongst them. We used to have very good time together. Yes.
But, my father wants to stay here only. I have some very good
friends there.”
Sadiq: “I used to play with my Hindu friends. Now also, I shall
play with them if we live with them again.”
Mumtaz: “Yes, I had some good Hindu friends. If we go back to
our village again, I shall play with them.”
Tabassum: “Even if they killed many people, I would still play
with my old Hindu friends because they did not do anything
wrong.”
These children resisted succumbing to the climate of
hatred that existed in their communities, and they missed
playing with children of families that were seen as perpe-
trators of violence. We share these brief local vignettes and
responses of children to illustrate how these young survivors
expressed an interest in healing and a restoration of their
fractured and alienated selves through a desire for rebuilding
their relationships with their Hindu friends. As researchers
have pointed out, in post-disaster contexts, survivors often
seek to restore cultural coherence and meaning to their
selfhood and relationships that diagnostic categories in Euro-
American psychiatry such as PTSD often are unable to fully
capture (Abramowitz, 2005; Bracken et al., 1995;
Summerfield, 1999).
Viswambharan and Priya (2016) draw on Lewis-
Fernandez and Kleinman (1994)’s scholarship to argue that
Western psychiatric formulation of mental illness, including
those diagnosed with PTSD in the Gujarat riots, are based on
specific cultural assumptions about the human mind and
mental illness. These are:
9
(a) the egocentricity of self (the psychological normality and
abnormality are internal to one’s own self), (b) mind–body
dualism (events arise separately either in brain or in mind and
there is no interaction between the two) and (c) culture as an
epiphenomenon to the observed biological reality (p. 44).
These assumptions are culturally rooted in a Eurocentric
understanding of self, and they may not always be able to
explain mental illness or suffering in societies that embrace a
duty based and socio-centric view of human relations. From
such a socio-centric standpoint, sustaining connection and
harmony within relationships and respecting individuality
within cultural boundaries is critical for achieving a coherent
sense of self and other. Such a view of self stands in contrast
to a Eurocentric conception of self that is seen as firmly
bounded, highly individualized, and atomistic (Cushman,
1990; Sampson, 1993)—a “self” that is identified as a pri-
mary source for the enacting control, agency, growth, and
well-being.
The silencing of structurally induced mental health issues
or experiences evidenced above in case of communal vio-
lence has also been noted among the victims of caste-based
violence in India. Drawing on Teltumbde (2010), Kottai
(2018), and Pandey et al.’s (2020) scholarship, we now
take up an analysis of how neoliberalism—in the name of
development and mental health promotion—has facilitated
caste-based violence and social suffering of Indian dalits
(Scheduled Castes) and tribal groups (Scheduled Tribes, also
known as adivasis).
Internal Colonialism: Violence and Social
Suffering of Dalits in India
The Hindu sacred scripture, Rig Veda (1500–1000 BCE)
provides the four caste-based occupational categories of
priest (brahman), warrior (kshatriya), merchant (vaishya),
and laborer (shudra). As Clark-Decès and Smith (2017) have
noted, the caste system became based on “birth status” after
first millennium CE (p. 89) in the descending order of
hierarchy—brahman at the top of the ladder, followed by
kshatriya, and so on. However, as Teltumbde (2010) has
pointed out, there were communities of adivasis (living in
distant jungle or mountains) and those considered “un-
touchables” (today they are known as dalits) based on the
tasks assigned in the social order. Both these communities
were taken to be “outcastes” as these were kept out of the
caste system. Dalits were given the responsibility for re-
moving waste, including cleaning human excrement from dry
latrines, “butchery, the flaying of animal carcasses for their
hides, the making of footwear and the tending of funeral
pyres” (Teltumbde, 2010, p. 14). In other words, tasks that
had everything to do with impurity, filth, death, decay, and
death were carried out by people who belonged to the lowest
caste ladder. As per Manusmiriti—the ancient Hindu religious
10
text on social codes of conduct that was written between 2nd
century BCE and 2nd century CE—not only barred shudras and
dalits from the right to education, but they—especially dalits—
were also often treated inhumanly and denied basic human
dignity.
