This emergence of the new nationalities will imply the entrance into the world of a self-conscious Asia, which is bound to ask: “if self-determination is the policy of the future, how shall we apply the doctrine for ourselves?”Footnote 1
Introduction
The post-World War I moment was a critical turning point in the advent of self-determination as a legal and political principle underlying the global order. The formal dissolution of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires, the Bolsheviks’ consolidation of power amidst the chaos of the Russian Civil War, the United States’ rise to political and economic prominence in international politics, the emergence of Japan as a colonial state in East Asia, and the establishment of the League of Nations in Geneva all signaled the end of one era and the painful start of another—the transition from a world of monarchies and multi-national empires to one of nationalism, state socialism, and liberal experiments in world governance. And self-determination—very broadly the idea that a people should be able to collectively set the terms of their political life—provided an ideological pivot for this enormous transformation. As Lauri Mälksoo argues, for Lenin and the Bolsheviks, self-determination became a way to signal Soviet support for nationalism in Central Asia, the Balkans, and the Caucasus.Footnote 2 Thomas J. Knock shows that, for Woodrow Wilson, Robert Lansing, and other American diplomats in 1918–19, self-determination provided a way to integrate democracy-promotion into a new foreign policy of liberal internationalism.Footnote 3 Within international politics more generally, self-determination became simultaneously the rallying cry of new nationalist movements, and, somewhat paradoxically, a way of ensuring the continuity of European empires, through colonial powers’ declarations about “preparing” non-Western peoples for eventual self-government, as Antony Anghie argues.Footnote 4 Thus, in the eyes of W. E. B. Du Bois, writing in 1915, a key lesson to take away from the devastation of the war was the importance of “the principle of home rule” and the illegitimate “despotism” of “the ruling of one people for another people’s whim or gain.”Footnote 5 While self-determination became recognized as a formal right by the United Nations only in 1960, the immediate aftermath of WWI represented the concept’s first transnational “wave,” the moment which gave it truly global resonance.
This article attempts to broaden current understandings of the first global wave of national self-determination by reconstructing an anti-statist theorization of the principle from the work of the Indian political thinker Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889–1968). Writing in the early 1920s, Mukerjee interpreted self-determination as a means to allow for the political, economic, and social autonomy of non-state associational groups in South Asia. His argument was premised upon a view of state sovereignty as the product of distinctively Western European conditions. Sovereignty in South Asia, in contrast, was seen as disaggregated and non-statist in form. I show how Mukerjee’s comparative theory of the state led him to argue against post-WWI conceptualizations of national self-determination as the global diffusion of state structures and parliamentary representation. He instead proposed a “multilinear” view of self-determination which delinked the principle from the nation-state and centralized institutions of electoral representation.
By recovering Mukerjee’s conceptualization of national self-determination, this article makes two principal contributions to the history of twentieth-century political thought. First, I highlight the important role of evolutionary science in the formation of Mukerjee’s theory of self-determination. Locating Mukerjee within the context of Indian nationalism of the 1910s and 1920s, I examine how his views on sovereignty, statehood, and self-determination emerged through extensive engagement with strands of evolutionary theory popular in India in the early twentieth century. The scientific, evolutionary dimensions of Mukerjee’s state theory have been entirely neglected within existing studies of Indian political thought. Rather, Mukerjee’s critique of the state has been viewed by Manu Goswami as a product of the Indian uptake of German economic sociology,Footnote 6 and by Nazmul SultanFootnote 7 and Karuna MantenaFootnote 8 as part of an Indian tradition of political pluralism, comparable to the arguments of thinkers such as F. W. Maitland, John Neville Figgis, and, especially, Otto von Gierke. While C. A. Bayly has noted Mukerjee’s use of Darwinian tropes in his critique of global racial hierarchiesFootnote 9 and Alison Bashford has observed how Mukerjee deployed evolutionary arguments about environmental determinism and racial difference to support the transnational migration of Asian populations,Footnote 10 neither scholar has examined connections between Mukerjee’s turn to evolutionary theory and his ideas about political sovereignty. As I show, situating Mukerjee within the broader context of early twentieth-century South Asian political thought reveals the overlooked intersection of evolutionary science and anti-statism in his work.
In drawing out the connection between these two discourses of politics in Mukerjee’s writings, the article also argues for the existence of scientific anti-statism as a distinctive chapter in the global formation of anti-colonial theories of self-determination after WWI. Recognizing this unsettles dominant understandings of a key principle of modern international politics. Historians of twentieth-century political thought have tended to associate anti-colonial self-determination during the post-WWI period with representative government and statehood. In conceptual histories of self-determination, this period is taken to be the moment when earlier notions of a people’s collective right to self-governance became formally linked to the political form of the state, in the writings of Lenin and Wilson and through the various institutions of the League of Nations. For Jörg Fisch, the language of self-determination was “one of the most potentially explosive innovations of the First World War,”Footnote 11 since it made possible “the demand for an independent, sovereign state for every nationality.”Footnote 12 Similarly, for Eric Weitz, a collectivist understanding of self-determination which linked national communities and territorial statehood “became a doxa, an unreflected, hegemonic idea” at the end of WWI.Footnote 13 In Jens Bartelson’s account, to claim self-determination after WWI meant to claim a nation-state of one’s own, thereby entering into a new kind of multilateral international society.Footnote 14 And as Elizabeth Rodríguez-Santiago shows, the rise of the nation-state through self-determination after the war is similarly a common thesis within histories of international law.Footnote 15
Within the accepted historiography of self-determination, then, the end of WWI simultaneously marks the idea’s political widening—as it came to be taken up by peoples beyond Western Europe and the Americas—and its conceptual narrowing—as it came to entail a specific kind of political founding: the creation of states. Such a link has led Daniele Archibugi to insist that the turn to self-determination during this period contributed to state sovereignty becoming established as a dangerous “dogma” of international politics, one that superseded commitments to cosmopolitanism.Footnote 16 Revisiting Mukerjee’s political thought highlights the limits of this line of interpretation, which tends to associate interwar anti-colonial claims of national self-determination with the diffusion of state-based political representation. Instead, I argue, Mukerjee’s writings illustrate how anti-colonial theorists of self-determination in the post-WWI period deployed scientific discourse to advocate for non-state forms of sovereignty.
