Mithi Mukherjee

Bio: Mithi Mukherjee is an academic researcher from University of Colorado Boulder. The author has contributed to research in topics: Politics & Empire. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 11 publications receiving 126 citations.

India in the shadows of empire : a legal and political history, 1774-1950

Abstract: THE COLONIAL AND THE IMPERIAL: INDIA AND BRITAIN IN THE IMPEACHMENT TRIAL OF WARREN HASTINGS INTO THE LABYRINTH: THE BIRTH OF JUSTICE AS A DISCOURSE OF GOVERNANCE "VAKIL RAJ": THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS AND THE BIRTH OF THE LAWYER AS POLITICAL REPRESENTATIVE FROM IMPERIAL JUSTICE TO TRANSCENDENTAL FREEDOM: THE SAMNYASIN AS LEADER IN THE MOVEMENT FOR NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE AN IMPERIAL CONSTITUTION? JUSTICE AS EQUITY AND THE MAKING OF THE INDIAN CONSTITUTION

The “Right to Wage War” against Empire: Anticolonialism and the Challenge to International Law in the Indian National Army Trial of 1945

Abstract: 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. In this trial, the defense made the radical claim that anticolonial wars fought in Asia against European powers were legitimate and just and should be recognized as such under international law. The aim of this Article is to draw attention to the understudied role of anticolonial movements in challenging the premises of international law in the aftermath of World War II.

Justice, War, and the Imperium: India and Britain in Edmund Burke's Prosecutorial Speeches in the Impeachment Trial of Warren Hastings

Abstract: 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 into question before the highest judicial body in Britain, the House of Lords. The fact that the prosecution was led by Edmund Burke, one of the most articulate and prescient political statesman of modern Europe, has only added to the trial's enduring significance as a moment of critical reflection on colonial practices. Indeed, it could be argued that it was on this occasion, and in this act of defending the rights of an alien population against coercive colonial rule, that some of Burke's long-held political and ethical convictions found their clearest expression.

Transcending Identity: Gandhi, Nonviolence, and the Pursuit of a “Different” Freedom in Modern India

Abstract: 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 resulted in the histories of these countries being presented in negative terms as a deviation from the universal trajectories of capital, democracy, and liberalism, which are themselves grounded in particular historical experiences of the West. Thus, as Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others, has argued, most scholars trained in this intellectual tradition have characterized India as “not modern” or “not bourgeois” or “not liberal.” The new intellectual sensitivity toward non-Western systems of thought has resulted in a significant number of works that deploy the critical category of difference. Yet none of the four major schools of historiography on modern India—Marxist, Cambridge, nationalist, and subaltern—has extended this notion of difference to the discourse of freedom associated with the Gandhian nonviolent resistance movement against British colonialism. This is a surprising omission, given the striking ways in which the Gandhian discourse of freedom departed from the Western discourse of freedom. While the distinctiveness of the Gandhian movement in relation to other forms of anticolonial resistance of the day was evident to Gandhi’s contemporaries and has been noted by scholars, the use of difference as an analytical category to

‘A World of Illusion’: The Legacy of Empire in India's Foreign Relations, 1947–62

