Shaila Seshia Galvin - K. Sivaramakrishnan Reflection

Shaila Seshia Galvin
Geneva Graduate Institute

I’m grateful to be speaking on collaboration. But I haven’t, as others here have, collaborated with Shivi in the development of important edited volumes or worked with Shivi as a colleague. So, initially, I wondered what I could say. Eventually, I realized that even though I haven’t worked with Shivi in any of these ways, in fact, I faced the opposite problem. When reflecting on collaboration with Shivi, the issue is that there is just so much to say, and difficult to know where to begin.

Let me begin, then, with this. I speak as Shivi’s student, and (as has been expressed so beautifully by others today) I see some of his most vital lessons being ones that he does not teach but lives. This is true of collaboration (as, I think, it is true also of his mentorship—the two are connected). Shivi, you live collaboration, and you have shown me and so many others how, in its best sense, it is a relational, deeply human, way of scholarly being. Collaboration is rare in anthropology, where individualism and singularity are so long-engrained in disciplinary traditions – the figure of the lone fieldworker, the valorization of single-authored work. To embody collaboration, as Shivi does, is to chart a path against the grain of systems that recognize and reward the opposite, and to work steadfastly for something more collective. This is meaningfully resistant (and quietly rebellious). To call on our mentor, Jim Scott, the kind of collaboration that Shivi embodies, and has welcomed so many of us into, is—if not always hidden—then certainly an alternate transcript for our disciplines and fields.

Shivi arrived at Yale when I was in my third year of the joint PhD program in Anthropology and Forestry and Environmental Studies, just as I was about to leave for my fieldwork. By this time, his work had already had an important influence on my own dissertation research through Modern Forests and a series of important volumes he co-edited on the state, ecology, and environment in South Asia that were published over the subsequent 12 years of the early 2000s [Agrarian Environments and Regional Modernities (with Arun Agrawal), Ecological Nationalisms (with Gunnel Cederlöf), The State in India After Liberalization (with Akhil Gupta), and the two-volume India’s Environmental History (with Mahesh Rangarajan)]. These collaborative works transformed the study of environmental relations, history, and the state in India and South Asia, reorienting conceptual and methodological possibilities and catalyzing interdisciplinary fields of scholarship. As a graduate student in the early stages of imagining and crafting my dissertation research, and on the cusp of my fieldwork, it was hugely inspiring to read this work, to follow the paths it opened up, and to sense the possibility of what collaborative inquiry could offer.

When I returned to New Haven in early 2009, I saw more fully that this collective and collaborative spirit infused not only Shivi’s scholarship, but his way of being within the university. I was amazed at how in just two years Shivi had transformed the study of South Asia at Yale, creating new cross-disciplinary conversations, teaching, and research among students and faculty across the university and beyond it (for instance, within the Department of Anthropology, Shivi created the Environmental Anthropology Collective and co-directed the Yale Agrarian Studies Program. In 2013, in his capacity as an Editorial Collective member for the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS), he worked to convene JPS’s 40th anniversary conference, bringing together Yale Agrarian Studies, the wider international field of critical agrarian studies, and an even larger community of scholar-activists and social movements like La Via Campesina).

As a graduate students, we too were invited warmly into these collaborations, not as onlookers but as participants, encouraged to present our own work, and supported with his intellectual vision and wisdom to organize our own colloquia and conferences. Looking back, one way to see this would be as a part of our doctoral training—but training is a cold and functional word, and it does not capture the generous induction we experienced, and what we learned: that it is worth pushing against scholarly isolation and summoning a more collaborative way of being.

As a mentor, Shivi’s collaboration also expressed itself in subtler moments (the best way I can put it, and as Sara Shneiderman mentioned earlier, is “meeting you wherever you’re at”).  These moments don’t get written up in the pages of dissertations and books—but in my case, the fact that there is a dissertation (and then a book) hinged also on moments like these.

In September 2007, not long after I arrived in India to begin my fieldwork, I sat down in an internet café (remember those?!) in the north Indian city of Dehradun. I was there to write a difficult email to Shivi, to relay that my fieldwork was not going well; in fact, it was going nowhere. At the time, Will, our first child, was nearly one year old, my husband was working in Delhi (several hundred kilometres away), and I was trying to figure out how I would be able to do fieldwork while also solo parenting for quite long stretches of time a toddler in a place where I knew very few people. The fear that I might not be able to begin (far less accomplish) my research had left me feeling like a failure and a fraud. I thought that it was time to let Shivi know where I was at, and I wasn’t certain how he would take this news from me. In his email reply, Shivi began, “I can understand the difficulties you are facing, it is not easy to start field work, and must be even harder with a small child to keep safe and well. All of us (even without your additional responsibilities) have a tough time initially…Keep up your spirits and be patient, soon you will be on your way.” He went on to offer extensive, practical advice on ways I might navigate this, and he put me in touch with several of his own personal contacts who helped me on my way. Just at the moment when I thought I might not belong in the discipline, his words, “all of us have a tough time initially,” assured me that I did. For the rest of my fieldwork, and for all these years after, I have hung on to those words “keep your spirits up and be patient; soon you will be on your way.” Full of recognition and care; they are equally a rigourous, gentle, refusal to concede an inch of ground to doubts and fears.  

Another occasion came later, back in New Haven, as I was in the early stages of writing my dissertation after the birth of Kieran, our second child. Kieran was just a few months old, and that afternoon I had put him in a baby wrap and headed down to Shivi’s office to discuss a draft of my first chapter. I was crossing my fingers that Kieran would nap through our meeting, but that was not to be. As Kieran started to squirm and protest, I was on the verge of suggesting that I could come back another time when Shivi proposed that we just go for a walk and see if that helped. It did. The walk Shivi and I took that day soothed my crying baby and simultaneously advanced a dissertation chapter (and neither one of those things is easy to do!). This shows Shivi’s way of collaboration—something that isn’t done but lived. Thank you, Shivi, for meeting me wherever I’ve been at, for showing me that there is a path when I thought there wasn’t, and for walking it steadily with me (sometimes with babies in tow). You deserve a restful and relaxing retirement, but I hope that in some way we can all keep walking with you.