About a month ago, Indian psychology lost one of its most important voices. Anand C. Paranjpe, scholar, teacher, and bridge-builder, passed away quietly, leaving behind a body of work that still crackles with intellectual electricity. His passing is a loss not just for academics, but for anyone who believes psychology should understand people in the fullness of their cultural and inner lives.
Anand C. Paranjpe Saw the “Self” Beyond the Mirror
In an age where mainstream psychology often reduced the self to a bundle of cognitive schemas and behavioral patterns, Paranjpe insisted on a richer model, one that accounted for ātman as a stable core of identity, and not merely a shifting self-concept.
In Self and Identity in Modern Psychology and Indian Thought, he dissected Western theories of the self. Erikson’s psychosocial stages, Rogers’ self-actualization, Festinger’s cognitive dissonance and then counterposed them with concepts from Advaita Vedanta, Yoga, and Buddhist phenomenology. His aim wasn’t to reject the West, but to integrate it with India’s own centuries-old metacognitive traditions.
Where Freud saw unconscious drives, Paranjpe saw avidyā (ignorance) clouding pure awareness. Where Skinner saw reinforcement schedules, Paranjpe pointed to saṁskāras, deep conditioning imprinted in consciousness over time.
He Refused to Let Indian Psychology Stay in the Shadows
Paranjpe knew that the dominant paradigms in psychology were often culturally biased, what fit the “average” American undergraduate in a lab experiment did not necessarily fit a farmer in Maharashtra or a monk in Sikkim. His work in Theoretical Psychology: The Meeting of East and West challenged the default Euro-American lens, urging Indian psychologists to reclaim indigenous constructs of mind, motivation, and affective states.
He showed that Indian philosophy was not just “cultural background,” but an empirical resource for understanding human cognition, emotional regulation, and moral reasoning.
Why We Need Anand C. Paranjpe Now More Than Ever
In a post-globalization era, mental health debates in India still lean heavily on imported frameworks. Paranjpe’s approach offers an antidote-contextualized psychology that:
a) Respects cultural phenomenology – understanding lived experience (anubhava) without forcing it into alien taxonomies.
b) Balances cognition and transcendence – treating metacognition and self-awareness not just as cognitive processes, but as spiritual practices.
c) Integrates moral development – framing identity not only as self-esteem or self-efficacy, but as dharma-oriented living.
For therapists, researchers, and students, Paranjpe’s books are not just texts, they’re maps to a psychology that treats humans as more than data points.
A Personal Legacy That Outlives Him
Those who studied under Paranjpe remember a man who could switch seamlessly between discussing Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory and the Bhagavad Gītā’s discourse on desire, without losing rigor in either. He treated cross-cultural psychology not as a side project, but as the central task of understanding the human condition.
If you’ve ever felt that modern psychology explains your behavior but not your being, Paranjpe is the author you need. His writing will not just sharpen your critical thinking; it will challenge your existential orientation.
We owe it to him and to ourselves, to keep reading his work. Not out of nostalgia, but because he left us tools for building a psychology that can speak to both the lab and the meditation hall, to both the therapist’s couch and the seeker’s mat. In an age hungry for meaning, his voice is not an echo from the past, it is a guidepost for the future.
