By: Niveja Assalaarachchi
Editor’s note: In the printed version of this article, The Peak mistakenly noted that Mukherjee is an assistant professor at SFU. This is incorrect, as he is an associate professor at SFU, and the piece has been updated accordingly.
Dr. Shivaji Mukherjee is an associate professor in the department of political science here at SFU. He’s focused on South Asian politics, specifically political violence and colonial legacies. This fall, he’s teaching POL 339, a selected topic course on South Asia’s political environment. In it, he takes a look at the colonial period of the Indian subcontinent and its impact on conflict and struggle, such as the Sri Lankan Civil War.
As a former student of his, I regard Mukherjee as passionate about what he teaches and helping his students. He also has sly humour and brought his students sugary treats to every class.
He sat down for an interview to recount his personal and academic journey, as well as hopes for South Asian politics at this university. Mukherjee was born in the city of Kolkata, in India’s West Bengal state. The state was ruled by the Left Front, a coalition of left-leaning parties which formed the world’s longest, democratically-elected communist government until 2011.
He described the “revolutionary imagination” of that time and place:
“[revolutionary imagination” is well known in folklore and a part of our culture, through movies and literature amongst Bengalis.”
— Dr. Shivaji Mukherjee, associate professor of political science at SFU
The West Bengal village of Naxalbari is also the origin point of the Maoist-Naxalite insurgency, which would become a focus of Mukherjee’s research. He explained this movement is a “radical leftist insurgency” aiming to topple the Indian government, which began in 1967 and continues today. It also “fights for the rights of lower castes and Indigenous Peoples” of India, he continued, known as Adivasis. Inspired by the communist Maoist principles of peasant alliances against state power, the Naxalite revolt set off a chain of armed insurgencies across Eastern India, fighting for things like economic equality and land ownership.
“In Kolkata itself, there was a lot of violence. I heard stories from my school teachers about when they were young and the police and the Naxalites fighting each other. So, I’ve grown up and all Bengalis grew up hearing this. I don’t know if that really led me to study the Naxalite movement, but probably it was in my subconscious.”
Growing up, Mukherjee went to Catholic school. He said the general message of “good moral character building, being honest and hard-working” shaped him. The ethnic diversity of his school also helped him believe in a “secular vision of Indian politics,” he said. He explained how India has many ethnic groups that have long co-existed; however the rise of Hindu nationalism and the idea of the “nation state” is detrimental to peace.
“It’s possible to have a multi-ethnic society where minority ethnic groups are given the necessary empowerment,”
— Dr. Shivaji Mukherjee, associate professor of political science at SFU
Mukherjee’s tertiary education at Delhi University exposed him more to the political realities of India, one of which was caste.
“I was in economics, but I was sitting in the residences, the halls, and there was ragging so I could not study initially,” he said. “But, I learned a lot about politics in an indirect way because in the [residences] there were a lot of different people there from different parts of India. I could clearly see the influence of caste for the first time and there used to be all these tensions and conflicts between students.”
Caste is a system of social categorization that originated thousands of years ago in Hinduism, intending to determine working roles, and abilities that people could do in society. When I took this course with Mukherjee, we learned about how British colonization impacted the caste system. Previously, caste included thousands of different categories and allowed people to move between said categories. The British used caste as a codified social categorization during their rule and made it difficult to change. The changes made caste more salient and controversial in India, leaving millions shunned from interacting with one another. Despite being illegal in India since 1950, caste still plays an important role in Indian society today.
Mukherjee sought his master’s in international relations at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), also in New Delhi. JNU considerably impacted his political viewpoint, where he became more involved in student politics. “There were a lot of these left-based as well as right-wing groups there, and it was very politically active at that time,” he said. “I used to help support the candidates in indirect ways. I used to know some student political leaders there, then I was urged to run for office, but I refused because I wanted to study.”
At JNU, Mukherjee interacted with some notable figures in Indian society. His friend at JNU was future actor Sujith Shanker, who is the grandson of E.M.S. Namboodiripad, the first communist Chief Minister of an Indian state in history. He also interacted with prominent Indian Supreme Court attorney Sunil Fernandes, at JNU. He viewed his time at the institution positively; doting on the teaching staff, stating they greatly influenced his views and the way he teaches.
Following this, Mukherjee went abroad to the US to pursue further studies. He initially studied at the University of Michigan-Dearborn but later transferred to Yale University. It was at Yale where he developed an interest in insurgency movements. This was due to the influence of Dr. Elisabeth Wood, a senior scholar at Yale who specializes in them, particularly in the Latin American and African context. Mukherjee said taking her class on the FMNL Maoist insurgency in El Salvador, helped him draw links to the Naxalite movement, which was expanding during 2005–2006, coinciding with his stay at Yale.
Mukherjee first began his teaching career at the University of Toronto’s Centre for South Asian Studies, serving as a faculty associate. He would later become an assistant professor at the UofT department of political science, as well as be a part of the graduate faculty and other institutions.
His previous research and work at the university would eventually lead him to publishing a book, Colonial Institutions and Civil War: Indirect Rule and Maoist Insurgency in India. He did extensive fieldwork in two Indian states, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh, researching the effects of Maoism there. He wrote about how “historical legacies of British colonial indirect and direct rule created land qualities and how that persists,” he said. “But the book is more qualitative research, where I’ve analyzed various interviews I did in the field with bureaucrats, politicians, human rights activists,” and even “Maoist leaders in jail.” He also noted several times where he faced interference, phone-tapping, and other threats. For example, police commanders misled him in pursuing interviews with Maoist leaders, in an attempt to prevent his research.
He was at UofT when he saw an opportunity to come to Vancouver to teach. SFU’s Somjee chair of Indian political development was vacant at the time. The position is named after A.H. Somjee, a professor emeritus at SFU department of political science, who has been pivotal in teaching South Asian politics at the university. However as Mukherjee noted, his absence left a void in the university. “He retired in the 1990s and after that SFU political science [had] never had a faculty working on India or South Asia, so he created an endowed chair and they were trying to hire someone. I saw the job and I applied for it and luckily, I got it,” he said. The position entails not only conducting research on South Asia, but also teaching it, which is what he’s been doing since 2023.
Mukherjee also noted the importance of teaching South Asian politics to students at SFU. Since Metro Vancouver has a large South Asian international student population and diaspora, they should have the opportunity to learn about their cultures. “I can always sense that they feel very enthused and excited to learn about it and I’ve had students tell me ‘Oh, now I can go and have discussions with my uncle or father.’” He also noted that with globalization, learning about Asia, especially countries like India and China, is important, this is because they are “large market economies, so it is necessary to understand the politics, economics, and societies of these member-nations to engage with them effectively.”
When he’s not deep in research and academia, you may find Mukherjee watching cricket and European soccer, with FC Barcelona being his favourite team.
“Anyone who supports Real Madrid, they go from A to A-,”
— Dr. Shivaji Mukherjee, associate professor of political science at SFU
Mukherjee also shared his current favourite work of literature on South Asian Politics: Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence by Paul R. Brass.
