Psychology of Mithila Culture: An Emic Perspective

This book began not merely as an academic inquiry but as a journey into memory, identity, and meaning. Growing up amid the rituals, songs, and silences of Mithila, I often sensed a deep emotional grammar embedded in everyday life, one that modern psychology rarely acknowledged. It was only later, through the lenses of cultural and indigenous psychology that I realized: Mithila does not just preserve culture; it lives it, performs it, and transforms it into a unique way of understanding the mind.

“Psychology of Mithila Culture: An Emic Perspective” is an attempt to listen to that inner voice of a region, through its women’s songs, children’s lullabies, sacred fasts, stories of Sita, painted walls, and unspoken rituals of care. This is not a study from above, but a conversation from within. It values silence as much as speech, myth as much as theory, devotion as much as diagnosis.

I have watched women express pain through vidaigeet, witnessed emotional healing in the folds of Chhath Puja, and felt how a painted wall or a whispered lullaby can carry psychological truths rarely captured in textbooks. This book is my humble attempt to honor those truths and as much about reclaiming indigenous psychological wisdom as it is about contributing to a plural, decolonized, and grounded Indian psychology. It invites readers to move beyond the lab and clinic, to the courtyard, the shrine, the kitchen, and the village square.