Nikhil Anand - K. Sivaramakrishnan Reflection

Nikhil Anand
University of Pennsylvania

Mentorship

From our very first conversations, I was struck by Shivi’s quiet generosity and kindness. I was working at a human rights organization in Mumbai in 2002 when, I reached out to Shivi about  my interest in graduate school. He responded immediately to my shot in the dark email (yes we had email then) by very kindly offering to talk over the phone.  That was the first time I heard about this thing called environmental anthropology. A year later, he invited me to attend workshop in Delhi he’d co-organized with Mahesh Rangarajan (where I first met Radhika, also not a PhD student).  Already, his actions spoke so much more than his words (which were characteristically few)- His actions- (characteristically many)– invitations of care, thoughtfulness and generosity– have supported me over the last quarter century. 

Qualifying Exam

Our conversations continued after (and despite) my beginning a PhD at Stanford soon after.  After some initial hesitation– because even then he was so very overcommitted with students, Shivi served as a member of my oral exam committee and guided me on a qualifying exam on Citizenship, the Developmental State and Political Ecology in South Asia. For the exam- co-supervised by Akhil Gupta– I think it was Shivi that framed the following small question for me to answer in 24 hours:

Discuss the proposition that political ecology scholarship in south Asia is necessarily engaged in the study of the postcolonial condition. What are the lessons and limitations of this approach, particularly for thinking about questions of citizenship? 

You’d recognize this as a Shivi question! I don’t think I answered that question very well then, but it was enormously consequential for my dissertation and book, Hydraulic City, in which I tried to bring political ecology’s attention to distribution and scale, into conversation with the everyday demands of citizenship and political society. 

State-making

Another way in which the book was tremendously influenced by Shivi’s insight was on account of his critical engagement with Foucault– that Foucault’s theory of power was too totalizing, and that governmentality was not attentive to questions of spatial, temporal and institutional variations.  Coloniality and state power, he pointed out were practically mediated impositions, and as such, it was necessary to focus on the location at which these relations were made.  Recognizing their critical role in government, the former bureaucrat urged an attention to the work of field officers of the state to understand projects of state-making.  And in my PhD fieldwork that followed, I was particularly interested in the ways that engineers and water department laborers met informalized residents in their efforts to make, maintain and manage what they called ‘the system’.

Ecologies of Urbanism:  Finally, just as I was completing my PhD, in 2010, 2011… Shivi together with Anne Rademacher and Helen Siu included me, as they did so many other junior scholars at the time– in an exciting new conversation.  Exciting not only because it was in Hong Kong (while of course that)– congee for breakfast. Exciting also because they brought graduate students–  Asher Ghertner, Sapna Doshi, Lalit Batra, Nityha Raman– brought us as peers to think with the  most delightful and generous lights in the field- Vinay Gidwani, Shubhra Gururani, Will Glover and Karen Coelho.  The three volumes on Ecologies of Urbanism were sparkling.  But they produced more than that– they produced an intellectual community that continues to hold me in Environmental Anthropology and South Asian Urbanism today.

For all your care in Hong Kong and Delhi, between the East and the Best coast of the United States– and in all the times and spaces in between these last two and a half decades, thank you so much Shivi, for your mentorship, care, and friendship. Here’s to the next 25 years.