Universalism and Ecology: An Anthropological Bridge between Radhakamal Mukerjee’s Key Concepts

The wider universe of discourse for this lecture is the interface between social sciences and the humanities. This was the dominant intellectual thrust of the so-called Lucknow School of sociology in the 1960s to which Radhakamal Mukerjee (RKM) belonged. Initially, by juxtaposing RKM’s universalism to the holistic evolutionary theory, I bring together the earlier and later versions of scientific universalism, and RKM’s universalistic stance leaning to the humanities. I next contrast the somewhat narrow paradigm of ecology in RKM, with trans-nationalist ecosystems postulated in the contemporary times. Further, the reverberations of RKM’s humanistic universalism are traced in the ‘text and context’ as well as in the polyglot anthropology movements in the new anthropology. Finally, taking a cue from RKM, I note the contribution of incipient and full-blown anthropo-sociological universalism to the debate about the indigenisation of social sciences.