Historically, there has been resistance to such atrocities
against dalits and other outcastes in the form of bhakti and sufi
religio-spiritual movements in medieval times. Several legal
reforms initially during British colonial rule and then in post-
Independent India have been implemented to protect dalit
groups. However, the post-globalization times in India has
seen an upsurge in the crime (murder, arson, sexual assault,
etc.) against the scheduled castes (or dalits) and scheduled
tribes (or Adivasis) from 21,877 in 1981–1990 to 28,041 in
1991–2000 and 29,254 in 2001–2008 (Teltumbde, 2010, p.
176). More than the increased crime rate, the violence enacted
against dalits by mobs have been transformed into a cele-
bratory public “spectacle,” (Teltumbde, 2010, p. 176) and
these barbarities and atrocities against dalits have become
socially divisive and alarming, and they have increased caste
oppression (Kottai, 2018). What explains the increased vi-
olence against the dalits by the higher castes when the advent
of neoliberalism was hailed by its proponents as a system that
would uplift dalits and erase social hierarchies?
How Neoliberalism Reinforces Caste–Outcaste
Hierarchy and Suffering
The glitz of modern and global lifestyles promised by neo-
liberal globalization came with an implicit imposition of
extreme individualism (i.e., the person rather than the state
has to take the responsibility of his or her survival, health, or
well-being) and social Darwinism (taking social or economic
inequality to be a natural phenomenon as the socio-economic
status of a person is a function of one’s own action or skills)
on the citizens (Prashad, 2020; Teltumbde, 2010). Similarly,
Thorat (2018) argues that the neoliberal market and its
globalizing force as the usherer of caste equality is a myth. He
writes that “instead of ignoring caste and treating individuals
as pure economic agents, market relations are based on the
exploitation of caste inequalities. Dalits receive lower wages
and are forced into ill-paid and arduous work because the
market is not neutral” (p. 258). The elites or higher socio-
economic groups flourished in the new economic environ-
ment, but social Darwinism reinforced the caste system with
the outcastes suffering the brunt of it, as Teltumbde (2010)
explains:
In essence, it reiterates in modern idiom the Hindu metaphysical
doctrine that. . . consoled the oppressed castes with the dictum
that their current plight was due to their own karma which they
could overcome in future births by following their caste dharma
in the present one. The direct implication of the laissez faire,
noninterventionist propositions of globalization for the caste
system is its preservation (p. 31–32, emphasis in original).
Review of General Psychology 0(0)
The uncertainty among the lower socio-economic groups
about earning a livelihood has increased due to the shutting
down of small-scale industries. In addition, Teltumbde found
that “various downsizing strategies, such as business process
reengineering, outsourcing, contractization, etc., entailed an
informalization of jobs and therefore huge reductions in
income” (Teltumbde, 2010, p. 32). Importantly, as Teltumbde
posits, such a situation of economic crisis and distress often
makes the non-dalit/tribal caste groups extremely orthodox
towards maintaining caste hierarchy as they may take solace
from being “higher up” from dalit/tribal or other lower castes.
Consequently, the burden of preserving the millennial-old
caste system and caste–outcaste relationships is mainly
carried by dalits—especially if they tend to disturb the
“psychological equilibrium” of established caste-related
norms (related to education, occupation, social status, etc.)
ascribed to various caste hierarchies (Teltumbde, 2010, p.
178). For instance, the dalit Bhotmange family in Mahara-
shtra faced sexual assault and death in 2008 due to their
support for Ambedkar’s ideas of dalit equality and education.
Other examples of such violence against dalit communities
also indicate that their education and improved economic
condition often become a thorn in the flesh for upper-caste
groups. In the 2005 Gohana violence in Punjab:
seventy dalit houses were burned down by a mob of 2,000 jats, a
dominant . . . shudra community. The provocation was their
economic prosperity: in this case, the victims had educated their
children, procured jobs outside their traditional role and defied
the efforts of the jats to extract unpaid forced labour from them
(Teltumbde, 2010, p. 179).
Thus, to understand caste dynamics in modern India is to
examine what Teltumbde (2010) calls anti-dalit “atrocity
dynamics” and how the police, neoliberal capitalism, media,
civil society, and even secular groups play a role in the
persistence of these social dynamics and caste hierarchies (p.
