Culture and Cultural Policy in Radhakamal Mukerjee and Indian Sociology: Text in Context

Abstract

This article focuses on culture and cultural policy for it is a theme present in Radhakamal Mukerjee’s (RKM) writings and is a persistent presence in Indian sociology. Perhaps no other time is more appropriate than now to revisit the debates on cultural policy than in a context defined by cultural majoritarianism. One attempts here a synoptic account of RKM’s approach to culture and also suggests pointers as to how we ought to read the contradictory impulses. In this contested space, three trends are discernible in the ways that cultural policy has been visualised. The first is an overt location of unity in the Great Hindu tradition. The second is in an idea of composite culture, synthesis and pluralism, and the third is politically a more Left-inspired cultural policy responding to ‘the national norms of democracy, secularism and socialism’.