Although some research scholarship in this field occurred as early as the 1930s, activity intensified after the Manifesto on Indian Psychology[1] was issued in 2002 by more than 150 psychologists gathered in Pondicherry, India, led by K. Ramakrishna Rao, Girishwar Misra, and others.
Topics addressed by Indian psychology research and scholarship have included conceptions or processes relevant to values, personality, perception, cognition, emotion, creativity, education, and spirituality as well as applications such as meditation, yoga, and ayurveda, and case studies of prominent spiritual figures and their legacies.
Indian psychology subscribes to methodological pluralism and especially emphasizes universal perspectives that pertain primarily to a person's inner state, and are not otherworldly, religious, or dogmatic, and with special emphasis on applications that foster the positive transformation of human conditions toward achievement and well-being.
For catalyzing this intensified interest, S. K. Kiran Kumar (2008) wrote that two specific developments... have played key roles in stimulating investigators to examine and incorporate Indian psychological thoughts into current literature.
[9]: 28 Other contributing factors were the sense that there had been in India a "painful neglect of the indigenous tradition",[10]: vii and that modern psychology as studied in India was "essentially a Western transplant, unable to connect with the Indian ethos and concurrent community conditions.... by and large imitative and replicative of Western studies".
[10]: vii Rao and Paranjpe (2016) reported that about a year after the issuance of the Manifesto, "a smaller group assembled in Visakhapatnam and worked out a plan to prepare a set of three volumes, a handbook, a textbook, and a sourcebook of Indian psychology.
[10]: vii Dalal (2014) reported that "efforts to build Indian psychology as a vibrant discipline"[15]: 35 have received impetus through several conferences that have taken place in Pondicherry (2001, 2002, 2004), Kollam (2001), Delhi (2002, 2003, 2007), Visakhapatnam (2002, 2003, 2006), and Bengaluru (2007).
[17][18] Oman and Singh (2018) stated that "The Indian psychology movement has made substantial strides in incorporating theory- and realization-derived content".
[19][20][21][22][23][24][25] Other external impacts to date include a meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin, in which Sedlmeier and his meta-analytic colleagues, for determining basic traditional teachings relevant to meditation, "lean heavily on the recent Indian psychology movement, which originated in India but includes experts on diverse theoretical approaches to meditation from both East and West".
Chaudhary[19] noted that the Handbook[14] contains sections on schools of thought (Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and various related traditions), specific psychological processes and constructs ("values, personality, perception, cognition, emotion, creativity, education, and spirituality"[19]: 289 ), and applications to individual psychology and group dynamics, including meditation from different traditions, yoga, and ayurveda.
Therefore, neurophysiological studies are not considered irrelevant to Indian psychology, but are regarded as insufficient to give us a complete understanding of human nature".
[6]: 174 [30] Rao and Paranjpe (2016) wrote that "In the Indian tradition the guru (preceptor)… occupies an intermediate position between first-person experience of the practitioner and the final self-certifying state of pure consciousness, playing an indispensable role of mediation and providing a second-person perspective to supplement third-person and first-person approaches.