34). These caste atrocities are an urgent reminder that we need
to consider both Western forms of “external” coloniality as
well “caste-based” forms of “internal” or indigenous forms of
inter-group religious domination and power dynamics when
we are examining the links between capitalist forms of
globalization, hegemonic Euro-American psychology, and
the mutually strengthening relationship among caste op-
pression, Brahminism, and neoliberal politics.
The decolonization perspective gives us an understanding
of how the legacies of British colonialism and coloniality
manifested through neoliberalism have taken root in the
Indian society. However, some scholars have advocated for
focusing on the silencing and erasure that occurs through
internal forms of colonialism—that is, through caste op-
pression and inequality. In particular, these scholars have
examined how local or internal cultural power dynamics have
sustained the caste system or the atrocious caste-outcaste
relationship despite the legal reforms and anti-caste social
Bhatia and Priya
movements of the last few centuries (Gudavarthy, 2016;
Mani, 2005).
Braj Ranjan Mani (2005) has noted that the caste system
has been legitimized by an elitist historiography that has
depicted major anti-caste social movements or religious
philosophies (e.g., Bhakti Movement, Sufism, Buddhism,
Sikhism) as inferior to the Hindu caste system. He argues that
we need to undertake a critical analysis of these elitist, upper-
caste historical depictions of anti-caste movements, and we
need to further foreground the egalitarian social principles of
such movements. He calls this process as debrahmanizing the
history of caste-system. Similarly, Ajay Gudavarthy (2016)
has highlighted the role played by the “politics of accom-
modation” (p. 15)—a politics that tends to reframe or blunt
the emancipatory impulse of Ambedkarism or Buddhism by
assimilating it within the larger religious principles of Hin-
duism. Gudavarthy also illustrates that these politics of ac-
commodation nullify the effects of anti-castes philosophies
and often are used by dominant political parties to appeal to
their loyal voters. Clearly, we need a critical analysis of how
both external and internal colonialism (global coloniality,
neoliberal globalization, and politics of accommodation,
respectively) perpetuate caste-based coloniality and violence.
Medicalizing Social Suffering: Neoliberalism
and Mental Healthcare for
Marginalized Groups
Studies of violent conflicts report that major experiences of
suffering among the survivors pertains to physical or psy-
chological assaults being experienced as assaults on their
social or cultural identity (Summerfield, 1999; Priya, 2015,
2018, 2019). The social suffering of dalit communities often
occurs due to atrocities carried out by the collective members
of the upper-caste Hindus. These atrocities are often con-
ducted in a dehumanizing and sadistic manner—such as
“selfies” taken by the perpetrators to record and create a
spectacle of the acts of assault (Kottai, 2018). In such a
scenario, the mental healthcare system may cause a second
victimization for the survivors of violence by depicting their
suffering as individual psychopathology. For example, Kottai
(2018) in his ethnographic study of primary mental healthcare
in Kerala noted that the outcaste tribal groups often faced
“dispossession of land, unemployment, malnutrition and
discrimination” due to systematic “expropriation” of their
land by the state in the name of development (para 6). The
collective suffering of tribal groups that was often caused by
structural impediments was erased by the language of indi-
vidual pathology and by using “scientific” and “objective”
discourses of psychiatry or medicine:
With many tribals living in abject poverty and squalor, the
mental health professionals interact briefly for four to five
minutes with pointed questions to examine their “mental
status” in order to fit them neatly into a specific diagnostic
criteria. Typically, mental health professionals ask questions
11
along the lines of whether there is any voice heard in their ears
and whether they have any “thoughts.” A patient, when asked
if his mind was peaceful, responded by saying that he is
worried about getting food since he has been unemployed for
almost four years. The mental health professional prescribed
medicines to treat ‘bipolar disorder’ for this patient (para 16,
emphasis added).
Neoliberal globalization, as part of the larger project of
Western modernization and progress, was supposed to make
caste disappear. Instead, globalization and the neoliberal free
market have hardened caste hierarchies, as capitalism has
allied with casteism (Teltumbde, 2010). Although caste-
based discrimination is illegal in India, caste oppression
manifests itself in the fabric of Indian society and now in-
tersects with other economic and psychological forms of
Western coloniality.
