Vikramaditya Thakur - K. Sivaramakrishnan Reflection

Vikramaditya Thakur
University of Delaware

There’s a sense of déjà vu as I was a participant in another farewell to honor Shivi at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle in 2006. I didn’t anticipate that the one at Yale would come so early. Given our shared interest in postcolonial theory, history and cricket, I’m reminded of that famous quote I heard legendary cricket player Sunil Gavaskar state several times, quoting another top cricket star of his times, Vijay Merchant. Merchant, who retired in 1951 after scoring 154 against England, believed in leaving at the peak of one’s career. The famous advice to retire is when people ask “why?” rather than “why not?” Contrary to professional cricketers playing at the top level who slow with age within a matter of a few years, as is true for all sports that demand peak physical fitness, social scientists improve over the decades. But, I guess, there is life after writing a book that revised the field of environmental history while simultaneously laying its foundation, editing nearly a dozen books—products of intense workshops, many journal articles, mentoring so many students and managing multiple departments simultaneously. To borrow a quote from that 2006 UW farewell, “Shivi was arguably the best IAS officer that was sent to the US university system.” 

LAW & STATE:

This is a theme on which I can appreciate Shivi’s approach both at the personal level and professionally too as an anthropologist. It is related to my study of the Narmada Dam resettlement study in rural Maharashtra, India—a process I tracked both as an insider as a fringe activist and later as a researcher. Shivi kindly agreed to become one of my informants drawing on his experiences as a young bureaucrat who worked with the newly founded Ministry of Environment and Forest, Govt. of India. After about a decade of association with the Narmada project, when I interviewed him for my doctoral dissertation, I was impressed by how closely he understood how the working of states and bureaucracy at the micro-level. And it was also personally satisfying that I shared his reading of some of the leading urban activists associated with the Narmada anti-dam campaign. 

This anecdote ties us to the theme of my panel: law and state. For someone who grew up in rural India, his edited volume, Regional Modernities had a profound impact on me, next only to Pierre Bourdieu’s works on how social reproduction of inequality pans out on the cultural terrain. As someone who is deft at guessing the direction of where a student’s projects are headed, and guide it gently, he gifted me a copy of the book when I was just beginning my research. Here’s the copy. I will now read from that book’s Introduction. I’m reading a few sentences from the edited volume, unsure if he wrote it or Arun Agrawal. Here’s my attempt at guessing his unique approach to understanding the modern state and presuming that he wrote those lines:

“A greater emphasis on the nation-state is critical to understanding the emergence of regional modernities as development policies and projects are enacted. The modern state…serves both as an agent, and as an arena in which other social agents pursue specific visions of growth, democracy and nationhood… [T]hose who are supposedly subjected to development are also the subject of development. Our emphasis on stories indicates the importance of variable power held by different actors in the creation of the discourse of development….”

To conclude, what I admire most about Shivi, and have tried to emulate, is his constructive and positive approach, both in his writing and the way he has approached life.