My reconstruction of Mukerjee’s thought is organized into four parts. I first provide an overview of Indian discourse on self-determination at the end of WWI. The broader landscape of early interwar Indian nationalism was the crucial political and intellectual background against which Mukerjee articulated his ideas of national self-determination—and in direct opposition to which he constructed his own anti-statist project. In the second section, I trace Mukerjee’s interaction with a group of Darwinian thinkers based in India in the early 1910s. Through engaging with these thinkers, I show, Mukerjee came to view political practices as a function of geography and climate. In the third section, I examine how adopting an evolutionary perspective on politics led him to develop a comparative, global analysis of state formation and to critique the nationalist approach to self-determination. The article’s concluding section tracks reconfigurations in Mukerjee’s theories of evolutionary politics, statehood, and nationalism through the 1940s and 1950s.
Indian Nationalism After WWI
In order to understand the novelty of Mukerjee’s intervention into South Asian political thought, it is necessary to grasp the contours of Indian discussions of self-determination following the armistice of November 11, 1918. The Indian National Congress (INC), the leading organization of the anti-colonial movement in British India, initially gathered to deliberate on the post-war peace settlement and on India’s place within an emerging international order in December 1918. Congress delegates immediately recognized that they had a new addressee and a new intellectual discourse with which to contend, from outside of the British Empire: American president Woodrow Wilson, and his distinctive version of liberal internationalism. In his Fourteen Points speech of January 1918, Wilson had famously called for an international system based on principles of national autonomy, self-determination, and popular consent (“the consent of the governed”). As the Paris Peace Conference progressed, Wilson played a key role in institutionalizing these principles into the League of Nations Covenant and eventually its Mandates Commission. In the final weeks of 1918, the leadership of the INC located in Wilson’s promises a framework to demand a right of self-government for India, as an imperial dominion and a national community.
In his opening address to the INC session of December 1918, Hakim Mohammed Ajmal Khan drew the audience’s attention to the emergence of “the right of self-determination” as a new political ideal.Footnote 17 Peace negotiations in Paris were premised on being able to secure this new right for all, including for “the smallest nationality in Europe.”Footnote 18 It followed that India, which had “so ungrudgingly and cheerfully made sacrifices” for the Allied victory, needed to be extended “the right to determine her own form of Government.”Footnote 19 Khan rooted his justification for political rights within the military service of the Indian Army. He then presented Indian self-determination as a matter of equal treatment: if European nationalities formerly under Tsarist, Habsburg, and Ottoman control were now being assured self-rule, then it was unjust for the United States, the British Empire, and the still-nascent, proposed League of Nations to withhold the new right from the Indian nation. Khan took Wilson’s promise of a new international society structured around self-governing national communities quite literally. The result was a liberal, rights-based argument for national sovereignty, replete with references to the “liberty” and “freedom” of individual nations. “When President Wilson announced to the world his memorable principles of Peace,” Khan stated, “the principle of Self-Determination on which he laid special emphasis” emboldened nationalist “enthusiasm” in British India.Footnote 20
Khan was merely the first Congress delegate to frame the prospect of national self-government in Wilsonian terms. Madan Mohan Malaviya, elected president of the INC that very day, recited large sections of Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech verbatim, first translating each point into Hindi-Urdu and then repeating them in the original English. Eager to describe the Fourteen Points as embodying “the ideals that America has fought for,” Malaviya singled out Wilson’s hope of securing “political independence and territorial integrity for great and small states alike.”Footnote 21 To act upon the Fourteen Points meant to recognize India as a national community able to manage its own internal affairs and send its own elected representatives to the Paris Peace Conference. Malaviya declared to his audience that if, following Wilson and ongoing debates around the League of Nations Covenant, “the adjustment of colonial claims” was to be done with attention to “the sovereignty and interests of the population” being ruled, then “principles of autonomy and self-determination” needed to be “applied to India,” on the model of the “Balkan states” and the “independent Polish States which are to be created.”Footnote 22
The professions of Wilsonian liberalism which opened the Congress’s 1918 session bracketed Wilson’s deeply racialized understanding of the world order. Khan and Malaviya both worked with the assumption that the scheme of rights outlined in the Fourteen Points would not be applied any differently to European and non-European populations and that India would be treated by the League of Nations in much the same way as the former Habsburg territories or Poland—an assumption that Wilson himself never shared.Footnote 23 The formulation of a somewhat vague “right” to national self-government raised the further question of what self-determination would entail on the subcontinent. Malaviya proposed two things. First, self-government did not imply a formal break with empire. Through clear statements of imperial fealty—declaring that “we still desire to remain subjects of the British Crown”—Malaviya reconciled a new Wilsonian recognition of colonial nationalist claims with established British sovereignty.Footnote 24 He continued, however, and insisted that a “second” and equally important “aspect of self-determination” was “complete responsible government on the lines of the Dominions.”Footnote 25 Malaviya meant the introduction into India of representative government and legislative autonomy on the model of the four British settler colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa.
