Rudrangshu Mukherjee studied at Calcutta Boys' School, Presidency College, Kolkata, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and St Edmund Hall, Oxford..

His D.Phil in Modern History at the University of Oxford in 1981 wasbased on his acclaimed thesis on the revolt of1857, which presenteda view of the revolt from the native perspective. The cover illustration of his book was drawn by Satyajit Ray. He hasrevisited this theme in his books including Awadh in Revolt 1857-58: A Study ofPopular Resistance (Delhi, 1984, repr. 2002), Spectre of Violence: The1857 Kanpur Massacres (Delhi, 1988), which tries to re-frame the popularcolonial image of the massacres, and Mangal Pandey: Brave Martyr or Accidental Hero? (Penguin India). The last bookreflects on the theme of how hero-formation feeds into irrational nationalistfrenzy.

Mukherjee has taught history at the University of Calcutta and held visiting appointments at Princeton University, the University of Manchester and the University of California, Santa Cruz. At the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), which he had joined as a Junior Research Fellow in 1975, he became involved in several aspects of historiography, especially the issues concerning the ascendancy of the North in the production of knowledge. He has edited The Penguin Gandhi Reader (Delhi, 1993) and is the author of the Art of Bengal: A Vision Defined, 1955-75 (Kolkata, 2003), and co-edited Trade and Politics and the Indian Ocean World: Essays in Honour of Ashin Das Gupta (Delhi, 1998).

He has also worked on the history of the leftist movement in India.After the 2007 Nandigram episode where the Communist Party of India (CPI(M)) government of West Bengal attempted to forcibly annex some farm lands for an industrial zone, Rudrangshu was among the more vociferous of the leftist intellectuals in Kolkata who protested the violent policies of the left.though he, and the ABP group, keep shifting their opinion from time to time and tend to more or less favour land acquisition, SEZs and the CPI(M)'s model of development.