Abstract: The Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, summed up in October 1962 India’s approach to international affairs since its independence from British rule in 1947: ‘We were living in a world of illusion . . . we were getting out of touch with reality in the modern world and we were living in an artificial world of our own creation. We have been shocked out of it.’ He spoke at the end of the Sino-Indian war, when, to his surprise, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), after having rejected all of India’s overtures of friendship over the last fifteen years, had invaded Indian territory and routed the Indian Army. The central question that this article addresses is: what was this ‘world of illusion’, this ‘artificial world’ that Nehru was referring to? It contends that Nehru’s ‘illusory’ world was one grounded in the category of justice in opposition to the ‘real’ world of power politics. India’s foreign policy under Nehru, who was Foreign Minister as well as Prime Minister, was based on a juridical discursive framework that assumed that any dispute between two nations would be resolved by a neutral and impartial third party, the United Nations’ Security Council, thus conceptually excluding the possibility of war. This approach to foreign relations, shattered in the wake of the war with the PRC, was not grounded in the principle of Gandhian nonviolence. It was a legacy of empire. Contemporary Indian diplomats and politicians look back to the period after independence as a ‘golden age’ when India played a prominent role on the world stage, particularly at the United Nations, as the spokesman for non-violence and peace and as the leader of the non-aligned movement. Independent India made its first bid for leadership at the Asian Relations conference held in New Delhi in March 1947, followed, at Bandung in 1955, by working with President of EgyptGamelAbdul Nasser, President of Indonesia Sukarno, and Premier of China Chou En Lai to lay the foundations for African and Asian co-operation. In 1956, Nehru met with President of Yugoslavia Josip Tito and Nasser at Brione to plan the non-aligned movement formally launched at Belgrade in 1961. Paradoxically, despite India’s role at the United Nations in helping to arrange the armistice in Korea, chairing international commissions on Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and promoting nuclear disarmament, the war with the PRC broke out within a year of the formal launching of the non-aligned movement. The non-aligned movement as the pivot of India’s foreign policy is attributed to the dynamism and brilliance of Nehru as a person whose commitment to both

The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century.

Abstract: 1. Political India 2. The Political Arithmetic of the Presidencies 3. The Rewards of Education 4. The Policies of the Rulers 5. The Politics of the Associations 6. The Politics of Union 7. The Muslim Breakaway 8. Perspectives.

The Promise of International Law: A Third World View

Abstract: This is a moment of repudiation of international law and of reckoning with racial injustice and committing to anti-racism. Some of the leading States that have shaped international law are not only exiting treaties, but also openly declaring and operating outside its rules. This lecture argues that one important way to trace the promise of international law at this moment of difficulty is to go outside the beltway of our discipline to places often unfamiliar in our textbooks and the locations where we practice and teach international law. To do that, this lecture will take you to places like Arusha, Tanzania, the seat of three international courts. In doing so, the lecture will bring into our conversation the voices of international lawyers from the Third World and the everyday issues that drive their practice and scholarship often under very difficult political circumstances. To appreciate fully the promise of international law, it is important to go beyond the usual debates, places and canons of our discipline in two ways. First, this lecture challenges the limited geography of places and ideas that dominate the beltway of our discipline. This limited geography and set of ideas is characterized by the law of Geneva, the law of Strasbourg, the law of New York and that of Washington DC. These are the places that our discipline celebrates as producers of the type of international law which in turn becomes the benchmark for the efficacy of international law produced elsewhere. These are also the locations where the bulk of international legal practice is produced and which influences and reinforces our understandings not only of international practice but also of international law more generally. My second major point in this lecture, which proceeds from a Third Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) perspective, is that TWAIL speaks from a subaltern epistemic location. This means that TWAIL questions international law’s presumed universality. TWAIL contests the idea that international law is applicable everywhere and that we should therefore regard it as a view from nowhere. Third World States and TWAIL scholars have contested this non−situated, universal status of international law in a variety of ways. Ultimately, this lecture defends the claim that the Third World is an epistemic site of production and not merely a site of reception of international legal knowledge. Recognizing and grounding the Third World as a site knowledge production and of the practice of international law disrupts the assumptions that international legal knowledge is exclusively produced in the West for consumption and governance of the Third World. This lecture therefore argues that what is at stake is not an issue of inclusion or exclusion of non-western peoples, states within Western international law. Rather, it involves considerations of the very terms of the constitutional order of 'post-Enlightenment social knowledge, its structures of thought, and related constructions of political subjectivity'. A bibliography of TWAIL scholarship from 1996 to 2019 is appended to this lecture.

The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman

Abstract: Here Warren Kimball explores Roosevelt's vision of the postwar world by laying out the nature and development of FDR's "war aims"--his long-range political goals. As the face of eastern Europe and the world changes before our eyes, Roose-velt's goals, dismissed during the Cold War as impractical, seem less unrealistic today.Here Warren Kimball explores Roosevelt's vision of the postwar world by laying out the nature and development of FDR's "war aims"--his long-range political goals. As the face of eastern Europe and the world changes before our eyes, Roose-velt's goals, dismissed during the Cold War as impractical, seem less unrealistic today.