The details of Malaviya’s attempt to combine nationalism, imperial subjecthood, and greater representative government were elucidated on the final day of the 1918 session by Annie Besant, the great Anglo-Irish proponent of Indian anti-colonialism. Invoking again “the pronouncement of President Wilson,” Besant argued for international recognition of India as a subject but “Progressive” nation entitled to claim the new right of self-determination.Footnote 26 She built on Malaviya’s remarks and characterized Indian self-determination as a project for the “reconstruction” of Britain’s “Imperial polity.”Footnote 27 “Reconstruction” meant the recognition of British sovereignty while allowing for elected government:
We do not ask for the abolition of the sovereignty of the Crown. We do not ask for the throne of the King-Emperor. But we say in our internal affairs, in the business of our own nation, in the transactions of our own business, public and private, we shall make our own laws, choose those who shall carry it out, elect our own men, get rid of those men if they fail us after we have elected them. The freedom that every colony in the self-governing dominions enjoys, that freedom we claim for the Indian nation.Footnote 28
The mechanism of direct election, in Besant’s description, was a means to constitute individual provincial legislatures with clearly demarcated jurisdictions, to be coordinated by a single parliamentary body—“the supreme legislative assembly”—also directly elected. In their respective spheres, these two tiers of elected government were to be independent of executive interference.Footnote 29 They both also worked under the larger aegis of the British parliament based in Westminster, which, in turn, contained elected Indian representatives, based on “a right of representation in the central authority of the empire.”Footnote 30 While Besant repeatedly cited parliamentarism in the settler colonies as the template for her three-layered structure of electoral representation, she was apprehensive about the introduction of full adult suffrage into India—as had already happened, for instance, in New Zealand in 1893 and in Australia in 1902. She made it clear that, within the Congress plan, “you will not have at first a franchise including every Indian.”Footnote 31 Instead, Besant maintained, like much of the Congress leadership, that the Indian electorate should continue to be restricted based on wealth and education and should be gradually, carefully extended over time (though she specified neither the criteria nor the timeline for extension). Representation through a slowly widening suffrage would allow for the articulation of “the voice of the nation” through legislatures—and this, for Besant, was the responsibility of Wilson’s League of Nations and the British Empire to bring about, “from the stand-point of self-determination.”Footnote 32
For the Indian National Congress, imperial parliamentarism thus provided the institutional means to realize the Wilsonian promise of self-determination. Elected legislatures allowed for the collective will of a subject population—albeit one circumscribed by considerations of political capacity—to become the foundation of colonial governance. Securing elected representation within a component state of the British Empire can be identified as the core element of Indian nationalist thinking on self-determination in the wake of the war. A formal letter submitted to Edward Grey, President of the London-based League of Nations Union, on behalf of the INC in early 1920 associated “the right of self-determination” with the grant of full representative government to India “as a free unit of the British Commonwealth.”Footnote 33 Reflecting on the post-war moment four years later, the liberal statesman V. S. Srinivasa Sastri held that the prospect of more popular “imperial representation” was the main reason behind enthusiasm for “Dr. Wilson” and the League of Nations in Congress circles.Footnote 34
In early 1919, the INC’s imperial parliamentarism thesis was sketched out in considerable depth in the pamphlet Self-Determination for India, authored by the veteran nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai. The opening sections praised Wilson and ongoing deliberations around the League of Nations at the Paris Peace Conference. The League was lauded as a new kind of global political structure, oriented toward “fostering the development of different nationalities on the principle of Self-Determination.”Footnote 35 Rai identified self-determination as the key to post-war peace. Institutionalizing rights to “nationalism”—the aspiration of a people to live under a shared state—and to “democracy”—which he glossed as “popular government”—would safeguard against the threat of further imperial conquest of Asia by European powers, including Britain, France, and the Netherlands, but also Tsarist Russia and the Kaiser’s Germany. The denial of “popular government” to Asian peoples, Rai argued, enabled “militarism, despotism, and wars of conquest” amongst competing empires.Footnote 36 Using the example of Japan to refute arguments about Asian unfitness for modern self-government, Rai demanded an immediate extension of Wilson’s Fourteen Points to India. In application, Wilsonian self-determination meant “emancipating India from pupilage and democratizing the government of India,” but did not mean an end to empire itself.Footnote 37 Rai repeated the Malaviya-Besant line of argumentation that his goal was not to seek “dismemberment or severance” of British imperial sovereignty, but rather to secure “equality of status” for British India “with the Overseas Dominions.”Footnote 38
The demand necessitated, as Rai noted, an entirely new constitutional arrangement to replace the Government of India Act of 1915. The mechanics of such a constitution, intended for a semi-independent Dominion State of the British Empire to be called the “United States of India,” were detailed in the concluding section of the pamphlet. Rai first advocated the territorial division of the Indian subcontinent into provinces “on the basis of nationality,” though without ever clarifying whether nationality would be defined by language, religion, or race.Footnote 39 Provincial government within these new territories was to be in the hands of directly elected legislative assemblies; Rai was as adamant as Besant had been in December 1918 that “the form of Government” in a reformed India “should be democratic.”Footnote 40 Elected provincial assemblies were to be coordinated by an elected executive and an elected central legislature. The resulting state was then to have equal standing as a voting member of a transnational British commonwealth. Rai modeled his proposal for a republican “United States of India” on experiments in colonial self-government in other parts of the British Empire and presented the “federal principle” as a way to reconcile empire with national autonomy and electoral popular government.Footnote 41
In their recurrent references to Wilson’s Fourteen Points, Indian nationalists were key participants in what Erez Manela has described as the global “Wilsonian moment” in international politics between 1918 and 1920.Footnote 42 At the same time, the precise constitutional demands made by the INC after 1918—electoral democracy within an imperial federation, with legislative self-government and autonomy for a parliamentary state of British India—were continuous with earlier demands made within Indian nationalist politics through the first decade of the twentieth century. As early as 1906, Dadabhai Naoroji, one of the founding members of the INC, had already posited imperial parliamentarism on the model of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as the primary political goal of the Indian national movement.Footnote 43 The emergent post-WWI language of self-determination did not, then, suddenly provide a new array of political possibilities for Indian nationalism. Rather, self-determination became a new form of claim-making, a way to frame and present an established consensus around the value of electoral parliamentarism.
