Helen Siu - K. Sivaramakrishnan Reflection

Helen Siu
Yale University 

A slice of pre-history of Shivi that most of you might not know.

When he came to Yale in 1989, he was a rising civil servant for the Indian bureaucracy.  Bill Kelly, Jim and I managed to entice him to study anthropology.  Somehow, I feel that if he had not made that decision, we might have had a remarkable prime minister in India!

But Shivi’s career was not ruined.  With his characteristic competence, he finished his degree in record time, beating all of you I am sure, and moved on.  Agrarian Studies has been his baby.  He started as the first student helper in the early 1990s and took our first graduate seminar when we had 59 students.  Shivi says that Paul Sabean was the only undergraduate in that seminar？  Anthropology invited Shivi back in 2006 as a senior professor.  His contributions to the department and to South Asian Studies are not only intellectual, but also financial (we have proven to Yale that anthropologists could be effective fund raisers to support programs and students close to our hearts.)  

Since I already used one minute of my allotted time, let me highlight one endeavor of which Shivi and I can claim as comrades in arms, or partners in crime.

To continue our agenda to cross disciplinary boundaries, we have pushed for inter-regional research across Asia in the past 15 years.

When I returned from the first SSRC Inter-Asia conference in Dubai in 2008, Bill Kelly, Shivi and I asked Ian Shapiro, then director of MacMillan Center, to provide 25K to start Yale’s own Inter-Asia Initiative.  We joined global partners in the SSRC consortium (NUS, HKU, Gottingen, Seoul National U) and helped organize a series of conferences (2010 at NUS, 2012 at HKU, 2013 Koḉ U, 2016 at Seoul National U). Each time, we screened hundreds of paper proposals to create an enthusiastic multi-generation community of adventurous scholars worldwide.  Unlike our affluent Asian partners, we did not have much funding.  Instead, we contributed our labor to the consortium (by then, we might have drafted Erik Harms to help). Shiv and I also decided to approach The Carnegie Foundation. The outcome was a pleasant surprise.  The foundation concluded that our modest request of 250K would not get us very far.  They doubled the amount.  I was thrilled!  With his usual stoic grin, Shivi calmed me down saying “no problem, I shall draft a formal note of thanks on Yale stationary.”  Over the years, I have relied on him to deal with bureaucrats.

We used the funds to engage Yale’s faculty and students – post-doctoral fellows, student-initiated workshops, and above all, participated in two major research/fieldtrip/publications with partners across the globe (e.g. HK Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at HK University).   The three Asia inside Out volumes with Harvard U Press redefined Area Studies by crossing continental divides, shifting land-based, state centered research entities to oceans and river deltas (I still remember Sunil’s kind review in the American Historical Review)!  During our field trips in HK, India, Oman, Tanzania, Hanoi, we bonded with at least 36 colleagues who contributed to the volumes (some of them are here today).  The other series, led by Shivi and Anne Rademarcher, highlighted Urban ecologies in Asian cities, the three volumes joined emerging research energies on Asian urbanism and environmental humanities.  On our revamped Yale Inter-Asia Initiative website today, you would see Shivi, relaxed, all smiles, hiking along the HK wilderness trails (meeting occasional wild boars) and not getting seasick from the open waters!

We continued our subversive streak and got the three Asian area councils to work together in a three-year Inter-Asia program after the Carnegie funds ran out in the wake of Covid.  With supportive colleagues, I recently brought more funds from HK to provide small grants to place our adventurous students and post-doctoral scholars ahead of their peers in a difficult job environment, and to connect them to peers situated globally.  We are not there yet, but with publishers and funding entities taking notice, we now rely on a younger generation of co-conspirators.  I see Shaila from Geneva, Luisa from Rotterdam, and Anne from Munich. We have Louisa Lumbord here too.  You can tell that our “Asian” agenda have happily embraced Europe and Africa.  

When the world seems to be in crisis, there is the opportunity to think outside the box, break new grounds, map a new academic landscape by de-centering China as a research site in Asia and moving beyond US based institutions and mindsets to reposition ourselves with the rest of the world!  Do not let boundaries define you; instead, define your own with curiosity and resilience.

Our late Jim Scott once announced in an acknowledgment of a book, that he would not claim full responsibility for what he had written; if he had barked up the wrong tree, we were in it together.  

Shivi and I have faith in the future of Inter-Asia scholarship at Yale. Together with supportive colleagues, we have planted subversive seeds. It is up to you to grow them into trees and forests.  That is my hope too.