Mithi Mukherjee
Biographic Data
| ID | 3935245 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mithi Mukherjee |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mithi |
| FAMILY NAME | Mukherjee |
| SIGNATURE | MUKHERJEE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Colorado Boulder |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1796-1628 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Imperial exception
D avid H ardiman . The Nonviolent Struggle for Indian Freedom, 1905–19
The escalation in violence in popular movements worldwide, whether in opposition to oppressive state systems or in their support, has inspired much scholarly interest in nonviolent methods of resistance lately. As leader of the largest nonviolent anti-colonial mass movement for national independence in the twentieth century, Mahatma Gandhi’s life and philosophy offer a particularly rich archive to scholars seeking to understand both the nature of…
The “Right to Wage War” against Empire
This Article treats the Indian National Army Trial of 1945 as a key moment in the elaboration of an anticolonial critique of international law in India. The trial was actually a court-martial of three Indian officers by the British colonial government on charges of high treason for defecting from the British Indian Army, joining up with Indian National Army forces in Singapore, and waging war in alliance with Imperial Japan against the British. I…
Sedition, Law, and the British Empire in India
This article is a historical inquiry into the sedition trial in 1908 of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, one of the most important anticolonial leaders in twentieth-century India. It argues that Tilak, in the grand spectacle of this political trial, rejected the British discourse of imperial justice that had served as the ground of the British Empire until then, and claimed a new discourse of legislative freedom for the people of India. The trial thus marked…
G andhi, M ohandas K aramchand (1869–1948)
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, leader of the Indian independence movement against British colonial rule, was given the title “Mahatma” (“Great Soul”) by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore for introducing the world to the power of nonviolent political resistance. The Gandhian movement was the first and most important mass movement for freedom in the twentieth century that was based entirely on the discourse and practice of nonviolent resistance. Wha…
The British Empire in India
In her response to Julian Go’s book Patterns of Empire, Mukherjee contends that the harder Go seeks to critique American exceptionalism, the more he has to insist on the liberal nature of the British Empire in India. By “liberal British rule,” Mukherjee writes, Go refers to certain imperial policies that seemed to offer the subject populations more representation, and therefore more participation in governance. He is not concerned with liberalism…
Ananya Vajpeyi. Righteous Republic
Righteous Republic is centrally concerned with exploring the construction of the self in the works of five important thinkers of modern India—Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Bhimrao Ambedkar. The category “swaraj,” commonly translated as self-rule, came to be at the very heart of political discourse in modern India as the anticolonial movement against British rule developed over the nineteenth and…
India in the shadows of empire
A World of Illusion’
Transcending Identity
IN THE PAST TWO DECADES, subaltern historians and postcolonial scholars have brought to our attention the need to question the generally assumed universality of Western categories in framing the histories of the rest of the world.1 The exclusive deployment of Western concepts to explain historical development in India and other non-Western countries, they say, not only has marginalized indigenous systems of knowledge and practices, but has also r…
India in the Shadows of Empire
This book explains the postcolonial Indian polity by presenting an alternative historical narrative of the British Empire in India and India's struggle for independence. It pursues this narrative along two major trajectories. On the one hand, it focuses on the role of imperial judicial institutions and practices in the making of both the British Empire and the anti-colonial movement under the Congress, with the lawyer as political leader. On the …
The Colonial and the Imperial1
This chapter explores the dramatic clash of the competing visions of empire in late 18th-century England through a discussion of the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, the former Governor-General of India for the British East India Company, who was tried for ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’ against the people of India in 1788. It shows how a discourse of imperial justice, critical of colonial power, came to be constructed in the speeches of the…
A History of the Present
In his comments Kunal Parker has framed my article within what he calls the “ontology of colonialism as difference.” He argues that my article “fits squarely” within a “self-consciously postcolonial scholarship” that in recent decades has been centrally concerned with “the rendering of colonialism as difference.” My research in this article, however, was neither inspired nor guided by the historiography of difference. Indeed Parker's framing of m…
Justice, War, and the Imperium
The impeachment trial of Warren Hastings has long been considered one of the key political trials in the history of the British empire. It was the first major public discursive event of its kind in England, and arguably in Europe as a whole, in which the colonial ambitions and practices of European powers in the east stood exposed to a close and comprehensive critique. In addition, the legal and moral legitimacy of colonialism itself was thrown i…
British Rule in Bengal
Transcending Identity
IN THE PAST TWO DECADES, subaltern historians and postcolonial scholars have brought to our attention the need to question the generally assumed universality of Western categories in framing the histories of the rest of the world.1 The exclusive deployment of Western concepts to explain historical development in India and other non-Western countries, they say, not only has marginalized indigenous systems of knowledge and practices, but has also r…
Justice, War, and the Imperium