There were also prominent dissenting voices present within the Indian political landscape between 1918 and 1924, voices much more skeptical than Malaviya, Besant, or Rai of associating self-determination with electoral politics. The revolutionary leader Aurobindo Ghose asserted in 1921 that a “mechanical” understanding of self-determination as political or constitutional reform was fundamentally flawed. Instead, Aurobindo argued, self-determination needed to be approached in “subjective” terms as an extra-institutional principle of moral life, enabling the self-directed growth of the personality (swabhava) of individual persons.Footnote 44 M. K. Gandhi, meanwhile, was apprehensive about whether self-determination even provided a trustworthy language for anti-colonial nationalists at all, given the term’s use by imperial powers to advance their strategic interests. Criticizing the peace settlement’s application to the erstwhile Ottoman Empire in July 1920, Gandhi wrote that the League of Nations plan was providing a pretext for “secret treaties, duplicity, and hypocritical subterfuges” across the Middle East on the part of British military and economic actors.Footnote 45 Gandhi’s close involvement with the pan-Islamic Khilafat Movement between 1919 and 1924 indicated how opposition to empire, in his estimation, entailed transnational civil disobedience (satyagraha), a much more capacious, far-reaching project than merely securing self-government through representative institutions. Finally, one notable Indian thinker of the time, Manabendranath (M. N.) Roy, spurned Wilson’s premise of national self-determination based on liberal internationalism in favor of the nascent Leninist paradigm of vanguardist party politics.Footnote 46 Roy’s Bolshevist approach culminated in his establishment of the Communist Party of India (CPI) in exile in Tashkent in 1920, as an organization committed to bringing about revolutionary anti-imperial struggle and Soviet-style dictatorial rule on the subcontinent.
Indian nationalists therefore adopted the language of national self-determination in the late 1910s and early 1920s to alternatively demand imperial electoral representation, to push for moral reform, and to propose the need for party dictatorship. The Wilsonian framework in particular gave leaders of the INC a way to rearticulate the organization’s commitments to parliamentary imperial federation. National self-determination was equated with the achievement of popular legislative sovereignty, or the authority to collectively make and enact law. Such sovereignty was to be secured by making India into a Dominion State of an imperial federation and by creating a layered system of electoral government within the jurisdiction of such a self-governing imperial state. Many Indian nationalists fully embraced the prospect of diffusing a set of institutional practices across the empire—statehood, parliamentarism, and electoral politics—to bring about the constitutional architecture of popular sovereignty. Bracketing any question of difference between global societies, they turned to the principle of self-determination to claim for India the precise kinds of representative systems of government granted to “progressive nations” of the British Empire in the early twentieth century.
An Evolutionary Approach to Politics
It was to the Congress leadership’s weaving together of imperial statehood, representative government, and national self-determination after 1918 that Radhakamal Mukerjee began to formulate a response in the 1920s. Mukerjee’s reflections on self-determination derived from a lifelong engagement with evolutionary science, a topic he first encountered during five formative years from 1910 to 1915. In his posthumously published autobiography, Mukerjee recalled that he was introduced to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), to the writings of Francis Galton, Henry Drummond, and Thomas Henry Huxley, and to an English translation of the German naturalist Ernst Hackel’s General Morphology of Organisms (1866) while working as a lecturer in economics at Krishnath College, Berhampore.Footnote 47
There appear to have been two significant inspirations for Mukerjee’s turn toward Darwinian scholarship from 1910. The first was his association (and friendship) with the Scottish sociologist and botanist Patrick Geddes, a protégé of T. H. Huxley in London (where he also briefly worked with Charles Darwin as a laboratory assistant in 1877–78) and a frequent visitor to India in the 1910s. Much of Geddes’s writing in the early and mid-1910s sought to build on Darwinism to present complex social structures such as cities and neighborhoods as analogous to living organisms, undergoing cycles of growth, development, and change. In Cities in Evolution, Geddes argued that the development of urban settlements in any context was shaped by the regional cultural and especially environmental conditions within which the settlements existed.Footnote 48 Mukerjee came to describe the Scottish sociologist as his single most “formative influence.”Footnote 49 He adopted Geddes’s Darwin-inspired thesis that social systems structuring human life might be examined as discrete organisms, produced by external environmental factors and responsive to changing circumstances. The burgeoning intellectual partnership between them was well established by December 1915, when Geddes wrote the foreword to Mukerjee’s first academic publication, The Foundations of Indian Economics. Footnote 50
The second line of influence on Mukerjee was a remarkable upsurge of interest in evolutionism within early twentieth-century Indian nationalist circles. As Inder Marwah has shown, Indian anti-colonial nationalists in the first two decades of the twentieth century extensively reworked Darwinian tropes in order to challenge assertions of European racial and civilizational supremacy and to justify nationalism as a means of enabling India’s distinctive trajectory of collective evolutionary development.Footnote 51 Mukerjee drew close to two key proponents of Darwinian thought in colonial India: Aurobindo Ghose, one of the leaders of the militant faction of the national movement, and Brajendranath Seal, professor of philosophy at the University of Calcutta. Mukerjee was taken with Aurobindo’s insistence that anti-colonial nationalism was not “a mere political revolt” against British rule, but was much more capaciously a project intended to recover and assert the salient evolutionary traits of “Indian civilization.”Footnote 52
Brajendranath Seal’s influence on Mukerjee, though just as foundational, was above all in terms of method. By 1915, Seal was the most prominent Indian academic using Darwinian language to rethink historiography and political philosophy. Within Seal’s philosophy, each “nation” or “people” in international society followed a unique path of evolutionary racial development, resulting in an enormous global diversity of social, cultural, and especially political systems.Footnote 53 Mukerjee came to deeply admire Seal’s emphasis on the “multi-linear character of human social evolution in different regions and cultures.”Footnote 54 He viewed his own scholarship of the late 1910s and early 1920s as firmly rooted in Seal’s theory of multilinear political evolution.
