Mohsin Alam Bhat - K. Sivaramakrishnan Reflection

Mohsin Alam Bhat
Queen Mary University of London

There are many who can speak far more authoritatively about Shivi as a paradigm-setting scholar and an institution builder, and about the remarkable range of lives you have traversed—as bureaucrat, academic, and mentor. What I find myself returning to, however, is something more personal: his extraordinary grace and generosity, and your unsurpassed commitment as a teacher.

I first came to Shivi at a moment of uncertainty. I had just begun my dissertation and realised, quite quickly, that my work would not cohere without developing an ethnographic sensibility—something I had not yet learned how to inhabit, despite having read widely. I remember writing to him, and then walking into his office without really knowing what to expect. What followed was, in retrospect, extraordinary. Not only was he generous with his time in that first meeting, but he agreed—much to my surprise—to meet me every week for an hour. Together, we built a reading list, almost a syllabus, and those conversations became a sustained intellectual apprenticeship.

It is difficult to overstate what that experience did. Engaging with him—his range, attentiveness, way of seeing—fundamentally altered how I understand the world. Although I continue to work and write as a lawyer, the sensibility that underpins my work is indelibly shaped by that anthropological orientation he helped cultivate. Those long conversations, and the (famous Shivi-) walks that accompanied them, remain among the most formative intellectual experiences I have had.

Like so many of your students, I remain profoundly grateful, Shivi—for your generosity, your wisdom, and for the example you have set. It is one I hope, in some measure, to carry forward.
 

Mohsin