Sabujkoli Mukherjee

Sabujkoli Mukherjee is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History with a Designated Emphasis in Environmental Humanities. Her dissertation titled "The Land of the Eighteen Tides: Survival and Resilience in the Lower Bengal Delta" studies the environmental transformations in the mangrove forests, commonly called Sunderbans, in the age of the British Empire. Her research focuses on marginal peoples' contested histories of negotiation and resistance amidst extractive imperialism. Telling the story of itinerant forest users' violent dispossession and tenacious survival, her work contributes to the interdisciplinary scholarship on empire and environment, showing the decisive rupture of indigenous ecological relations, and the remarkable resilience of forest-dependent peoples as they practiced their livelihoods despite colonialism and capitalism. 

In addition to her core training in South Asian Environmental History, she is deeply invested in the questions of citizenship and religious minorities in postcolonial India, especially the evolution of Indian citizenship and its relation to state making during the first two decades after independence in the face of the unfolding consequences of the 1947 Partition. 

Building on these interests, her future project will study the post-1947 environmental history of the Sundarbans, focusing on the making of the borderland milieu in a fluid landscape of shifting rivers and islands, contributing to the literature on partition and decolonization in the mid-twentieth century. 

Before coming to Davis, Mukherjee earned her BA, MA, and M.Phil in History, at the University of Delhi.