Benjamin Siegel - K. Sivaramakrishnan Reflection

Benjamin Siegel
Boston University

I never had the formal privilege of being Shivi's student. I was never his advisee, never his postdoc, never in any structured relationship that would have earned me a claim on his attention. Our connection has been purely a function of his scholarly and personal generosity — which is profound, and which has shaped two decades of my thinking and, through my wife Caterina Scaramelli, our shared intellectual life as well. I graduated from Yale in 2007, when South Asia on campus was sparser territory than it is now. Barney Bate was my great mentor, Ram Guha was a visiting fellow my senior year, and a handful of us undergraduates clamored for more. I left for JNU on a Fox Fellowship, and when I came back I learned that Yale had hired Shivi, in part to build a world-class South Asia program. Did he ever deliver. New faculty, programs, and energy all palpably gathered around him. By the time I started my PhD at Harvard, it was clear to nearly everyone I worked with that the real intellectual energy on South Asia was in New Haven.

But from a distance, I found myself drawn ever more deeply into the conceptual work that Shivi was doing — his insistent attention to how both "the environment" but more importantly particular environments get called into specific projects and politics. I read Modern Forests, but just as formatively I read the work of his students, whose books he so often introduced with characteristic generosity. Reading those books together now is like encountering an agenda Shivi laid out over many years that has since come very beautifully into the world: the production of agrarian landscapes as cultural and material artifacts, the fetishization of community and the indigenous, the workings of state science, the ways intermediate actors and local histories complicate the facile stories environmentalism tells about itself.

When I wrote Hungry Nation, I was trying in my own halting way to honor the provocation of Agrarian
Environments: that the boundaries we draw between an autonomous nature and a constructed human agency require "prodigious energy" to maintain, and collapse easily when you press on them. I was writing about famine and food policy and national self-fashioning, but I knew, because Shivi had taught me, that these were environmental histories too.

Wherever you try to take an argument, you find Shivi has softened the ground first. I came back to Yale on sabbatical in 2018, trying to assemble very inchoate thoughts on what would eventually become Markets of Pain. I still have my handwritten notes from that workshop — the wonderfully torturous format where you sit silent through the critique and only later get to respond. Shivi pressed me on the linkages between pain, deindustrialization, and the Nehruvian insistence on self-reliance; on what it means for states to become "analgesic"; on the politics of "guilt-ridden exports.” I reread those notes just now, and see how Shivi’s questions, posed gently but without mercy, made the book that I wrote.

Now, working on the environmental and human consequences of our global obsession with protein, I return to many of Shivi’s formulations and provocations. I recently reread foreword to James Staples's Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian, where he warns against the temptation toward "radical proposals for regulating meat" and argues that enduring solutions lie in "understanding human relations to animals and food, and in studying the material conditions in which human and nonhuman lives remain entangled and interwoven." Once again, I find Shivi setting a field-defining agenda and then stepping aside so others can take it up.

So much of what Shivi has long attended to — environments, extraction, the projects of states and
intermediate actors making logic out of animals and particular landscapes and relationships — is now so deeply embedded in my own thinking that I cannot imagine what my work would look like without him. I am in debt to a mentor I was never formally assigned – a position that I know so many of us who are celebrating Shivi’s career share.

Then there is the rarer thing, the thing that cannot be read off a CV. In a profession that is by design cutting, Shivi is unfailingly thoughtful, kind, and humane. He tends a garden for all the animals he cannot imagine eating. He treats the most junior colleague with deep wellsprings of respect, and pushes them to the kind of great work that can only come from it. He engenders admiration precisely because he does not seek it. Shivi is a study in what it means to be an thinker, a mentor, a leader, a mensch. I am so grateful to have been in his orbit.
 

Benjamin Siegel (he/him)