Radhakamal Mukerjee Research Articles

Climate Change and Its Impact on Violence Against Rural Women in India: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

This research paper explores the complex relationship between climate change and gender-based violence, particularly focusing on rural women in India. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the paper investigates how rising temperatures, economic disruptions, and migration due to climate change exacerbate gender inequalities and increase instances of domestic violence. Drawing on data from UN Women, JAMA Psychiatry, and various Indian scholars such as Radhakamal Mukerjee, Indra Munshi, Bina Agarwal, and Shobhita Jain, this study provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of this phenomenon

Culture and Cultural Policy in Radhakamal Mukerjee and Indian Sociology: Text in Context

Culture and Cultural Policy in Radhakamal Mukerjee and Indian Sociology: Text in Context

The Brahmanisation of Indian Sociology or the Birth of the Racial Theories of Untouchability

This article shows how untouchability was framed as an ethnographic problem largely through a racial and Brahmanical perspective by looking at some of the main interventions made by British and Indian social scientists on this topic, such as H.H. Risley, G.S. Ghurye and Radhakamal Mukerjee. Dalit traditions, knowledge and theories about their origin were discarded and suffered an epistemicide. Reassessing the history of untouchability as an ethnographic concept is critical as the influence of these theories can still be perceived not only in common understandings about the origin of Dalits but also in the way sociology and anthropology are practised in India.

Universalising Sociology: Lessons From Radhakamal Mukerjee

Even though Radhakamal Mukerjee is recognised as a founding father of sociology in India, he has remained a neglected figure in his own country. This lecture attempts to make his major writings more accessible. They are seen in the context of his life as he lived it, with an emphasis on some formative influences, biographical and societal, of his early life. This leads to an argument about his writings that highlights his overriding concern with universalising sociology by overcoming its narrowness so that it may contribute to the welfare of humanity. It is further argued that he is relevant to us at present in the face of the challenges of environmental degradation, the persisting pandemic, war, and our tendency to face these challenges not with truth but with falsehoods.

A. K. Saran’s Sociology: Towards a Critique of Modernist Mode in Social Sciences

In the academic world of Indian Sociology, the deeply philosophical orientation of A. K. Saran’s approach, together with the masterly approaches developed by Radha Kamal Mukerjee and D. P. Mukerjee, each in his own distinct way came to be known as the trait of the Lucknow School, which made the great contribution of making traditional values not as the object of the study but as the frame of reference for sociological study and analysis. Saran, in this academic endeavour, appears to be influenced by the great philosophers like Rene Guenon, A. K. Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon, Micro Pallis and Titus Burckhardt. These philosophers, though concerned with the crises of modern civilisation, were primarily remained engaged in the enunciation and interpretation of the traditional doctrines at the abstract doctrinal level. But Saran as a professional sociologist remained busy throughout his life in expounding and examining theories and ideologies, problems and problematic, conflicts and contradictions and norms, values and institutions of modern societies and welfarism. Saran took on the negative side of the task, that is, the critique of modernity as his vocation, whose unique logic-dialectical-philosophical method became his trademark. Through this article, I take an opportunity to make today’s academic world familiar with some of the significant contributions of Saran.

Federalism, Representation, and Direct Democracy in 1920s India

This article reconstructs an overlooked tradition of direct democracy within early twentieth-century Indian political thought. It focuses on four political thinkers—Radhakumud Mookerji (1884–1964), Brajendranath Seal (1864–1938), Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889–1968), and Beni Prasad (1900–1945)—all of whom were central figures in a genre of federalist historiography of premodern Indian politics which emerged in the 1910s. The article interprets these thinkers as critics of the Indian nationalist movement's embrace of electoral government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through a contextual reading of their major written works in the late 1910s and the 1920s, the article traces the rise of a distinct theory of federalist constitutionalism, modelled on premodern state structures and oriented towards the legislative empowerment of local citizens’ assemblies.

Universalism and Ecology: An Anthropological Bridge between Radhakamal Mukerjee’s Key Concepts

The wider universe of discourse for this lecture is the interface between social sciences and the humanities. This was the dominant intellectual thrust of the so-called Lucknow School of sociology in the 1960s to which Radhakamal Mukerjee (RKM) belonged. Initially, by juxtaposing RKM’s universalism to the holistic evolutionary theory, I bring together the earlier and later versions of scientific universalism, and RKM’s universalistic stance leaning to the humanities. I next contrast the somewhat narrow paradigm of ecology in RKM, with trans-nationalist ecosystems postulated in the contemporary times. Further, the reverberations of RKM’s humanistic universalism are traced in the ‘text and context’ as well as in the polyglot anthropology movements in the new anthropology. Finally, taking a cue from RKM, I note the contribution of incipient and full-blown anthropo-sociological universalism to the debate about the indigenisation of social sciences.

Eroded Life-worlds and Emergent Assemblages: Rethinking the Sociologies/Social Anthropologies of the ‘Contemporary’

At the turn of the 20th century, Radhakamal Mukerjee wrote about a range of issues that reflected the trends of his times. A century later, new definitions and understanding of our ‘contemporary’ times suggest the need for new theoretical and methodological approaches which are to chart sociology and anthropology’s course. Interrogating these propositions is to assert the coeval presence of both ‘emergent assemblages’ and a range of emergent and ‘eroded life-worlds’. Attention to these life-worlds and their trajectories will broaden the anthropological definition of the ‘contemporary’ and enable anthropology to engage with a plurality of approaches and methods.