Mukerjee’s immersion in the intellectual world of Indian evolutionary thought around Geddes, Aurobindo, and Seal furnished him with three intersecting arguments. First, the structures of human social life were always evolutionary products of specific physical conditions, whether these structures were cities and neighborhoods for Geddes or forms of political organization and sovereignty for Seal. The origin, development, and transformation of social-political structures could be examined through a study of relevant external conditions. Secondly, each regional context invariably formed its own distinctive set of structures. Differences in environmental conditions led to differences in society and culture, which then led to differences in institutional development, resulting in what Seal referred to as a “multilinear” framework of global politics. Such an iteration of Darwinism advanced an understanding of institutions as fundamentally determined by location and therefore subject to variation. Finally, and perhaps most consequentially, nationalism, as Aurobindo had argued, could justifiably seek to preserve the array of structures and practices which had evolved in a particular region. Indian evolutionary thought of the 1910s posited anti-colonial nationalism as a natural consequence of regional variation: anti-colonial nationalism was necessary because it could protect a people’s collective evolutionary distinctiveness. In ways broadly analogous to what Marwa Elshakry has traced in the context of colonial Egypt, the Darwinism that Mukerjee encountered in India in the first two decades of the twentieth century was thoroughly imbricated with questions of civilizational difference.Footnote 55
Mukerjee began to use an evolutionary paradigm to think about politics starting with the first volume of his second major work, Principles of Comparative Economics (1921). While his earlier work, The Foundations of Indian Economics, had carried a foreword by Geddes, that book did not engage in any substantive depth with Darwin or Galton or, indeed, with any Indian evolutionary thinkers. Its only mention of Darwinian thought was a brief reference in book IV, chapter 10 (“The Ethics of Indian Industrialism, and its Lessons for the West”) to Huxley’s 1871 lecture at the Birmingham and Midland Institute on the importance of “independent individuality” in the development of complex social systems.Footnote 56 It was not until the opening section of Principles, published five years later, that Mukerjee underlined the importance of an evolutionary, “multilinear” approach to political life—borrowing the latter term from Seal. In Principles, Mukerjee argued that all politics was the result of “social values” that governed and motivated human behavior, interacting with the “regulating conditions” imposed by the physical environment.Footnote 57 Since both “values” and physical “conditions” varied by location, political life inevitably developed as a “diverse multilinear series,” varying across “regions and cultural zones.”Footnote 58 To study politics correctly meant to adopt a “genetic-historical method” which could trace the “progressive unfolding” of values and physical conditions into “organizations” in each “cultural zone.”Footnote 59 The analysis of political forms was the analysis of evolutionary difference. Mukerjee rejected any “unilinear” approaches to politics—namely, the idea that zones with distinct socio-cultural practices, climates, and physical environments might nevertheless adopt the same set of institutions.Footnote 60
The most pronounced axis of global difference for Mukerjee was between the “West” (Europe) and the “East” (Asia). He used “Western” and “Eastern” as shorthand terms to describe what he considered two internally cohesive cultural regions with distinctive social morals, geographies, and trajectories of political evolution. Indeed, Mukerjee often characterized them as “rival” or “oppositional” human communities. The “West” included much of Europe outside of the erstwhile Russian Empire, North America, and Britain’s settler colonies in Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa. Its physical environment was replete with mineral and natural resources but not enough fertile land. Such an environment incentivized trade and industry instead of small-scale cultivation, leading to “the development of manufacturing industries divorced from agricultural pursuits.”Footnote 61 The cultural impact of the West’s push into industrial production—an “economic necessity” required by its geography—was an ethos of individualism.Footnote 62 Mukerjee singled out “individual gain” as a “value” celebrated in the “Western” cultural zone. The push for individual gain led to a rapid growth of private industry and “markets and capitalistic investments in foreign countries.”Footnote 63 The dominance of an individualistic ethos meant the rise of systems of production and exchange premised upon “appropriation and possession” by individuals, along with the legitimacy of “competition” between persons acting as autonomous social and economic agents.Footnote 64
“Eastern civilization” was Mukerjee’s foil for an individualistic, industrial (and industrious) West. Mukerjee’s “East” was just as wide-ranging a geographical space as his “West,” encompassing India, China, Japan, the Korean Peninsula, Southeast Asia, the Muslim world, and much of the Russian Empire. Its geography was marked by comparative ease of access to arable land and thus the development of largely agrarian societies. Most significantly, Mukerjee argued, individualism was not foundational to Eastern ethics. Pushed to establish economic systems of localized, collective production, the East developed “a strong natural endowment of communal instincts and sympathies.”Footnote 65 Taking India and China as exemplars, Mukerjee held that the constitutive units of social and economic life in the East were families, guilds, and kinship and descent-based occupational groups (samaj). The prevalence of groups led to a dominance of collectivist instincts over a commitment to individual freedom. In Indian conceptions of property, for example, “individual rights” were “more or less subordinated to the ends of communal well-being, by the emphasis given to joint ownership.”Footnote 66 The effect was to render social and economic life into a collectivist project.
