Ramachandra Guha - K. Sivaramakrishnan Reflection

Ramachandra Guha
Krea University

A PORTRAIT OF THE SCHOLAR AS A YOUNG MAN 

This gathering at New Haven shall celebrate Shivy’s remarkable contributions as scholar, teacher, mentor, professional colleague and institution-builder. I have known and admired him in those capacities too, but here I shall speak of the Shivy I first knew, fifty and more years ago, long before he became a distinguished university professor.

Shivy and I joined St. Stephen’s College in Delhi in July 1974, two among the three hundred students (all male) boarding on the college campus. Our friendship began at first out of academic disenchantment. He and I had both wanted to study Literature, but family pressure compelled him to register for a degree in Mathematics, and I for a degree in Economics. Within a fortnight, he knew that differential calculus was not for him, and I knew that indifference curves were not for me. We sought refuge in each other’s company. Every afternoon after class we would repair together to the University Coffee House, and stay there almost until closing time. For the three years we were together at St. Stephen’s we were best friends, almost like brothers even.

My conversations with Shivy were partly in English and partly in Hindustani, that lovely, supple, syncretic, tongue, once the lingua franca of the subcontinent from Peshawar to Patna, alas now in a terminal stage of decline. Of course he spoke Hindustani much better than me—he would—and made jokes in it too. In larger groups, I was exuberant and Shivy reticent (that may still be the case), but when it was just the two of us, the chatter was more equal, and even (since he was wiser and wittier) more biased towards his side.

The subjects Shivy and I chiefly spoke about in the Coffee House (or in our rooms after dinner) were cricket, literature, and music. I instructed him in the first, and was the grateful recipient of his teachings in the other two. At the time, Shivy’s literary interests were mostly modern British: the novels of Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and, especially, Anthony Powell. At his bidding I embraced these writers as well, this a considerable step upwards from the American detective stories I was then reading.

My literary debt to Shivy was large; my musical debt, incalculable. While the writers Shivy then read were mostly British, the musicians he listened to were all Indians. Here his interests were remarkably ecumenical; he engaged deeply with Carnatic classical, Hindustani classical, and Hindi film music. The first was a little beyond my own aesthetic grasp; nonetheless, as guided by Shivy, I—who, unlike him, grew up in a home without music—learned to love the great instrumentalists and vocalists of the Hindustani tradition. We went to hear Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar play together under a large shamiana in the grounds of Modern School, and to listen to Kishori Amonkar sing in the more formal setting of the Kamani Auditorium. Almost as memorable, perhaps, was a trip to the dilapitated Sheela Cinema in Paharganj, where, eating Krackerjack biscuits while rats ran along the floor, we watched a rare re-run of The Guide, a movie made by its gorgeous songs, with lyrics by Shailendra set to music by Sachin Dev Burman, and sung by Mohammad Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar, Kishore Kumar, Manna Dey and Burman himself. (I still return to those songs at regular intervals, and so I suspect does Shivy).

For all his musical learning, I never heard Shivy sing or even hum (perhaps he did so in the privacy of his room). However, he did have literary aspirations. In our second year, St. Stephen’s admitted women students for the first time. Within months Shivy had begun drafting a novel on the changing social dynamics of what had hitherto been a self-enclosed, self-satisfied, utterly parochial community of young men. The novel was called ‘Asha Singh’—so the lead character was female—and he was writing it in long hand in a large green notebook. He allowed me a glimpse of the first page (hence I remember the title) but no more—for, as he said, first drafts should never be shown to anyone (a sensible yet rarely followed rule applicable to writers, scholars, graduate students and Chat GPT users alike).  

As I was drafting this piece, and the memories came flooding back, I recalled a second and more telling example of Shivy’s early literary experiments. He had been appointed an editor of the students’ magazine, Kooler Talk, which normally ran satirical articles on students and faculty in the style of P. G. Wodehouse. Shivy was determined to elevate the tone, and did two wonderful profiles of a long-serving office clerk and the man who sold us cigarettes respectively. They were among the college’s forgotten subalterns, who, as nudged along by Shivy, were made to speak, their words and thoughts bringing an altogether new dimension to a previously lightweight rag.  

As many of you know, after college Shivy became a civil servant, and it was more than a decade before he found his way into anthropology. Yet those pages of Asha Singh and those precocious profiles of non-elite Stephanians do perhaps in retrospect anticipate the social theorist and field-worker in the making.

Though he has retired from the academy Shivy has by no means retired from scholarship, and will doubtless now have more time to write the books and papers based on the ethnographic and archival research he has conducted over the decades. Hopefully he will also have more time to go back to those early interests, to literature and especially to music, drawing on the unparalleled resources of YouTube, with its staggeringly rich collections of the dead—but never to be forgotten—maestros and maestras of Indian classical music. I will be with him there in spirit, and who knows, before we each depart this earth, we may yet have one last, lingering cup of coffee in the old Delhi University Coffee House.