Obituary for Ramkrishna Mukherjee

H-Asia Obituary for Ramkrishna Mukherjee

Discussion published by Preben Kaarsholm on Monday, November 23, 2015

Professor Rila Mukherjee, University of Hyderabad and Institut de Chandernagor, has asked me to post this obituary of her father to H-ASIA:

Ramkrishna Mukherjee, Distinguished Scientist of the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York, Binghamton, passed away in Kolkata on November 15, 2015 at the age of 98 from multi organ failure arising from ascites.

His publications included works on genetics, historical sociology, social classification, problems of acculturation, social indicators and quality of life. An M.Sc. in 1941 from Calcutta University and a Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1948, he was Chief Research Officer to His Majesty’s Social Survey, London (1948-49), Consultant, Government of Turkey (1949), Consultant, London School of Economics (1952), Guest Professor of Indian Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin (1953-57) and Research Professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, until 1979. His research experience spanned India, Bangladesh, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda, France, Germany, Sweden, U.K., Czechoslovakia and Turkey. With over a hundred research papers in internationally reputed journals, Mukherjee was member of the Indian Council of Social Science Research and of the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association (1974-78), President, Indian Sociological Society (1972-74) and adviser to institutions and journals in the social sciences in India and abroad.

His monographs are: The Ancient Inhabitants of Jebel Moya, Sudan (1955), The Problem of Uganda (1956), The Dynamics of a Rural Society (1957), The Sociologist and Social Change in India Today (1965), Six Villages of Bengal (1971), Social Indicators (1975), Family and Planning in India (1976), West Bengal Family Structure: 1946-66 (1977), Explorations in Inductive Sociology (1978), What Will it Be? (1979, Sociology of Indian Sociology (1979) and Classification in Social Research (1983). His The Rise and Fall of the East Indian Company (1958) remains a landmark contribution to South Asian economic and social history. His last publication, The Measure of Time in the Appraisal of Social Reality (2009) contained a scathing critique of the return of caste-based politics in India with the implementation of the Mandal Commission report.

Mukherjee has been characterised as a lone wolf who was increasingly marginalised in an intellectual landscape dominated by notions of brahmanization and sanskritization. Yet, the significance of his work did not escape contemporaries. For Partha Nath Mukherji, he was a ‘profound scholar and intellectual with indefatigable energy, with a penchant for provoking any scholar, whatever his or her academic stature, and yet commanding respect and admiration from them’. Sociologist Amit Bhattacharya writes from New York, ‘I feel fortunate to have come in close contact with him and admired his uncompromising study habits sitting at his desk’. Puja Mondol noted that under his direction at the Indian Statistical Institute, his team investigated agrarian class structure, class relations and agrarian social change through large scale sample surveys. Through his work in the late 1960s and the 1970s, the theme of agrarian social structure and change re-appeared in Indian sociology after a gap of nearly two decades. T.N. Madan adds, ‘He used to say that I was the only person who recognized the fact that he was indeed the first Indian sociologist to lead in the area of village studies.’

Citation: Preben Kaarsholm. Obituary for Ramkrishna Mukherjee. H-Asia. 02-22-2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/22055/discussions/97849/obituary-ramkrishna-mukherjee Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Asia

Mukherjee lived a full life with varied interests. He started life as a geneticist, took a keen interest in gardening, loved classical music and played the sarod, an instrument akin to the sitar. Mukul Dube writes from Delhi, ‘while primarily known as a sociologist, Mukherjee did many other things in the course of his life. His first major work was to do with the Bengal Famine of 1943. He left the Communist Party of India for personal reasons, yet he never lost his commitment to the Left. He once told me that one of his job titles was "computer", i.e., one who calculates and computes. It is not so well known that he was a competent photographer who, at least in his younger days, earned money from photography. From my experience I can say that he liked good brandy, good cooking, and (not least) babies’.

Mukherjee leaves behind two daughters, one son in law, three grandsons: economist Maitreesh Ghatak, sociologist Saran Ghatak and Rudrajit Banerjee, graduate student in physics, and numerous students and colleagues.