Deepti Chatti - K. Sivaramakrishnan Reflection

Deepti Chatti
University of California, San Diego

Good morning everyone, my name is Deepti Chatti and I was a graduate student at the Yale School of Environment till 2019. I am currently an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego.  

Since it would be impossible to summarize all (or even many) of Shivi’s contributions to environmental studies in the time that I have today, I will focus my remarks on the ways that Shivi’s scholarship has contributed to the study of environmental expertise and knowledge, which are topics of interest to scholars in political ecology, development studies, and science and technology studies.  

Shivi has shown us that expertise and knowledge cannot be studied through the binary lens of a colonial science forged in the metropole and implemented in the colony. Continental forestry could not be replicated to form colonial forestry. This was not a simple story of a colonial Western science imposed on and eviscerating indigenous world views and knowledge. Drawing on historians of science working in South Asia and other contexts, Shivi showed us that the empire provided unique opportunities for scientific discoveries. Shivi also showed us that expertise cannot be analyzed accurately through the lens of the expert scientist sharing the fruits of his expert knowledge with lay peasants. Expertise was not made in an abstract way somewhere else and transported to the field. Shivi shows us that scientific expertise in the forestry sciences in the 200 year period that Modern Forests describes, is forged through interactions between various constituents including amateur scientists, bureaucrats, local landlords, peasants, trees, forests, and the place of woodland Bengal itself.  

Modern Forests negates the narrative that colonial foresters disrupted native ecologies through the implementation of scientific forestry plans. Instead Shivi reminds us that “landscapes were neither uniformly transformed by, nor similarly obdurate in defying ‘assistance to nature’ that became so abundantly and persistently available by the twentieth century, from foresters and their cooperators in Bengal” (p2)

Shivi’s scholarship encourages us to the embrace the messy complexity that emerges through careful attention to place and the myriad relationships that constitute it. For example, Shivi cautions us against thinking about the natural world as simply out there, an objective reality that becomes knowable, manipulable, degradable, conservable through human action (this might be the point of view of some natural scientists, foresters, and also some environmental historians), and also cautions us against making nature epiphenomenal, thinking about it as a passive text or backdrop in front of which human drama unfolds (this might have been the point of view of those who deploy cultural critiques while completely ignoring ecological processes). Thus, Shivi offers in Modern Forests a clear call for not just interdisciplinarity in environmental studies but also an appreciation for both the social construction of something called the environment and the ecological processes by which the environment is simultaneously produced.  

These insights have been instrumental in pushing forward critical scholarship in environmental studies that takes the environment seriously, and are particularly helpful today as we struggle to find ways to study and tackle climate change while keeping social justice at the forefront of our minds.

Now, I would have gladly spent my entire 5 minutes discussing Shivi’s contributions to environmental studies since there is so much more to say, but I really wished to say just a few words about his mentorship too, so that’s how I will conclude my remarks by shifting gears and sharing what Shivi’s mentorship has meant to me.  

As you all might know, or might have experienced directly, Shivi’s mentorship is legendary; he is generous with two of the scarcest resources in academia -  time, and attention.  

I came to Yale as an environmental engineer and left as a critical social scientist in the making. I am not exaggerating when I say that this intellectual growth would not have been possible without Shivi. Through the various ups and downs of graduate school, I benefited from his wisdom, generously shared during group meetings of the Env anthropology collective or the South Asia research group and through innumerable walks around New Haven.  

Shivi’s mentorship does not end when you leave Yale. In the seven years since I graduated, Shivi has continued to generously offer advice when asked on a variety of different matters ranging from navigating job interviews, negotiating offers, visa and green card related matters, progress to tenure, institutional histories and politics of schools of environment, higher education in India, and finding time to write amidst all the demands of being an assistant professor. The simple truth is that my current livelihood as faculty, and my life in California would not have been possible without his mentorship.  

In May 2017, Shivi received the Yale mentorship award. Since I was away doing fieldwork at the time, I was unable to attend his acceptance speech, but he was kind enough to send across a written copy of the remarks he gave at the official ceremony. While accepting the mentorship award, Shivi talked about four aspects of mentoring, and I am going to quote Shivi as he describes mentoring as a collective enterprise.  

“Our students, those who choose us as mentors, come to us rich with experience and equipped with diverse views of the world. Often they are more intelligent and savvy than us, always bursting with energy, sometimes impatient, and usually occupied with questions we have not yet quite thought about in any sustained fashion. These are some of the most enjoyable elements of working with these students for they set up opportunities for mutual education in research groups. True learning occurs in the rough and tumble of ideas bouncing around in these workshops and seminars. Those unflinching in sharing emergent and at times still unpolished ideas, those unafraid of being disputed or redirected, learn the most. It was TS Eliot, I think, who wrote that holding on to ideas in fear of their being stolen or ridiculed is to refuse the possibility of dialogic learning; for he did not believe in the conceit of complete originality. All learning is, therefore, I say, a collective enterprise; it occurs through collaborative effort, and mentoring must nurture this collective enterprise. “

I think these words give us a glimpse into the thought process by which Shivi approaches mentorship, learning, and intellectual work more broadly.  

Dear Shivi, a sincere thank you for everything that you have contributed to political ecology, development studies, environmental studies and Science and Technology Studies, and thank you for everything that you have done for me and countless other students. You have given us so much to aspire to.  

Wishing you all the best in your retirement.