“A Self-Conscious Asia”: R. K. Mukerjee on Self-Determination

Abstract Political and legal theorists have long been interested in how the principle of national self-determination emerged over the course of the twentieth century, particularly in relation to anti-colonial movements. In general, national self-determination has been associated with the anti-colonial turn to statehood, sovereignty, and representative government. This article recovers an anti-statist, anti-electoral theorization of self-determination from the work of Indian political thinker Radhakamal Mukerjee. I show how Mukerjee’s engagement with evolutionary theories of politics in the early twentieth century led him to depart from Indian nationalist appropriations of the discourse of self-determination in the aftermath of WWI. Mukerjee historicized state sovereignty, representative government, and individual rights as products of Western Europe’s trajectory of political development and constructed “Asia” as a region marked by anti-statist collectivism. The article thereby highlights the overlooked role of evolutionary arguments in forming a novel, anti-statist conceptualization of anti-colonial self-determination.