Sara Shneiderman - K. Sivaramakrishnan Reflection

Sara Shneiderman
University of British Columbia

Recently a colleague with whom I was just becoming acquainted asked who my most influential intellectual mentors have been. Shivi’s image immediately floated to the forefront of my mind. Although most of what I learned from him was transmitted within a very short and intense three year period, his imprint on my life as a scholar, an educator, and human being has been exponential.

When I first arrived at Yale to take up an Assistant Professor position in Anthropology and South Asian Studies in 2011, I had never met Shivi in person. When I left three years later in 2014, I couldn’t imagine ever having not known him. I had interviewed remotely in 2009 (before that became common practice) due to pregnancy complications that made it impossible for me to travel for a campus visit. By the time I actually got to New Haven, we had exchanged many emails and spent hours on Skype (remember that?) calls to work out the details of my appointment. 

But still, meeting in person for the first time over lunch at a local diner was an altogether different experience. He put me at ease and answered my stack of breathless questions with a studied calm that I came to learn was his hallmark style. He listened well and met me where I was in that neophyte moment, explaining in reassuring yet not condescending terms exactly how things worked, while also encouraging me to learn for myself. 

I was not Shivi’s student, but as a recent PhD transitioning from a post-doc to my first faculty position, in many ways I might as well have been. It was through Shivi’s mentorship that I learned how to supervise graduate students, build academic programs, and navigate institutional politics, particularly at the intersection between disciplinary and area-focused programs, working together as we did in both the Yale Department of Anthropology and the South Asian Studies Council. Whatever academic life threw at him, Shivi seemed to stay present while simultaneously zooming out to take a bird’s eye view that enabled him to determine the most appropriate course of action. He used his formidable understanding of bureaucracy to creatively reimagine the institutions around us from the inside out. 

It was also with Shivi that I truly became a South Asianist. He saw the ethnographic and linguistic research that I and my husband and colleague Mark Turin were engaged with in Nepal and Himalayan regions of India as critical contributions to South Asian Studies writ large. Together with Sir Peter Crane, then Dean of the then School of Forestry and Environment, Shivi supported us in building the Yale Himalaya Initiative. This became an interdisciplinary meeting place for faculty and students across the university who shared commitments to the Himalayan region. Shivi’s investment of time and funding in this project generated a sense of belonging within South Asia-focused scholarly networks that I had found elusive elsewhere, in turn expanding the scope of my own transregional thinking. 

I cannot count the number of times I knocked on Shivi’s office door at the end of the hallway on Sachem Street, just down from mine. In the office, on walks, over lunches, he advised me on everything from where to submit my writing, how to develop my syllabi, how to wrangle sometimes entitled students in my role as Director of Undergraduate Studies for South Asian Studies, how to prepare graduate students for fieldwork. I still use the template he shared with me for student field reports, and think of him every time I introduce it to a student. 

I will never forget what Shivi said when I knocked on his door to tell him the news that Mark and I were leaving for UBC: “Congratulations. Your departure will be very sad for us, but good for the field. There will be a lot for you to do there.” I was taken aback by his spontaneous generosity, in this moment which could have felt like a betrayal. Instead, he was already seeing how our move might lead to new horizons, not only for us, but for the many colleagues, students, and institutional structures we might be fortunate enough to encounter, the networks we might foster and expand. 

That is indeed what happened. In the last 12 years since leaving Yale in 2014, hardly a week has gone by in which I haven’t thought of Shivi as I write, teach, and negotiate the vagaries of academic life. I’ve also been proud to watch the remarkable trajectories of the many graduate students we co-supervised or served on joint committees for.  

I wish Shivi well in retirement, and hope that the slower pace will suit him well. At the same time, I look forward to future opportunities to work together. Most importantly, I am hoping to finally complete my second book for one of the University of Washington book series that he edits. The idea for an ethnography of post-conflict state restructuring in Nepal first emerged in conversation with Shivi, and I began the research in 2014 before leaving for UBC. But soon thereafter, Nepal’s 2015 earthquakes struck and radically reshaped the lives of my interlocutors and the land on which they live. It took some years to realize that part of the book’s work was to explore the entanglements between post-conflict state restructuring and post-disaster reconstruction. That is what I am writing now. One of things that motivates me is imagining the  full circle moment in which I can share the completed manuscript with Shivi, and thank him for all he has offered so many scholars like myself across the many fields that we share.