Bengt G. Karlsson - K. Sivaramakrishnan Reflection

Beppe Karlsson
Stockholm University

Greetings to everyone. I am sending this note to join the celebration of Shivi’s outstanding academic career. I met Shivi the first time in the student café at SOAS in London in the mid 1990s. The sweat smell of weed was coming up from the basement where the student union gathered. Already then, Shivi had the sober elegance of a statesmen or a diplomat. Speaking in a soft voice, calm and convincing. You listen. We had a common interest in the colonial history of Bengal, and Shivi had already a few articles out. He agreed to read a few chapters of my thesis. 

Over the years our paths have crossed several times. As a postdoc in Chicago, Shivi invited me to give a talk in Seattle, introducing me to all his colleagues there. The most memorable interactions were in 2005 when Gunnel Cederlöf and I invited Shivi for a longer stay at Uppsala University to give a series of lectures in our new course in Political Ecology. Shivi brought his wonderful wife and daughters along. The theme of the lectures was Postcolonial Nature and they were supposed to become the basis of a book that he had already secured a contact for. We were a rather small group of people that followed the lectures, but as you can see on the image, Shivi insisted on having a podium to be able to stand up while speaking. Gunnel thus made one of a carbon box. In these lectures, Shivi summed up the work in environmental history and political ecology of colonial and postcolonial settings, outlining the road ahead. It was fantastic. For many years I was waiting for the book to come out, but Shivi eventually told me that it wasn’t really in the cards any longer. But perhaps now it is time for this book!  

Dear Shivi. With these words I would like to thank you for all the support and cooperation over the years. You are a true scholar and someone I am happy to know and count as a friend. 

All the best, 

Beppe Karlsson, Stockholm