Juned Shaikh - K. Sivaramakrishnan Reflections

Juned Shaikh
University of California, Santa Cruz

Thank you for having me here and thank you to the organizers and participants for making this a wonderful, warm event. I want to underline three remarkable practices of Shivi’s mentorship – eating together, participating in reading groups, and openness to scholarship that may not align with his political beliefs.  If you have been Shivi’s student in Seattle, you would have gone to the vegetarian buffet at Flowers on University Ave or may have been invited to his home for a party where Shivi cooked. Alcohol was not absent from these parties. You may have also played cricket with him at Ravenna Park – he is a mean left arm spin bowler in the mold of Bishan Singh Bedi. On the cricket ground he would invariably get snacks for everybody. In New Haven, you may have gone to Thaali or to one of the colleges on campus or to other such places. I certainly did when I was a postdoc here in 2011-12. Food and feeding were always an important part of Shivi’s mentorship. In the process of eating, his students were treated to the breadth of his reading and his considered opinions on a wide range of topics such as cricket, films, and the State of various academic fields he was engaging with.

One such field was Subaltern Studies. When I met Shivi for the first time in 2005, I had read only one piece by him, his chapter in Reading Subaltern Studies, entitled Situating the Subaltern, that demonstrated his close engagement with the collective and critiqued it for ignoring an analysis of political economy and the State. Personally, I think that chapter was extremely influential for many scholars, particularly, history graduate students of my vintage who entered graduate programs after the heyday of the collective. Many of us took the call to bring the State back, and study political economic changes, into an understanding of subaltern politics, to heart. I learned much later that the chapter came out of discussions in a reading group in Seattle and I began to appreciate the pedagogical value of reading and discussing not just in graduate seminars, or spaces like agrarian studies, but also in impromptu reading groups. For a couple of years after Shivi left for Yale, a few South Asia graduate students in Seattle participated in a reading group called Marx and Madira at various pubs in the University district. By the time we disbanded it was apparent that Madira was overshadowing Marx. But the idea of reading in a group became entrenched in our minds.

The last point I want to highlight is Shivi’s openness to different types of work, even works motored by different political positions. I think the common thread that ties these differences together is his belief that democracy, and by extension modernity, can take different forms. In the democratic process, the rightwing, left wing, liberals etc. may end up wielding power; the work of a scholar is to engage with the actually existing democracy, its realpolitik. I think this belief provides him the bandwidth to mentor scholars and students with various ideological predilections or those who may respond to different personal and collective identities. The democratizing of scholarly space, I think, is one of his abiding contributions to academy. This is one of the reasons, he’s a magnet for students who have a winding path to academia. Thank you Shivi for opening up that space.

Juned Shaikh

UC Santa Cruz