Her research examines how psychotherapy shapes the emergence of middle-class subjectivities in the world’s most populous democracy. Young Indians—primarily women—are learning to practise therapy and, in the process, crafting new ideas of personhood, morality, and care in a rapidly changing urban society. Meghna followed trainees through classrooms, therapy simulations, and internships in community settings.
Her fieldwork captures the textures of pedagogic and emotional life—how concepts such as empathy, self-awareness, cultural sensitivity, and ethics are embodied, debated, and practised in everyday interactions. The research also examines how global psychotherapeutic heuristics circulate through institutions shaped by neoliberal aspirations and middle-class respectability, producing a form of “relational individualism” that is both deeply social and self-reflexive.
Her findings show that psychotherapy training in India is not simply a “Western import.” Instead, it is a site of moral negotiation where standards of global mental health meet regional hierarchies of gender, caste, and class. Trainees learn to cultivate selfhood as both introspective and relational, grounded in the idea that to have a therapeutic effect, one must first work on oneself. Through exercises of self-disclosure, therapeutic simulations, and collective reflection, students become ethical subjects capable of care that is simultaneously professional and personal.
This process, Meghna argues, reconfigures kinship and the moral economy of care in urban India. The figure of the counsellor embodies a new middle-class aspiration: to turn emotional labour into professional expertise while outwardly maintaining local standards of respectability and femininity. Yet this moral self-making is fraught with tension—between care and control, empathy and hierarchy, self-realisation and social conformity.
By documenting these contradictions, Meghna’s work contributes to a broader understanding of how psychological expertise becomes a means of making the self and imagining the future in post-liberalisation India. Her findings suggest that psychotherapy is emerging as a new idiom through which the middle classes articulate their responsibility, aspirations, and sense of belonging. In doing so, her research invites policymakers, educators, and mental health practitioners to consider how “care” can both reproduce inequality and attend to its effects, and how global psychotherapeutic ideals are adapted in ways that both challenge and reinforce existing social orders.