Rudrangshu Mukherjee

Rudrangshu Mukherjee is an Indian historian and author who is presently Opinions Editor for The Telegraph newspaper, Kolkata.

Academics

Rudrangshu Mukherjee studied at Calcutta Boys' School, Presidency College, Kolkata, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and St Edmund Hall, Oxford. [cite news
title = Author bio
publisher = Silicon India magazine
url = http://www.siliconindia.com/books/newbooks/AuthorDetails.php?auid=351] .

His D.Phil in Modern History at the University of Oxford in 1981 wasbased on his acclaimed thesis on the revolt of1857cite news
title = Sephis e-magazine: Partha Chatterjee interview
author = Rudrangshu Mukherjee
publisher = South-south Exchange programme for research on the history of development
url = http://www.iisg.nl/~sephis/pdf/emagazine.pdf
date = vol. 1 no. 1 Sept 2004
accessdate = 2007-12-17] , which presenteda view of the revolt from the native perspective. The cover illustration of his book was drawn by Satyajit Ray. He hasrevisited this theme in his books including "Awadh in Revolt 1857-58: A Study ofPopular Resistance" (Delhi, 1984, repr. 2002), "Spectre of Violence: The1857 Kanpur Massacres" (Delhi, 1988), which tries to re-frame the popularcolonial image of the massacres, and "Mangal Pandey: Brave Martyr or Accidental Hero?" (Penguin India). The last bookreflects on the theme of how hero-formation feeds into irrational nationalistfrenzy [cite news
title = Clio Is Not For Worship:- History is best freed from nation-building
author = Rudrangshu Mukherjee
publisher = The Telegraph
url = http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050904/asp/opinion/story_5188782.asp
date = 2005-09-04
accessdate = 2007-12-18] .

Public Life

Mukherjee has taught history at the University of Calcutta and held visiting appointments at Princeton University, the University of Manchester and the University of California, Santa Cruz. At the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), which he had joined as a Junior Research Fellow in 1975, he became involved in several aspects of historiography, especially the issues concerning the ascendancy of the North in the production of knowledge. He has edited "The Penguin Gandhi Reader" (Delhi, 1993) and is the author of the "Art of Bengal: A Vision Defined, 1955-75" (Kolkata, 2003), and co-edited "Trade and Politics and the Indian Ocean World: Essays in Honour of Ashin Das Gupta" (Delhi, 1998).

He has also worked on the history of the leftist movement in India [cite news
title = Left Luggage
author = Rudrangshu Mukherjee
publisher = [http://www.india-seminar.com/ Seminar, New Delhi, ed. Raj and Romesh Thapar]
url = A Mandate For Change: A symposium on the 2004 general elections
date = July 2004
accessdate = 2007-12-19] .After the 2007 Nandigram episode where the CPI(M) government of West Bengal attempted to forcibly annex some farm lands for an industrial zone, Rudrangshu was among the more vociferous of the leftist intellectuals in Kolkata who protested the violent policies of the left [cite news
title = Kiss of Death - The CPI(M)'s use of violence in Nandigram isn't surprising
author = Rudranghshu Mukherjee
publisher = The Telegraph
url = http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070110/asp/opinion/story_7238853.asp
date = 2007-01-10
accessdate = 2007-12-19
note = Telegraph pages were down at the time; article is excerpted at http://forum.atimes.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=9620(part of a three-article series)] .though he, and the ABP group, keep shifting their opinion from time to time and tend to more or less favour land acquisition, SEZs and the CPI(M)'s model of development.

References