Childhood, Family and Sociocultural Change in India : Reinterpreting the Inner World

This book deals with the nature of sociocultural change in India and its relevance for the scientific study of childhood, family environments and the process of human development.

The view developed in this book is an interdisciplinary one, with a focus on social, developmental and psychoanalytic theory.

On the one hand, the growing Indian middle class appears to be in the process of creating a new sense of Indianness, a sort of 'transitional identity', aspiring to be authentically Indian yet thoroughly modern; and on the other, there remains a search for the authentic Hindu self, best represented by the Hindutva movement and the BJP achieving political power.

From a social and psychological perspective, these cultural and political movements hope to expunge the harsh pain of the colonial legacy, while managing to fight off the stresses and strains of modernity.

Both the inward looking and the outward directed components of the new Indian identity impact the domain of the family through parenting, schooling and media, represented in the daily routines of socialization. The book addresses this challenge by working its way through psychoanalytic or developmental issues in order to arrive at a consensus between theory and observations on Indian childhood and personality development.

Although this realm of experience remains relatively unexplored within the social discourse in India, the psychoanalytic works by Sudhir Kakar on the psychosocial tensions underlying Indian society offer a great landmark and a starting point.

A unique and overdue study, this volume brings important debates previously aired only in relation to rather restricted audiences to a wider readership.