Manish Thakur, The Quest for Indian Sociology: Radhakamal Mukerjee and Our Times

Manish Thakur, <i>The Quest for Indian Sociology: Radhakamal Mukerjee and Our Times</i>

The Politics of Indigenous Social Science: Invoking a Lucknow Sociologist

A deep sense of ambivalence towards the Western social scientific categories has been a characteristic feature of the growth and development of social sciences in postcolonial societies. Indian sociologists, in particular, have frequently turned their critical gaze on the ethnocentrism of the Western social sciences. In fact, there have been extreme responses on the issue—from the impossibility of an Indian sociology to the calls for an Indian ethno-sociology. At the core of such responses is the contestation over one's approach and orientation to Western modernity. Against this backdrop, the present paper selectively invokes Radhakamal Mukerjee's axial concerns and analytical thematics with a view to demonstrate the general contour of a long-raging debate on the indigeneity question in Indian sociology.

Radhakamal Mukerjee on Social Ecology: Filling Up Some Blanks

Radhakamal Mukerjee on Social Ecology: Filling Up Some Blanks

Sociological traditions

Students of sociology are likely to come across synoptic accounts of the ‘Lucknow School’ in courses relating to the growth and development of sociology in India. Most, if not all, may find names such as Radhakamal Mukerjee, D.P. Mukerji and D.N. Majumdar, the ‘three Ms’ as T.N. Madan (2013: 3) calls them in his recently edited volume entitled Sociology at the University of Lucknow: The First Half Century (1921–1975),1 somehow familiar. This familiarity, though, does not presuppose any serious understanding on their part of the substantive works of the Lucknow sociologists. Preliminary ideas about Radhakamal Mukerjee’s work in the field of social ecology, or D.P. Mukerji’s stress on the study of tradition, or D.N. Majumdar’s ethnographic work among tribes, or A.K. Saran’s repartee to Louis Dumont, is all that one can generally expect. Given the general amnesia surrounding the works of the pioneers at Lucknow, Madan’s volume is a noteworthy contribution to the recent attempts at retrieving

POLITY, RELIGION AND SECULARISM IN INDIA: A STUDY OF INTERRELATIONSHIPS

POLITY, RELIGION AND SECULARISM IN INDIA: A STUDY OF INTERRELATIONSHIPS

The Dynamics of Morals. By Radhakamal Mukerjee. London: Macmillan, n.d. [1950]. Pp. xxvii+530.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Dynamics of Morals. By Radhakamal Mukerjee. London: Macmillan, n.d. [1950]. Pp. xxvii+530.Barbara CelarentBarbara CelarentUniversity of Atlantis*Another review from 2052 to share with AJS readers.—Ed. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 118, Number 6May 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/671113 Views: 47Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref © 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:A. R. Vasavi Eroded Life-worlds and Emergent Assemblages: Rethinking the Sociologies/Social Anthropologies of the ‘Contemporary’, Sociological Bulletin 66, no.33 (Sep 2017): 271–285.https://doi.org/10.1177/0038022917726937Matthew W. Hughey Back to the Future, Humanity & Society 41, no.22 (Feb 2017): 269–276.https://doi.org/10.1177/0160597617694441Ashwani Saith Transforming peasantries in India and China: comparative investigations of institutional dimensions, The Indian Journal of Labour Economics 59, no.11 (Dec 2016): 85–124.https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-016-0051-2Eric Sheppard, Vinay Gidwani, Michael Goldman, Helga Leitner, Ananya Roy, Anant Maringanti Introduction: Urban revolutions in the age of global urbanism, Urban Studies 52, no.1111 (Aug 2015): 1947–1961.https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098015590050

Anticolonial Climates: Physiology, Ecology, and Global Population, 1920s–1950s

Historiography on tropical medicine and determinist ideas about climate and racial difference rightly focuses on links with nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial rule. Occasionally and counterintuitively, however, these ideas have been redeployed as anticolonial argument. This article looks at one such instance; the racial physiology of Indian economist, ecologist, and anticolonial nationalist Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889-1968). It argues that the explanatory context was mid-twentieth-century discussion of global population growth, which raised questions of density and belonging to land. Ecology offered a new language and scientific system within which people and place were conceptually integrated, in this instance to anticolonial ends.

ON GANDHI'S CRITIQUE OF THE STATE: SOURCES, CONTEXTS, CONJUNCTURES

Gandhi's critique of the modern state was central to his political thinking. It served as a pivotal hinge between Gandhi's anticolonialism and his theory of politics and was given striking institutional form in his vision of decentralized peasant democracy. This essay explores the origins and implications of Gandhian antistatism by situating it within a genealogy of early twentieth-century political pluralism, specifically British and Indian pluralist criticism of state sovereignty and centralization. This essay traces that critique from the imperial sociology of Henry Sumner Maine, through the political theory of Harold Laski and G. D. H. Cole, to Radhakamal Mukerjee's reworking of these strands into a normative–universal model of Eastern pluralism. The essay concludes with a consideration of Gandhi's ideal of a stateless, nonviolent polity as a culmination and overturning of the pluralist tradition and as integral to his distinctive understanding of political freedom, rule, and action.

Radhakamal Mukerjee and the Quest for an Indian Sociology

Radhakamal Mukerjee and the Quest for an Indian Sociology

Radhakamal Mukerjee and His Contemporaries: Founding Fathers of Sociology in India

Radhakamal Mukerjee and His Contemporaries: Founding Fathers of Sociology in India

Brij Mohan: the evolution of a social scientist

The mentor–protege cycle is a perpetual trajectory of generational evolution. My three great mentors – Radha Kamal Mukerjee, Nathan C. Cohen and Eveline M. Burns – represented a tradition of schola...

Institutional Economics of Radhakamal Mukerjee

Institutional Economics of Radhakamal Mukerjee