Ajantha Subramanian - K. Sivaramakrishnan Reflection

Ajantha Subramanian
City University of New York

Dear Shivi,

Heartiest congratulations on your retirement! What a glorious run you’ve had as a scholar, teacher and mentor. This event is a true testament to your deep and meaningful influence on the fields of anthropology, South Asian Studies, environmental studies, and on generations of students fortunate to have received your inspiration and guidance. I count myself among the lucky and am so grateful for the years of sage advice and support that you’ve given me.

Although my last project moved away from an environmental focus, my first book was indebted to your interventions in the environmental history and anthropology of South Asia, particularly your conceptualization of the making of modern nature through the work of colonial and postcolonial governance. I am now turning back to political ecology through a project on gold mining and am newly appreciative of your ideas about governance, various scales of regionalism, and anthropogenic nature. The care, rigor, and systematicity of your scholarship will no doubt stand the test of time.

I was trying to recall when we were first introduced -- I think it was at SOAS in the mid 1990s. What is clearer in my mind is meeting you at the Madison South Asia conference in 1998 or so when you and Arun put together a panel that eventually resulted in the Regional Modernities volume. I don’t know if you realize how consequential that experience was for me as someone fresh out of fieldwork and drowning in material that I had yet to digest. The interactions at the Yale conference that followed Madison and preceded the volume, and the experience of writing my chapter for it, renewed my faith in academia at a critical juncture when I was deciding whether to stay on in the profession. Your warm and welcoming presence played no small part in this decision.

Since then, you have been an ongoing presence in my life, giving me feedback on writing, writing letters for me, and advising me on professional moves. Your judiciousness and equanimity were always so welcome and helped check some of my own rash impulses. Happily for me, we’ve crossed paths many times since on dissertation committees, and at conferences, book workshops, and other events.

But our interpersonal encounters are not the only way you have made a mark on my life. So too have my relationships with your remarkable students, several of whom became colleagues and friends. Their intellectual rigor and ambition, their ethical orientation to scholarship, and their enduring commitment to understanding South Asia in all its complexity bear the mark of your steady and deep influence as a mentor.  

I trust that you have plans for a fun and festive post-retirement life filled with everything that gives you pleasure and satisfaction. It is so well deserved.

Warmest wishes,

Ajantha