Elucidating the East–West distinction further in Democracies of the East, Mukerjee drew on the work of American ethnologist and eugenicist Daniel Garrison Brinton—particularly Brinton’s Races and Peoples Footnote 67—to present socially and economically collectivist “communalism” as a distinctive racial characteristic of “Asiatic” peoples:
The deeply humanized and communal instincts of the Hindus and the Chinese on the Eastern Asiatic sea-board and the strength of their distributive impulses have resulted in rich social and communal experiments and constructions; while the instinct of individual assertion and aggression and the strength of creative impulses have contributed towards the success and efficiency of the mechanical exploitative industry and state among the Germanic and the Mediterranean peoples.Footnote 68
Within the framework Mukerjee adopted from Brinton’s Darwinian racial ethnology, the underlying geographical, cultural, and economic conditions of Eastern and Western civilization led to different conceptions of agency and subjectivity.
By the time Mukerjee came to compose Principles and Democracies between 1921 and 1923, the juxtaposition of a communal, collectivist Indian social ethos against a Western modernity rooted in competitive, possessive individualism was a common rhetorical move in Indian political thought. It had been forcefully articulated in M. K. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909), a text with which Mukerjee was familiar by the 1920s, though not one he discussed at any length. Mukerjee’s difference from Gandhi and other thinkers in the 1910s who used arguments about an innate Indian collectivism lay above all in his methodology, particularly in his emphasis on environmental variables. In accordance with the “scientific study of man and of society” which he took to have been properly introduced only by the “Darwinian concept of evolution” in the late nineteenth century, Mukerjee presented social and economic practices as adaptations that had evolved over time to satisfy external conditions imposed by climate and geography.Footnote 69 Acting together, the “external conditions of regional geography and physiography” led to “adaptive physiological modifications” amongst human populations, which, in turn, resulted in a “differentiation of peoples and races in point of temperament and physical endowment.”Footnote 70 The communal nature of Indian and Chinese economic life had developed as a response to living on or near the “fertile and inexhaustible soil” of “deltas and river plains” in South and East Asia.Footnote 71 Such an environment disincentivized economic expansionism and individual emigration outwards even as it made possible a relatively equitable distribution of arable land and resources between essentially self-governing, self-sufficient occupational groups. By interpreting social practices as evolutionary adaptations to geography and climate, a methodology modeled on Darwin, Mukerjee saw himself as giving a much more scientifically rooted account of Indian communalism than other nationalist thinkers of the time. His analysis of Indian society and economy relied upon natural determinism, rather than upon abstract appeals to history and inherited tradition.
Mukerjee’s State Theory
After tracing the environmental and consequently the economic differences between Eastern and Western regions, Mukerjee examined their two divergent paths of political development. To coordinate interactions between autonomous property-owning agents, there arose in the West the institution of the modern state. Politically, the foundational binary of the West was the rights-bearing individual citizen confronting the regulatory sovereign state, the binary of “individual differentiation” and “centralized control.”Footnote 72 In contrast, the salience of communal associations in the East inhibited the emergence of an individual–state dichotomy. Groups remained sites of production and exchange, of moral life, and, importantly, of law-making power, or what Mukerjee referred to as the power of “sovereignty.” As he put it in volume i of Principles, differences in environmental conditions and “social instincts” led to a difference in the nature of political institutions across the two regions:
Social instincts in the West are sought to be realized through the super-imposition of the State as the expression of the general will on the individual as the economic unit, while in the East the community or group is already an integral part of the individual personality, and the economic unit is not the individual as individual, but the individual in the community or, if you please, the community-in-the individual. Accordingly, the socialistic program in the West tends to be accomplished through state machinery, while in the East the voluntary or ethical cooperation of groups or communities crystallized into social categories and customs is the method of realizing social progress.Footnote 73
The state was an evolutionary product of geographical, cultural, and economic conditions particular to European history. It was not an abstract universal good which arose—or could arise—in any context. Mukerjee held that a fully sovereign state had never been able to exist in Indian history. Insofar as state power had been exercised through imperial monarchy, it had “comprehended and sanctioned an exuberant variety of local cults and customaries, laws and institutions (acharas)” rather than “superimposing upon them the fiat of a unitary sovereign will,” in the manner of the “absolutist autocratic” form of sovereignty peculiar to the West.Footnote 74
After framing sovereignty as shaped by and subject to universal laws of evolutionary development, Mukerjee proceeded to reinterpret the principle of self-determination. If self-determination after the war meant the right of a nation to govern itself, then, Mukerjee argued in Principles, it needed to mean the right of a national community to resort to the political institutions characteristic of its environmental region or “cultural zone.” Self-determination needed to become firmly grounded in principles of differential political evolution. It would thereby come to exist in accordance with a “multi-linear” view of humanity and aid each region in being “left free to develop along its own lines its characteristic organization.”Footnote 75 Chapter 13 of Principles, titled “Equilibrium of Races and Regions in World Economics,” called for a new formulation of national self-determination which could depart from that propounded by the League of Nations. A new understanding of the “principle of self-determination” needed to be grounded in “respect” for the distinctive political constitution of “a particular economic region or race”; Mukerjee took self-determination as a principle which could be marshaled in support of regional evolution.Footnote 76
The League of Nations for Mukerjee paid “scant attention” to the implications of multilinear evolution for international politics. The League sought to universalize a form of self-determination derived from an “obsolete, unscientific attitude of superiority of some races to all others.”Footnote 77 Mukerjee criticized the tendency to associate self-determination with the establishment of states, electoral politics, and market economies in colonial countries—in Asia, but also in much of Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific Islands. In preparing colonies for self-government, the League of Nations required them to adopt identifiably modern forms of sovereignty, commerce, and sociality. Since the state and capitalist relations were distinctively European forms, their direct transposition onto non-European societies through the League’s commitment to self-government amounted to a form of civilizational and racial “chauvinistic bias.”Footnote 78 The humanitarian promises of the League were little more than a façade for the extension of monistic sovereignty and possessive individualism across the globe, or the diffusion of “instincts of appropriation and possession.”Footnote 79 The underlying problem for Mukerjee was the League’s uncritical advocacy of European political arrangements and social values as abstract universal goods.Footnote 80
In Democracies of the East, Mukerjee further argued that anti-colonial activists were following the League of Nations and embracing a narrow set of institutions as the framework for bringing about national self-government. Persia by 1923 was already “on the road to modern constitutionalism”; nationalist leaders in Iraq and Syria were taking “their lessons of government from England and France.”Footnote 81 Japan had adopted a state-system “marked out on the model of the West.”Footnote 82 The result was an approach to self-determination that flattened historical differences between East and West. Chapter 11 of Democracies of the East (“The Communal Democracies of Asia”) focused especially on Indian nationalism of the late 1910s and early 1920s as a paradigmatic instantiation of a wider anti-colonial turn to Europe. In seeking reform of the empire, Indian nationalists were seeking to work within the strictures of parliamentary statehood—precisely those institutional forms which had developed to allow for representation and sovereignty in Europe. Nationalism thereby became a project of political importation. “The political methods and instruments of the West” were being “looked upon as models for India to imitate.”Footnote 83 The assumption underlying Indian nationalists’ association of self-rule with parliamentarism within an imperial state, Mukerjee insisted, was an evolutionarily unilinear approach to political development. Anti-colonial activists were not attentive to the ways that British representative institutions had evolved in response to the physical conditions of the West. By seeking to import these into India, they were inhibiting a distinctively Asian trajectory of development.