We have shared ethnographic and qualitative studies to
show how caste oppression, politico-religious violence
against minorities, along with Eurocentric and hegemonic
psychology lives through its categories, diagnoses, theories,
treatment plans, and how these various intersecting forms of
domination play out in the Indian context. We now take up a
brief analysis of how the global mental health movement is
framed through linking the cause of social suffering to
neocolonial ideas about development.
Decolonizing Western psychiatric knowledge calls for an
intervention beyond the use of neoliberal Western diagnostic
categories and for understanding how mental illness is de-
fined and linked to issues of poverty and development in the
Global South. Cosgrove and Karter (2018) state that one of
the most successful illustrations of the medicalization and
commodification of mental illness is reflected in the implicit
neoliberal and neocolonial language that is used to frame the
“global burden of depression” by the global mental health
movement. For instance, the World Health Organization
website on mental health depoliticizes stress by erasing how
persistent structural conditions of war, conflict, and unem-
ployment create mental health trauma and suffering. One
example of this depoliticization is reflected in the WHO
campaign, “Depression: Let’s talk.” Their headline states,
“When sadness doesn’t stop: Helping Syrians talk about
depression.” Even though this campaign and headline is well
intended, it “reflects a neocolonial perspective and an as-
sumption that Western mental health interventions are best
suited to remedy what the UN has described as the ‘biggest
humanitarian and refugee crisis of our time’” (Cosgrove &
Karter, 2018, pp. 672–673).
Western psychiatry has a “colonizing” tendency (Mills,
2014, p. 6) that often identifies and labels people in alien and
degrading terms and such medical diagnoses are often
stripped of their personal and social context. Almost two
decades ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2001
announced that over 450 million people around the world are
estimated to have some kind of mental or brain disorders.
Subsequently, the Global Mental Health Movement (GMH)
12
was launched in 2008 to close the psychiatric treatment gap
for people who primarily lived in the Global South. The
extensive critique by Mills (2014) shows how GMH pri-
marily emerges from the scientific knowledge base of the
Global South and how GMH does not fully recognize local
community needs, traditional modes of inquiry, and ignores
or erases indigenous healing practices in developing nations.
Mills (2018) warns us against deploying this Western
coloniality of psychological knowledge in the Global South.
Mental health in many postcolonial countries is being framed
within neoliberal terms and as a global “development” issue.
She emphasizes that “the development agenda has histori-
cally been linked to the promotion of the free market and to
neoliberalism … criticality is needed to ensure that with its
inclusion in that agenda, mental health does not follow the
same pattern” (Mills, 2018, p. 806). Furthermore, one im-
portant implication of situating mental health problems
within the neoliberal economic framework is that mental
illness and poverty are framed as “individual pathologies”
that impede development (Mills, 2018, p. 806). In sum, we
have argued here that understanding survivors’ selfhood and
mental health in the context of politico-religious and caste-
based violence requires community-based, insider knowl-
edge, and critical and narrative-based explorations of human
life. Otherwise, we run the risk of enacting double
victimization—first by the structural forces of political vio-
lence and second by the misapplication of Western colonial
and neoliberal conceptions of selfhood, well-being, and
mental health (Bhatia & Priya, 2018a).
Conclusion and Limitations
Our modest attempt in this article has been to include both
stories of domination with the acknowledgment that de-
colonial studies needs to undertake a deeper and more
complex analysis of how Eurocentric forms of coloniality
supported by neoliberal capitalism intersect with caste-based
inequalities in India. Critiques of Eurocentric coloniality
often overlook and silence internal colonialism of caste
oppression and violence. We have attempted to raises
questions about the boundaries of psychology: what kind of
knowledge is considered psychological; who is included and
excluded in the field; what counts as valid knowledge and
who decides what knowledge is valid; and maybe most
important, whose voices are represented and who gets to
control the knowledge production of psychology. In our
discussion about decolonization, it must be noted that the
control of power goes hand-in-hand with the creation of
knowledge. As Bhambra (2014) points out, “This coloniality
of power, expressed through political and economic spheres”
has been “strongly associated with a coloniality of knowledge
(or of imagination), articulated as modernity/rationality” (p.
117). Decolonizing means disrupting the traditional research
process by making space for art, community knowledge,
lived experiences, indigenous knowledge, and storytelling
Review of General Psychology 0(0)
and oral histories as valid knowledge (Smith, 2012). We set
out to analyze how Eurocentric psychology erases the
multilayered postcolonial identity, values, and indigenous
experiences of both youth and survivors of political conflict in
India.
