Bhoomika Joshi - K. Sivaramakrishnan Reflection

Bhoomika Joshi
National University of Singapore

A few days ago, while pondering over what to really say today, I made a fairly simple decision: I searched my inbox for emails from Shivi.

The result was 1,063 emails.

I know this number may not be extraordinary in this room. If anything, many of you are probably thinking, “Only 1,063?”. So I took another step to check out what was happening over these emails. 

This count begins in 2014 — which is important, because for one entire year of these 1063 emails, I was not actually a Yale student. I had not been admitted. In fact, I did not even make it through the first time I applied. But the emails did not stop – they kept up my spirit and my mind working harder through suggestions, directions and some very useful advice. 

My inbox from 2015 reminded me that one of the first things that happens when you are admitted to Yale and indicate that you want to work with Shivi is that your inbox undergoes a complete and irreversible transformation. Suddenly there are emails from faculty members, current graduate students, former graduate students, administrative staff, collaborators, workshop organizers, and people you have never met but who know what region you work on and what your dissertation might someday become.

And attached to these emails are astonishing levels of detail. Housing details. Funding details. Registration details. Reading group details. Conference details. Administrative procedures you did not know existed. Advice on archives, language study, health insurance, writing groups, grants, fieldwork, winter clothing, and occasionally life itself.

At first, it feels overwhelming. But over the years I realized something remarkable: Shivi recreates this ecosystem every single year, for every new cohort of students, with the same level of commitment and care, a lot of it via spreadsheets. 

By 2016, my emails (and my memory) tells me that I was inducted into the South Asia Research Group, widely and popularly now known as SARG. Soon after came the Environmental Anthropology Colloquium, which later became one of the intellectual foundations for what is now the Environmental Humanities Program and Inter-Asia. When I attended the most recent Inter-Asia meeting this March in Seattle, and it struck me that many of the people coordinating it now are themselves former members of SARG, EAC and EH. I did not realize it then but now with the power of hindsight, realize that Shivi was never simply mentoring individuals but was shaping durable intellectual communities and worlds of which most us have been members and which also brings us here today. 

I remember sitting in those early SARG meetings feeling deeply confused about why I was reading unpublished book manuscripts, grant applications, book proposals, and journal articles when I was still struggling to figure out my own research questions. At the time, it felt mildly unreasonable and even intimidating. But that also turned out be the long lasting understanding of how scholarship actually comes into being — not as polished books magically appearing on library shelves, but as messy drafts, uncertain arguments, collaborative conversations, revisions, and collective thinking. We learned how to read across disciplines, how to discuss work generously but rigorously, and how to sustain those conversations. 

One of the emails I treasure most from those years came after a SARG presentation I gave in 2016. Later that evening, Shivi sent me a short email saying that I had made a “great” presentation. Now, if you are a graduate student, especially in your early years, you know that a single sentence of encouragement from your advisor can become a treasured archival object. You reread it at strategically necessary moments for the next several years. And it also assures you that someone is reading and listening to what you might think is an outlandish idea!

However, another memory from that same year remains even more vivid.

At the end of my first year, I walked to my mailbox and found a sealed Yale envelope with my name on it. When you are a graduate student, an unexpected sealed Yale envelope does not generally inspire confidence. So naturally I panicked. I remember immediately checking the neighboring mailboxes to see whether everyone else had also received one. Nobody had. Which made things worse. I became convinced that there had been some negligence on my part and I was going to incur some kind of penalty for it. I opened the envelope — and inside was a detailed evaluation from Shivi about my progress in year one, my strengths and weaknesses, and possible directions for year two.

Encouraging in places. Cautionary in others. Extremely detailed throughout. And I still believe Shivi may have been the only faculty member who physically delivered annual assessment letters into graduate student mailboxes. What strikes me now is not only the labor involved, but the intentionality of it. The letter communicated something very important: that your work was being carefully read, tracked, remembered, and taken seriously.

And honestly, even today, when I check my mailbox at the university in Singapore where I now work, a small part of my brain still thinks I might someday discover another letter of appraisal about my work as an Assistant Professor from Shivi mailed internationally, all the way from New Haven.

Coming back to spreadsheets, between 2022 and 2023, much of our correspondence revolved around an enormous spreadsheet that I maintained on Shivi’s advice and template for the academic job market. The spreadsheet tracked institutions, deadlines, addresses, missing documents, recommendation letters, statuses, interviews, revisions, and follow-ups. It expanded and contracted with the flurry of some approvals, and many rejections. At the time, it felt relentless. But looking back, I realize that what Shivi was providing was not merely advice. He was providing structure — a scaffolding when you did not yet know how to quite build one for yourself. Shivi is also the only person I know who will submit your recommendation letter before you have completed the application itself — and then send you a reminder that your own materials are still pending.

And I think this is one of the defining features of Shivi’s mentorship. He did not simply tell students to become scholars, colleagues, institutional citizens, or mentors. He demonstrated how those things were done, repeatedly and patiently. As the parent of a four-and-a-half-year-old now, I increasingly think of this as a kind of academic “show and tell.” Shivi modeled ways of reading, responding, collaborating, organizing, and caring for intellectual communities. Many of us learned how to mentor by first being mentored by him.

In 2017, some of us had the privilege of helping nominate Shivi for the Graduate Student Mentor  award, which he won. What I remember most from that process was how unanimous the enthusiasm was across cohorts, departments, and disciplines. People responded immediately because so many of us had versions of the same story.

But I remember something else even more vividly: Shivi’s speech at the reception afterward. Instead of speaking primarily about his own achievements, he listed the accomplishments of his students — prospectus defenses, grants, fellowships, publications, jobs, faculty positions — one after another. Even while receiving an award himself, he instinctively redirected recognition outward.

I also want to mention a different moment that my inbox reminded me of during this process. This one is from 2020, during the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests and during the strange fragmentation of time and space that defined COVID. At 10 Sachem, there some overdue and some difficult conversations. There was also uncertainty, frustration, disagreement, and institutional strain. What I remember from some of the email exchanges with Shivi during that time, is that he made time for those conversations. He reached out to students individually and collectively, listened carefully, shared notes and reflections, participated in committees, and engaged in the slow, imperfect, often invisible work of institutional change. That labor is easy to overlook because it rarely appears on a CV. But many of us experienced directly how much work it took — emotionally, intellectually, and institutionally.

And that brings me back to one of the very first emails he sent me after I was admitted to Yale in 2015. He wrote, and I quote - 

“Mentoring is often the Achilles heel of great universities where faculty are often too busy and students somewhat competitive in ways that are unhelpful… the guiding principle here is to always be respectful, helpful, cooperative, yet rigorous and reliable in working together… many of us have worked hard for many years to get to this place in our working relations — and students flourish in such an environment.”

I think what everyone in this room knows is that Shivi did not simply describe that environment. He built it. Patiently, collectively, administratively, intellectually, emotionally — and year after year after year.

So thank you, Shivi — for the emails, the meetings, the walks, the reading groups, the spreadsheets, the letters, the institutional labor, the encouragement, the rigor, and the extraordinary generosity with which you made intellectual life feel both serious and deeply humane.

And congratulations on your retirement! I am however still looking forward to more emails 😊