The impeachment trial of Warren Hastings has long been considered one of the key political trials in the history of the British empire. It was the first major public discursive event of its kind in England, and arguably in Europe as a whole, in which the colonial ambitions and practices of European powers in the east stood exposed to a close and comprehensive critique. In addition, the legal and moral legitimacy of colonialism itself was thrown i…
Sedition, Law, and the British Empire in India
This article is a historical inquiry into the sedition trial in 1908 of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, one of the most important anticolonial leaders in twentieth-century India. It argues that Tilak, in the grand spectacle of this political trial, rejected the British discourse of imperial justice that had served as the ground of the British Empire until then, and claimed a new discourse of legislative freedom for the people of India. The trial thus marked…
British Rule in Bengal
A History of the Present
In his comments Kunal Parker has framed my article within what he calls the “ontology of colonialism as difference.” He argues that my article “fits squarely” within a “self-consciously postcolonial scholarship” that in recent decades has been centrally concerned with “the rendering of colonialism as difference.” My research in this article, however, was neither inspired nor guided by the historiography of difference. Indeed Parker's framing of m…
Justice, War, and the Imperium
The impeachment trial of Warren Hastings has long been considered one of the key political trials in the history of the British empire. It was the first major public discursive event of its kind in England, and arguably in Europe as a whole, in which the colonial ambitions and practices of European powers in the east stood exposed to a close and comprehensive critique. In addition, the legal and moral legitimacy of colonialism itself was thrown i…
India in the Shadows of Empire
This book explains the postcolonial Indian polity by presenting an alternative historical narrative of the British Empire in India and India's struggle for independence. It pursues this narrative along two major trajectories. On the one hand, it focuses on the role of imperial judicial institutions and practices in the making of both the British Empire and the anti-colonial movement under the Congress, with the lawyer as political leader. On the …
The Colonial and the Imperial1
This chapter explores the dramatic clash of the competing visions of empire in late 18th-century England through a discussion of the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, the former Governor-General of India for the British East India Company, who was tried for ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’ against the people of India in 1788. It shows how a discourse of imperial justice, critical of colonial power, came to be constructed in the speeches of the…
India in the shadows of empire
A World of Illusion’
Transcending Identity
IN THE PAST TWO DECADES, subaltern historians and postcolonial scholars have brought to our attention the need to question the generally assumed universality of Western categories in framing the histories of the rest of the world.1 The exclusive deployment of Western concepts to explain historical development in India and other non-Western countries, they say, not only has marginalized indigenous systems of knowledge and practices, but has also r…
The British Empire in India
In her response to Julian Go’s book Patterns of Empire, Mukherjee contends that the harder Go seeks to critique American exceptionalism, the more he has to insist on the liberal nature of the British Empire in India. By “liberal British rule,” Mukherjee writes, Go refers to certain imperial policies that seemed to offer the subject populations more representation, and therefore more participation in governance. He is not concerned with liberalism…
Ananya Vajpeyi. Righteous Republic
Righteous Republic is centrally concerned with exploring the construction of the self in the works of five important thinkers of modern India—Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Bhimrao Ambedkar. The category “swaraj,” commonly translated as self-rule, came to be at the very heart of political discourse in modern India as the anticolonial movement against British rule developed over the nineteenth and…
G andhi, M ohandas K aramchand (1869–1948)
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, leader of the Indian independence movement against British colonial rule, was given the title “Mahatma” (“Great Soul”) by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore for introducing the world to the power of nonviolent political resistance. The Gandhian movement was the first and most important mass movement for freedom in the twentieth century that was based entirely on the discourse and practice of nonviolent resistance. Wha…
Sedition, Law, and the British Empire in India
This article is a historical inquiry into the sedition trial in 1908 of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, one of the most important anticolonial leaders in twentieth-century India. It argues that Tilak, in the grand spectacle of this political trial, rejected the British discourse of imperial justice that had served as the ground of the British Empire until then, and claimed a new discourse of legislative freedom for the people of India. The trial thus marked…
The “Right to Wage War” against Empire
This Article treats the Indian National Army Trial of 1945 as a key moment in the elaboration of an anticolonial critique of international law in India. The trial was actually a court-martial of three Indian officers by the British colonial government on charges of high treason for defecting from the British Indian Army, joining up with Indian National Army forces in Singapore, and waging war in alliance with Imperial Japan against the British. I…
D avid H ardiman . The Nonviolent Struggle for Indian Freedom, 1905–19
The escalation in violence in popular movements worldwide, whether in opposition to oppressive state systems or in their support, has inspired much scholarly interest in nonviolent methods of resistance lately. As leader of the largest nonviolent anti-colonial mass movement for national independence in the twentieth century, Mahatma Gandhi’s life and philosophy offer a particularly rich archive to scholars seeking to understand both the nature of…
Imperial exception
Law (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Colonialism (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · History (8 works) · Empire (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · History (5 works)