Such a trajectory would be defined by the group-based associational life characteristic of Asian regions. Mukerjee insisted that the purpose of national self-determination for India should not be to gain political representation through parliamentary government, but rather to give greater autonomy and decision-making power to the functional groups already present within Indian society. Cooperative neighborhood associations, forms of kinship based on caste and clan, and occupational guilds needed to be transformed into the foundational political units of a new British India. The goal was a regime which Mukerjee repeatedly referred to as either a “communalistic polity” or a “cooperative commonwealth.” In its organization, the communalistic polity was a regional federation wherein a central government elected directly through proportional representation coordinated between self-governing functional-territorial groups. The citizen/state binary was replaced by a group/federation binary. The “natural development” of Indian conditions, Mukerjee argued, was toward a polity:
Communal in its lower stratifications, and democratic and federal in its organization, which will maintain the primary value of direct political activities in communal bodies and local assemblies, existing independently of and parallel to the central governing organization where collectivism and local representation will be tempered and modified by the recognition of groups.Footnote 84
National self-determination for India thus meant securing the self-governing autonomy of groups in political and economic life through an association-based federal structure.
Once self-determination became a principle which allowed “the Asiatic races” to “secure their political evolution” through the constitutional primacy of “group-organization,” there would emerge a new “federacy of Eastern powers.”Footnote 85 Such a “federacy” would be distinct from “the League of Nations of the West,” as it would not be an alliance of territorially defined states and empires, but an arrangement to allow non-state functional groups to participate in international politics on their own terms as groups. Furthermore, social and economic life within the communal polity would be solidaristic in nature. The central economic agent would not be the rights-bearing individual acting independently, but the collective association engaging in group ownership, production, and exchange. Communalism as a political philosophy rejected the doctrine of “natural rights of individuals” in favor of the “duties” of the individual toward the group and of intersecting, overlapping groups towards each other, emphasizing the “integration” of disparate interests.Footnote 86 To recover communal federalism was to turn away both from state sovereignty and from “competitive” individualism, toward cooperative, mutualistic collectivism.Footnote 87
Mukerjee’s associational view of self-determination in 1921 and 1923 marked a significant departure from Indian nationalism of the time. As noted earlier, nationalist leaders such as Malaviya, Sastri, Besant, and Rai were unanimous in using the discourse of self-determination to demand elected parliamentary representation within a Dominion State of the British Empire. Mukerjee posited an entirely different view of what national self-determination should mean for British India. Political representation was certainly present in his federal scheme as well: proportional representation was the electoral mechanism through which he imagined that associational groups might come together to create a democratic state able to coordinate between their respective spheres of rule. But securing representative government through an elected parliament and imperial statehood was not the goal of national self-determination for Mukerjee, as it was for Rai. The goal, instead, was about ensuring the self-governance of collective associations.
In the primacy it gave to associational life, Mukerjee’s anti-statist, federalist alternative to the Indian National Congress’s post-WWI constitutional program amounted to a form of deep social conservatism. In both the Indian and Chinese contexts, Mukerjee’s intention was to preserve the disaggregated sovereignty and communal social life which he saw as simultaneously long existing in Asia and increasingly eroded by the “superimposition of Western models” of politics and society.Footnote 88 In the Indian case, Mukerjee’s preservationist orientation led to a clear blindness to the issue of caste hierarchy. He held up caste communities (samaj, varna, and jati) as instantiations of the group-based, diffuse, and non-individualistic nature of Indian civil society, but had little to say about relations of domination between castes. In the opening chapter of Democracies, for instance, Mukerjee identified caste as “the very backbone” of the Indian “body politic.”Footnote 89 He specified three kinds of caste groupings: based on descent and kinship, on shared occupation, and on neighborhood.Footnote 90 All three had emerged at different points in Indian history as sociological responses to the environmental factors of the subcontinent. The attempt by caste associations to coordinate with each others’ spheres of jurisdiction had laid the groundwork for the emergence of “federative unions” amongst functional and territorial social groups, creating a scheme for the distribution of law-making powers amongst “extending and often intersecting circles of authority” and eliding the need for a powerful singular state authorized through representation.Footnote 91 Caste had been formed by India’s geography and, subsequently, had shaped the development of its pluralistic constitution. Mukerjee overlooked the internal hierarchy of the caste order by focusing almost entirely on the theme of group sovereignty.