One of the main purposes of this article is to show how
psychology is, wittingly or unwittingly, complicit in ad-
vancing the neoliberal discourse of self in Indian corporate
organizations, economic policies of the state, and social life.
A decolonial lens that focuses on the “coloniality” of psy-
chology uncovers how the psychological training given to
English-speaking, middle-class, and upper-class Indian
software engineers and call center agents points to new forms
of cultural and psychological imperialism. These new im-
perialisms gained currency through neoliberal flows of out-
sourcing and expansion of global corporations. The
conceptions of cross-cultural difference and identity that
permeate Indian corporations are not only about imparting
soft skills training and creating specific types of personalities
and cultivating a specific mindset. Discourses of self are also
intended to function as controlling and regulating mecha-
nisms that ultimately serve to maximize profits for the
company and create a ruthless enterprise culture based on
competition and personal achievement.
We draw on examples of ethnographic and qualitative
studies to show how the rapid psychologization and medi-
calization of a community’s suffering through the widespread
use of psychiatric diagnostic categories and treatment frames
the survivors of political violence as a “burden” on economic
development rather than seeing the marginalized people as
being made poorer through neoliberal economic policy. We
might add here that the large body of scholars that are as-
sociated with the psychological sciences need to understand
how psychology’s foundations are rooted in racist and co-
lonial knowledge.
A closer look at Euro-American psychology reveals
startling evidence of the ethnocentric nature of psychology
and how new forms of coloniality of psychological knowl-
edge are being applied in the Global South. But looking at the
universalization of Western knowledge and the ways in which
hegemonic psychological science and its vocabulary has been
deployed in the Indian context tells us just one side of how
coloniality manifests itself in postcolonial Indian society. We
believe what is urgently needed is a decolonial research
project that examines how centuries-long Brahmanical
domination combined with British colonization in India has
resulted in exacerbating caste-based oppression. Our par-
ticular analysis of caste-based suffering in India demonstrates
how changing the power dynamics in both geopolitical
(colonialism) and local (internal colonialism) settings re-
quires centering the rights and voices of groups that have
been oppressed and relegated to the margins.
We need a new decolonized psychology that speaks to the
economic injustices in the Global South, gender violence,
entrenchment of caste–race hierarchies, climate change, and
Bhatia and Priya
world-wide inequality and poverty. Psychologists all across the
world may have to first begin with engaging in self-reflexive,
“personal liberation” from racist and colonial knowledge. They
must dismantle the coloniality of knowledge and power if they
are going to work towards the liberation of all in a society,
particularly the excluded and marginalized.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, au-
thorship, and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iD
Sunil Bhatia  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6076-290X
References
Abramowitz, S. A. (2005). The poor have become rich, and the rich
have become poor: Collective trauma in the Guinean Langu-
ette. Social Science and Medicine, 61(10), 2106-2118.
Adams, G., Dobles, I., Gómez, L. H., Kurtis, T., & Molina, L. E.
(2015). Decolonizing psychological science: Introduction to
the special thematic section. Journal of Political and Social
Psychology, 3, 213-238. https://doi: 10.5964/jspp.v3i1.564
Arnett, J. J. (2008). The neglected 95%: Why American psychology
needs to be less American. American Psychologist, 63, 602-614.
DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.63.7.602https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-
066X.63.7.602
Bhambra, G. K. (2014). Postcolonial and decolonial dialogues.
Postcolonial Studies, 17(2), 115-121. https://doi: 10.1080/
13688790.2014.966414
Bhatia, S. (2002). Orientalism in Euro-American and Indian psy-
chology: Historical representation of ‘natives’ in colonial and
postcolonial contexts. History of Psychology, 5, 376-398. DOI:
10.1037/1093-4510.5.4.376
Bhatia, S. (2018). Decolonizing psychology: Globalization, social
justice and Indian youth identities. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
Bhatia, S. (2020). Decolonizing psychology: Power, citizenship and
identity. Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, 15(3), 257-266,
DOI: 10.1080/24720038.2020.1772266
Bhatia, S., & Priya, K. R. (2018a). Decolonizing culture: Euro-
American psychology and the shaping of neoliberal selves in
India. Theory & Psychology, 28(5), 645-668. https://doi:0.
