Some decades ago, I watched a kathakata (a play that is a narrative by a single female character) titled Nathavati, Anathavat by the playwright Saoli Mitra and was deeply moved by the feminist retelling of Draupadi’s story. Mitra’s inspiration was Irawati Karve’s Yuganta: The End of an Epoch (1967), and within a few days, I was the proud owner of a copy. That was my introduction to the famous anthropologist, who, I believe, figures more in the syllabi of the comparative literature department of my (then) university rather than in that of the sociology department. That is the legacy of India’s first woman anthropologist—an intellectual, a sociologist, a feminist, a scholar, and someone deeply committed to her field, anthropology.
Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve
While reading Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve, I was repeatedly reminded of Yuganta, where Draupadi is portrayed as a woman and an intellectual and not just a humiliated wife in a polyandrous marriage, when she questions the masculine conception of justice, righteousness, and male entitlement by asking Yudhishtir the basis on which he pawns her. It is the same feminist spirit, the refusal to be censored, gagged, or muzzled, that pulsates at the heart of this remarkable book.
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Tracing Karve’s life from childhood to her academic career, the book shows us what it meant to be a woman academic in mid-20th century India—her experience earning her degree in a foreign country; her relations with her family; the long absences from home and extensive fieldwork in remote archaeological sites with only men for company; the transgression, subversion, as well as negotiation of caste and gender norms—all that which made possible the emergence of a successful scholar who was also deeply aware of her femininity and her humanity.
Book cover of Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve
I was particularly touched by Karve’s experience of training for her doctoral degree under the German racial anthropology expert Eugen Fischer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWI-A). Fischer was on a mission to prove that racial inferiority was biologically determined. Going on to serve the Nazi regime under Hitler, Fischer recruited Karve to support his hypothesis of “Aryan superiority”. Karve, risking both her career and education, stood up to this scientific racism and stated in her thesis that the shape of skulls had nothing to do with racial attributes. Surprisingly, she did not fail, and unsurprisingly, she was awarded a Doneux (Latin for sufficient), which Fischer attributed to her foreignness and lack of German-speaking skills.
This tale of academic integrity, free spirit, and ethical scholarship—which goes against the grain of unstated norms that reward those who conform and exile those who question—is a refreshing read, particularly given our current times. As knowledge is being manipulated to serve political gains, institutions crumble, and liberal academics across the country self-censor to further petty ambitions, the life of this Indian woman and her defiance of eugenic science in 1920s Germany reminds us of all that we have lost and what we can still hope to recover.
Karve’s work drew on rich Indological sources and Sanskrit literature to understand caste and kinship. This often led to disciplinary criticism, where she was perceived more as an ethnologist interested in culture than a sociologist and anthropologist. Irawati Karve’s greatest contribution is her book Kinship Organization of India (1953), which draws as much from literary evidence as from empirical fieldwork. In this context, the biography Iru succinctly discusses the silencing of Karve by the French scholar Louis Dumont, who, at the time, was one of the most influential scholars on caste in India. Reading about Karve’s struggles as an Indian woman against misogyny and racism leads one to wonder if anything has changed.
The struggles of women in academia, particularly those from marginalised communities—even today—continue to be informed by deep misogyny, racism, and casteism, which often destroyed careers. The systematic silencing of women of colour/Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi communities in global academia, which is in the custody of white/Brahmin/dominant-caste men, is, of course, an age-old problem. Dumont’s dismissal of Karve’s work was an act of intellectual gatekeeping that insisted that Indian sociologists and anthropologists were too close to the subject to develop a “scientific” understanding.
A woman’s voice suppressed
This silencing was not new to Karve, a non-European woman, who was “brushed aside” as a doctoral scholar in Germany and then again during her visits to foreign universities later in her career. The biography weaves a haunting and powerful narrative of her loneliness and her continuous commitment to acquire and disseminate knowledge despite all odds.
Karve never made it to the pantheon of celebrated intellectuals and academics of India, which is dominated by male scientists and intellectuals, as both misogyny and regional exclusion kept her out of the hallowed halls of fame lining the pathway to academic posterity. However, she left behind a legacy that is not easily erased. Apart from her scholarship, Irawati Karve remains singular in India for the niche she carved out in a deeply masculine field. No doubt her caste identity and her marriage into a political and socially influential family played a role, but what is remarkable is how she used those advantages to break the barriers of gender.
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Karve is, of course, not free from controversy. Although critical of racial eugenics, her work continued to draw on Fischer’s method of anthropometric measurements to understand the social stratification of caste and tribe, which left deep imprints on the discipline itself and therefore continues to struggle with accusations of scientific racism.
The biography Iru is authored by Urmilla Deshpande, granddaughter of Irawati Karve, whose sense of Karve’s life also comes from the various family anecdotes around her grandmother, and Thiago Pinto Barbosa, whose research on racial and eugenics scholarship in Berlin led him to the Indian social scientist who stood her ground against the rising trend of fascism in early 20th century Germany.
The personal and the professional
The strength of the book lies in the collaboration between the two authors, whose investment in Karve is deeply personal and professional, respectively. The biography seamlessly weaves the professional and the personal, telling us that the two are never distinct. The account of her relationship with her children, particularly her daughter Gauri, paints Karve in a less-than-perfect light. One can tease out the tension of the strained relationship between mother and daughter which reveals Karve as truly human, full of contradictions, pulled back by traditions as much as propelled forward by modernity.
Of course, like any biography, Iru, too, reflects the constraints of the genre. Although a delightful read that takes us from Pune to Berlin and gives us sharp insights into the struggles of women in male-dominated fields such as academia in postcolonial India, it must be read with a critical eye. Iru is an interpretation rather than the absolute truth of the many lives of Irawati Karve.
Panchali Ray is Associate Professor in Anthropology and Gender Studies and Associate Dean (Academics) at Krea University.
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