Mukerjee was certainly not alone in his idealized construction of caste as a corporatist alternative to competitive individualism and monistic sovereignty. A similar dynamic was evident in Gandhi’s remarks on caste and economy in the early 1920s.Footnote 92 It was also present, quite explicitly, in the writings of Mukerjee’s elder brother, the conservative historian Radhakumud Mookerji.Footnote 93 As C. A. Bayly has shown, Indian communitarian thinkers of the 1920s repeatedly referenced an organic, self-sustaining, and collectivist Hindu civil society in need of protection and revival, often as a reactionary response to Social Darwinist fears about impending racial degeneration in the face of the political and economic transformations of the interwar years.Footnote 94 Mukerjee’s view of social practices and state formation as collective adaptations to geography and climate introduced a new empirically grounded, putatively scientific discourse into the tradition of interwar Hindu communitarianism. In Mukerjee’s Darwinian account, the diffuse associational life of caste came to be depicted as an adaptive trait of Indian economic organization, an evolutionary outcome of the subcontinent’s environmental pressures.
Conclusion
As a socially conservative challenge to imperial universalism, Mukerjee’s anti-statist collectivism emerged through his engagement with the tradition of post-Darwinian evolutionary thought as it existed in colonial India in the first two decades of the twentieth century. As we have seen, from Geddes, Ghose, and Seal, Mukerjee adopted arguments about the rootedness of political institutions within geography, climate, economy, and culture. He deployed the evolutionary paradigm of politics prevalent in early twentieth-century India to formulate a comparative theory of the state. ‘Asia’ in his account emerged as a region marked by disaggregated sovereignty and associational, collectivist group life. Justifying self-determination through a discourse of evolutionary politics thus meant a rejection of monistic sovereignty and individual autonomy within Asian societies. The result was a federalist theory of national self-determination oriented towards preserving differences in forms of sovereignty and sociability within the British Empire, rather than, as within the dominant nationalist paradigm, extending a modular range of representative, electoral institutions across the empire’s constituent parts.
Mukerjee’s later reflections on evolutionary politics signaled an evident shift in his intellectual career. In the fall of 1959, he was invited to give a series of lectures at the University of Bihar to commemorate the centenary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the book he had first read in Berhampore a half-century earlier. Mukerjee reiterated his arguments from the 1920s about Darwin’s insight into the triangular relationship between environment, society, and political life. Politics was the product of environmental pressures and social values and norms interacting with one another, to the point that, as a domain of human action, all politics might be seen as a “socio-genic mechanism.”Footnote 95 Yet Mukerjee’s focus was not then on the unique forms that the socio-genic mechanism of politics would take in different environments, but on shared commonalities between environments. Citing the American philosopher Charles Morris’s Varieties of Human Value (1956)—which was itself an ambitious attempt to combine comparative ethics with biological science—Mukerjee went on to insist that advances in moral philosophy, psychology, and more generally in the study of evolution through the 1930s and 1940s, had come to demonstrate the “tendency towards unity” of otherwise disparate human groups.Footnote 96 While societies emerged within distinctive physical environments, the notions of political sovereignty they developed in response to external conditions could contain strikingly analogous elements. A more sophisticated form of post-Darwinian evolutionary politics needed to move beyond the “older ethno-centrism” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and instead interrogate the “generic social impulses” which resulted in the emergence of shared political forms across cultural, racial, geographical, and climatological boundaries.Footnote 97
Mukerjee praised conventions of transnational global governance put into place after WWII, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and UNESCO, for their universalist aspirations and language. He depicted these new international agreements and organizations as “rooted in a common genetic system of human needs, values, and aspirations.”Footnote 98 The strong emphasis on universalism in the University of Bihar lectures was a clear turn away from assertions of deep, fundamental regional differences on the question of political and economic models. By 1940, Mukerjee had also largely abandoned the notion that state sovereignty was unsuited for Indian conditions. By his own admission, the shift was motivated by his favorable assessments of the regulatory state in Western Europe, the Soviet Union, and the New Deal-era United States following a six-month lecture tour of England, Austria, Russia, and North America in 1937.Footnote 99 His Food Planning for Four Hundred Millions (1938) was essentially a call to replicate the success of centralized planning within an independent, post-imperial Indian nation-state.Footnote 100
Mukerjee never fully reflected upon the considerable discrepancy between his post-WWI and his post-WWII writings on evolutionary politics. Nonetheless, given his subsequent trajectory, we can historicize his scientifically oriented anti-statism as an artifact of the 1920s. Principles of Comparative Economics and Democracies of the East were distinctive episodes in the story of self-determination’s circulation within the non-European world in the immediate wake of WWI. Mukerjee marshaled an eclectic range of evolutionary theory in these two texts to counter the association of national self-determination with imperial parliamentarism, electoral representation, and statehood, and to instead make it into the ideological foundation for a group-based, organicist collectivism. The very possibility of his articulating such a position in the first half of the 1920s shows how contested the place of the modern state was within anti-colonial self-determination claims of the time. Far from being unanimously accepted as the vectors of collective self-rule, state sovereignty and representative government were subject to critique from a discipline surprisingly foundational for early anti-colonial nationalism: evolutionary science.
Acknowledgements
The paper was written for presentation at the “Natural Sociability and Political Association Workshop” hosted by the UCLA Livescu Initiative on Neuro, Narrative, and AI (NNAI) in December 2024. For their feedback at the workshop, I am especially grateful to Joshua Dienstag, Angus Gowland, Chris Kelty, Daniel Lee, Natasha Piano, and Peter Stacey. Thanks are also due to the manuscript reviewers for Review of Politics and to Ruth Abbey for editorial guidance.
Open access