1177/0959354318791315
Bhatia, S., & Priya, K. R. (2018b). From representing culture to
fostering ’voice’: toward a critical indigenous psychology. In
Kuang-Hui Yeh (Ed.), Asian indigenous psychologies in the
global context (pp. 19-46). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bracken, P. J., Giller, J. E., & Summerfield, D. (1995). Psychological
responses to war and atrocity: The limitations of current
concepts. Social Science & Medicine, 40, 1073-1082.
13
Bulhan, H. A. (2015). Stages of colonialism in Africa: From occupation
of land to occupation of being. Journal of Social and Political
Psychology, 3, 239-256. https://doi:10.5964/jspp.v3i1.143
Chandoke, N., Priyadarshi, P., Tyagi, S., & Khanna, N. (2007). The
displaced of Ahmedabad. Economic and Political Weekly, 43,
10-14.
Clark-Decès, I., & Smith, F.M. (2017). Well-being in India: A
historical and anthropological report. In R. J. Estes, &
M. J. Sirgy (Eds.), The pursuit of human well-being: The untold
global story (pp. 83-107). Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Cosgrove, L., & Karter, J. (2018). The poison in the cure:
Neoliberalism and contemporary movements in mental
health. Theory & Psychology, 28, 669-683. DOI: 10.1177/
0959354318796307
Cushman, P. (1990). Why the self is empty. American Psychologist,
45, 599-611.
Dados, N., & Connell, R. (2012). The global south. Contexts, 11,
12-13. DOI: 10.1177/1536504212436479
Das, G. (2002). India unbound. New York, NY: Anchor Books.
Dutta, U, Sonn, C., & Lykes, B. M. (2016). Situation and contesting
structural violence in community-based research and action.
Community Psychology in Global Perspectives, 2, 1-20. doi:
10.1285/i24212113v2i2p1
Gelso, C. J., & &Kanninen, K. M. (2017). Neutrality revisited: On
the value of being neutral within an empathic atmosphere.
Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 27, 330-341. DOI: 10.
1037/int0000072
Gooptu, N. (2013). Introduction. In N. Gooptu (Ed.), Enterprise
culture in Neoliberal India: Studies in youth, class, work and
media (pp. 1-24). New York, NY: Routledge.
Grande, S. (2015). Red pedagogy: Native American political and
social thought (2nd Edition). Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield.
Gudavarthy, A. (2016). Brahmanism, liberalism and the postcolonial
theory. Economic and Political Weekly, 55(1), 15-17.
Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. New York, NY:
Oxford University Press.
Hashmi, S. (2007). The uprooted: Caught between existence and
denial, a document on the state of the internally displaced in
Gujarat. New Delhi: Centre for Social Justice and Anhad.
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest
people in the world? The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33,
61-83. DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X0999152X
Jacob, K. S. (2016). Mental health legislation: Contradictory par-
adigms, uneasy compromise. Economic and Political Weekly,
51(50), 22-24.
Kiguwa, P., & Segalo, P. (2018). Decolonising Psychology in res-
idential and open distance e-learning institutions: Critical re-
flections. South African Journal of Psychology, 48(3), 310-318.
DOI: 10.1177/0081246318786605
Kinnvall, C. (2004). Globalization and religious nationalism: Self,
identity, and the search for ontological security. Political
Psychology, 25, 741-767.
Kleinman, A. (1988a). The illness narratives: Suffering, healing and
human condition. New York: Basic Books.
14
Kleinman, A. (1988b). Rethinking psychiatry: From cultural cat-
egory to personal experience. New York: The Free Press.
Kleinman, A., Das, V., & Lock, M. (Eds.). (1998). Social suffering.
New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press.
Kottai, S. R. (2018). How Kerala’s poor tribals are being branded as
’mentally ill’. EPW Engage. https://www.epw.in/engage/article/
how-keralas-poor-tribals-are-reconfigured-psychiatric-patients?0=
ip_login_no_cache%3D8cdf11a884146d9365a7bda1985cda8a
Lewis-Fernández, R., & Kleinman, A. (1994). Culture, personality,
and psychopathology. Journal of Abnormal Psychology,
103(1), 67-71. DOI: 10.1037/0021-843X.103.1.67
Macleod, C., Bhatia, S., & Liu, W. (2020) Feminisms and de-
colonising psychology: Possibilities and challenges. Feminism
and Psychology, 30(3), 287-305.
Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being: Con-
tributions to the development of a concept. Cultural Studies,
21, 240-270. DOI: 10.1080/09502380601162548
Mani, B. R. (2005). Debrahmanising history: Dominance and re-
sistance in Indian society. Delhi: Manohar Publishers.
Mehta, K., Vankar, G., & Patel, V. (2005). Validity of the construct of
post-traumatic stress disorder in a low-income country: In-
terview study of women in Gujarat, India. British Journal of
Psychiatry, 187, 585-586. DOI: 10.1192/bjp.187.6.585.
Mignolo, W. D. (2007). Introduction: Coloniality of power and de-
colonial thinking. Cultural Studies, 21, 155-167
Mignolo, W. (2010). Introduction: Coloniality of power and de-colonial
thinking. In W. Mignolo, & A. Escobar (Eds.), Globalization and
the decolonial option (pp. 1-21) London, UK: Routledge.
Mignolo, W. (2011).The Darker side of modernity: Global futures,
decolonial options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Mignolo, W., & Walsh, C. E. (2018). On decoloniality: Concepts,
analytics, praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Mills, C. (2014). Decolonizing mental health: The psychiatrization
of the majority world. New York, NY: Routledge.
Mills, C. (2018). From ‘invisible problem’ to global priority: The
inclusion of mental health in the sustainable development
goals. Development and Change, 49(3), 843-866. https://doi:
10.1111/dech.12397
Mirchandani, K. (2012). Phone clones: Authenticity work in the
transnational service economy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Misra, G., & Paranjpe, A. (2012). Psychology in modern India. In
R. W. Reiber (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the history of psycho-
logical theories. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4419-0463-8
Nadeem, S. (2011). Dead ringers: How outsourcing is changing the
way Indians understand themselves. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Nandy, A. (1983). The intimate enemy: Loss and recovery of self
under colonialism. Calcutta, India: Oxford University Press.
Nandy, A. (1989). The intimate enemy: Loss and recovery of self
under colonialism. Calcutta, India: Oxford University Press.
NASSCOM. (2017). Strategic review 2017—The IT-BPM sector in
India. Retrieved from http://www.nasscom.in/knowledge-center/
publications/it-bpm-industry-india-2017-strategic-review
Review of General Psychology 0(0)
Nilekani, N. (2008). Imagining India: The idea of a renewed nation.
New Delhi, India: Penguin.
Ong, A. (2006). Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations in citizen-
ship and sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press.
Oza, R. (2012). The making of neoliberal India: Nationalism,
gender, and the paradoxes of globalization. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Pandey, R., Kukreja, S., & Priya, K. R. (2020). Covid-19: Mental
health care without social justice? Economic and Political
Weekly, 55(31), 16-20.
Pathak, G. (2015). “Presentable”: The body and neoliberal sub-
jecthood in India. Social Identities, 20, 314-332. https://doi: 10.
1080/13504630.2014.1002389.
Pickren, W. E. (2018). Psychology in the social imaginary of
neoliberalism: Critique and beyond. Theory & Psychology,
28(5), 575-580. DOI: 10.1177/0959354318799210
Prashad, V. (2020). A socialist cry for civilisational change: Covid-
19 and the failure of neo-liberalism. EPW Engage. https://
www.epw.in/engage/article/socialist-cry-civilisational-change-
covid-19-coronavirus
Priya, K. R. (2012). Trauma reactions, suffering and healing among
riot-affected internally displaced children of Gujarat: A qual-
itative inquiry. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 9, 189-209.
doi: 10.1080/14780887.2010.500353
Priya, K. R. (2015). On the social constructionist approach to
traumatized selves in post-disaster settings: State-induced vi-
olence in Nandigram, India. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry,
39(3), 428-448. https://doi: 10.1007/s11013-014-9423-6.
Priya, K. R. (2018). Well-being and Mental Health in the aftermath
of Disasters: A Social Constructionist Approach. In G. Misra
(Ed.), Psychosocial Interventions for Health and Wellbeing (pp.
355-368). New Delhi: Springer.
