Scholars Gather to Honor Kalyanakrishnan “Shivi” Sivaramakrishnan’s Contributions to South Asian Anthropology and Agrarian Studies

Scholars from across the world poured into Luce Hall and Humanities Quadrangle on May 8th and 9th for Tending the Banyan Tree: Celebrating Branches and Roots, an event held in honor of Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, the Dinakar Singh Professor of Anthropology and Professor in the School of the Environment at Yale University. Affectionately called “Shivi” by his students and peers, Sivaramakrishnan received his Master's in Environmental Studies from Yale in 1991 as well as a Ph.D. in Anthropology in 1996. He served on the anthropology faculty at the University of Washington before returning to Yale in 2007.

Now, after more than nineteen years as a Yale faculty member, Shivi has decided to retire.

“Yale provided me the gift of extraordinary teachers and mentors, all of whom contributed to the way I learned to become the person, teacher, and researcher I did become,” he said during the event. Shivi passed that gift onward, and he leaves behind a long line of scholars who are equally inspired by his research and mentorship.

Attendees praised Shivi’s diligence and commitment, sharing anecdotes ranging from his vast expansion of South Asian and Agrarian Studies at Yale to his unusually quick response time over email, inclination towards long walks, and commitment to rescuing cats from treetops. Many highlighted his belief that all ethnography is history as a guiding principle, cited his never-failing attention to detail, and praised his unique ability to bring scholars together. 

Early Career

Shivi’s own path to anthropology was quite unusual. The historian Ramachandra Guha, a college friend of Shivi’s, recalled the early whispers of his anthropological proclivities during their time at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi. Though Shivi studied mathematics on his family’s advice, Guha noted in a letter read during the celebration that Shivi was an editor of the student magazine “Kooler Talk.” There, Guha joked, Shivi first dabbled in subaltern studies through two profiles of an office clerk and the man from whom the pair bought cigarettes. It was not until the following decade, after a stint in the Indian Administrative Service, that Shivi would officially pursue anthropology.

“Thirty-seven years ago, when my wife Bala and I arrived in New Haven with two small children, we did not expect to be here very long, but things changed,” said Shivi, explaining how the pair ultimately pursued their Ph.D.s and raised their family in New Haven. 

William W. Kelly, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Sumitomo Professor Emeritus of Japanese Studies at Yale, spoke to Shivi’s contributions as a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology. Kelly served on Shivi’s dissertation committee and experienced firsthand his “prodigious energy and capacious intellect.”

“It’s not that Shivi needed the committee, but the committee needed each other to keep up with the student.” Kelly remarked, recollecting the scholar’s thorough bibliographies, polished essays, and gargantuan 771-page dissertation, which emerged with him from “the jungle mahals of southwest Bengal.”

Institution Building

After several years at the University of Washington, Shivi would return to Yale as a faculty member in Anthropology in 2007. Shivi quickly developed a reputation among peers and university leaders as both a prolific scholar and a determined administrator.

Steven Wilkinson, Dean of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, credited Shivi’s vision for expanding Yale’s prowess in the study of South Asia as playing a large role in drawing him to Yale from the University of Chicago in 2009, describing Shivi as a “consummate organizer” whose consistent and earnest advocacy has driven the prolonged success of several of the university’s flagship interdisciplinary programs.

Credit: Daniel Vieira

Sunil Amrith, Director of the MacMillan Center and Vice Provost for International Affairs, echoed Wilkinson’s praise in describing his stewardship of the Center’s South Asian Studies Council, Agrarian Studies Program, and InterAsia Initiative. “All roads lead back to Shivi,” he observed.

Amrith also spoke to the more personal aspects of how Shivi has transformed what he referred to as “Not one, not two, but three major fields of scholarship: historical anthropology of South Asia, environmental anthropology, the study of inter-Asian connections.”

For Amrith, Shivi’s scholarly impact has been amplified by the intellectual generosity he consistently shows to others. “I think of Shivi’s generosity as having a kind of multiplier effect,” he explained. “Whatever his own formidable scholarship would have achieved–and that itself would have been gargantuan–the multiplier effect is what Shivi has made possible for so many others, myself included.”

Collaboration and Mentorship

Among those who shared in Amrith’s sentiments was Bhoomika Joshi ’23 Ph.D., who praised Shivi’s strength for “shaping durable intellectual communities.” Joshi emphasized Shivi’s intentionality and meticulousness, noting that since 2014, he had sent her 1063 emails. She guessed this figure was matched, if not superseded, by those of her peers’ inboxes.

Joshi began her back-and-forth with Shivi before becoming a graduate student at Yale and was not accepted into Yale’s graduate program in Anthropology upon her first application. But after that initial rejection, she found that Shivi’s emails kept coming anyway. “They kept up my spirit,” said Joshi.

That consistency has enabled Shivi to advise a diverse range of scholars across disciplines and regions who always felt they could depend on his far-reaching expertise and generosity with his time. Among the historians, former South Asian Studies Council Postdoctoral Fellow (2011-12) Juned Shaikh called Shivi a “magnet for students who have a winding path to academia,” and former Agrarian Studies Fellow (2019) Bradley Camp Davis praised his embrace of the “porous boundaries” between researchers and disciplines. The anthropologist Dolly Kikon, who served as the Henry Hart Rice Visiting Associate Professor at the MacMillan Center in 2023, discussed how Shivi humanizes academia, while doctoral student Shalini Iyengar spoke of how “disenchanted lawyers” often find their way “to Shivi’s shores.”

Indeed, Shivi’s shores have become a sanctuary for most in attendance at Tending the Banyan Tree. His ability to be there whenever needed and for whoever asked left a lasting impression on the communities that came together for the celebration.

William Kelly called the weekend of events a “collective historical ethnography” in its own right, documenting how Shivi had impacted the ever-growing network of scholars he came to know and guide.

Caterina Scaramelli recounted a story that perhaps best exemplifies Shivi’s ethos. At a dinner with her cohort of Agrarian Studies fellows in 2018, she inquired about how Shivi kept the bunnies, squirrels, birds and various other animals that populate New Haven away from the crops in his garden. His response, said Scaramelli, reflected not just a horticultural ideology but also a broader philosophy about cultivating mentorship.

In answering her question, Shivi had announced softly, “My garden is for everyone.”
 

The celebration was organized by a committee of Shivi’s mentees, including Radhika Govindarajan ’13 Ph.D., Sahana Ghosh ’18 Ph.D., Lav Kanoi ’24 Ph.D., and current Ph.D. student Shalini Iyengar, with support from the South Asian Studies Council, the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Department of Anthropology, the InterAsia Initiative, the Program in Agrarian Studies, and Yale Environmental Humanities.

Written by Kamini Purushothaman, South Asian Studies Council.