Planetary Urbanization, Postcolonial Challenges, and Ecological Thought: The Early Anticolonial Perspective of Radhakamal Mukerjee

Joshua Silver, University of Chicago

This paper proposes a re-examination of an early anticolonial and environmental sociologist, Radhakamal Mukerjee, as a way of 1) provincializing sociology and 2) resolving tensions between ecological and postcolonial theorists of urbanization. That a profound disconnect between nature and the social widened in sociology over the course of the 20th century has been noted by recent thinkers interested in global environmental crisis. Nevertheless, theories of social ecology were available to sociologists since the early 20th century, notably in the work of Radhakamal Mukerjee. Further, while planetary urbanization theorists have emphasized the interconnected nature of globalized resource extraction, some, but not all, postcolonial scholars resist potentially totalizing implications of a theory that seemingly obscure real differences in the experience of environmentally destructive global capitalism. Sociologist Radhakamal Mukerjee, an anticolonial member of the Indian National Congress who was acutely attuned to global difference in a colonized world, nevertheless considered the ecological interconnections between man and nature to be a central problematic in social theorizing. Many of the planetary urbanization theorists’ theses of the inadequacy of an urban/rural divide were anticipated by Mukerjee’s Regional Sociology and Social Ecology. In these and other works, Mukerjee engaged in a uniquely promiscuous form of scholarship that drew eclectically, yet rigorously, on both Anglo-American mainstream and indigenous sources of knowledge to address the ecological challenges of his time. Further, writing from Lucknow, India to prominent Anglo-American publishing outlets in the 1930s, Mukerjee was already an active, if underrecognized, critic of metropolitan thought. If we take planetary environmental crisis to be one of the core social challenges of the 21st century, a reconsideration of Mukerjee’s claims, often involving thinking in totalities of interconnectedness between humanity and nature, may help us re-think our own theoretical dilemmas.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 120. Presidential Session: Empire, Energy, and Environment