Priya, K. R. (2019). Using constructivist grounded theory meth-
odology: Studying suffering and healing as a case example. In
A. Bryant, & K. Charmaz (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of
Current Developments in Grounded Theory (pp. 392-412).
London: Sage.
Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power, eurocentrism, and Latin
America. Nepantala: Views from South, 3, 533-580.
Quijano, A. (2007). Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural
Studies, 21(2), 168-178. DOI: 10.1080/09502380601164353
Ramesh, B. P. (2008). Work organization, control and empow-
erment: Managing the contradictions of call centre work. In
C. Upadhya, & A. R. Vasavi (Eds.), In an outpost of the
global economy: Work and workers in India’s information
technology industry (pp. 136-161). New Delhi, India:
Routledge.
Ratele, K., Cornell, J., Dlamini, S., Helman, R., Malherbe, &
Titi, N. (2018). Some basic questions about (a) decolonizing
African(n)-centered psychology considered. South African
Journal of Psychology, 48, 331-342. DOI: 10.1177/
0081246318790444
Rose, N. (1996). Inventing our selves: Psychology, power, and
personhood. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Bhatia and Priya
Sampson, E. E. (1993). Identity politics: Challenges to psychology’s
understanding. American Psychologist, 48(12), 1219-1230.
DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.48.12.1219
Sathaye, S. (2008). The scientific imperative to be positive: Self-
reliance and success in the modern workplace. In C. Upadhya,
& A. R. Vasavi (Eds.), In an outpost of the global economy:
Work and workers in India’s information technology industry
(pp. 136-161). New Delhi, India: Routledge.
Shetty, H. (2002). Response of mental health professionals in
Gujarat. Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, 10(3). http://www.
issuesinmedicalethics.org/103di050. html.
Shome, R. (2006). Thinking through the diaspora: Call centers, India,
and a new politics of hybridity. International Journal of Cultural
Studies, 9, 105-124. DOI: 10.1177/1367877906061167
Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and
indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). London, UK: Zed books.
Sugarman, J. (2015). Neoliberalism and psychological ethics.
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 35,
103-116. DOI: 10.1037/a0038960
Summerfield, D. (1999). A critique of seven assumptions behind
psychological trauma programmes in war-affected areas. Social
Science & Medicine, 48, 1449-1462. https://doi:10.1016/S0277-
9536(98)00450-X
Teltumbde, A. (2010). The persistence of caste: The Khairlanji
murders and India’s hidden apartheid. New York: Zed books.
Teo, T. (2018). Homo Neoliberalus: From personality to forms of
subjectivity. Theory and Psychology, 28, 581-599. DOI: 10.
1177/0959354318794899
Thorat, S. (2018. Political economy of caste discrimination and
atrocities. Why does caste discrimination persist despite law? In
15
S. Yengde, & A. Teltumbude (Eds.), The Radical in Am-
bedkar: Critical Reflections. Gurgaon, India: Penguin Ran-
dom House.
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor.
Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1-40.
Upadhya, C. (2008). Management of culture and managing
through culture in the Indian software outsourcing industry.
In C. Upadhya, & A. R. Vasavi (Eds.), In an outpost of the
global economy: Work and workers in India’s information
technology industry (pp. 101-135). New Delhi, India:
Routledge.
Upadhya, C., & Vasavi, A. R. (2008). Outposts of the global
information economy: Work and workers in India’s out-
sourcing industry. In C. Upadhya, & A. R. Vasavi (Eds.), In
an outpost of the global economy: Work and workers in
India’s information technology industry (pp.9-49). New
Delhi: Routledge.
Vasavi, A. R. (2008). “Service from India:’ The making of India’s
global youth workforce. In C. Upadhya, & A. R. Vasavi (Eds.),
In an outpost of the global economy: Work and workers in
India’s information technology industry (pp. 210-234). New
Delhi, India: Routledge.
Viswambharan, A. P., & Priya, K. R. (2016). Documentary analysis
as a qualitative methodology to explore disaster mental
health: Insights from analyzing a documentary on communal
riots. Qualitative Research, 16(1), 43-59. DOI:10.1177/
1468794114567494.
Watkins, M. (2015). Psychosocial accompaniment. Journal of Social
and Political Psychology, 3(1), 324-341. DOI:10.5964/jspp.
v3i1.103.