A new biography of anthropologist Irawati Karve examines the historical forces that shaped her work

Indian Express

17-05-2025

By Srija Naskar
Irawati Karve lived a life that defied conventions at every turn. She was born in Myanmar, raised in a foster home in Pune known to espouse atheism, and eventually married into a family of social reformers. Today known as India's first female anthropologist, Karve was able to navigate multiple social identities with both intellect and a certain degree of panache, challenging rigid hierarchies along the way.
This complexity of a woman and anthropologist in a turbulent historical era is the subject of a recent biography, Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve, by Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa. Biographies haven't seen much experimentation because their very structure is bracketed with a cradle on one end and a grave on the other. But with the incorporation of history into this field, a newer possibility can be imagined. That is what Deshpande and Barbosa have achieved. By placing Karve within a particular historical context, the authors have enriched our understanding of the kind of person she was and also the historical forces that shaped her.
Quite early, we are thrust into the chaos and creativity that marked the Weimar years, when Karve stepped into Berlin for her doctoral studies. Berlin was a city of contradictions. It was a city of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, of Josephine Baker's electrifying dances and of Magnus Hirschfeld's groundbreaking work on gender identity. But it was also a city reeling from war, its streets flooded with wounded beggars, Nazism on the rise.
How does one transport the reader of a biography into a time long lost? If we were to go back to the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s to meet Karve, what would we see? Deshpande and Barbosa detail not just a city being pulled into multiple directions but also an intellectual milieu where differing ideas were thrashed out, argued, repudiated and accepted. For example, Karve's mentor was the anthropologist Eugen Fischer, a man whose theories would later become cornerstones of Nazi ideology. The book tells us how Karve's beliefs and her scientific work clashed with that of Fischer's. So much so that Karve's own doctoral work would actually repudiate Fischer, proving that the contemporary practice of determining racial superiority through skull measurements was nothing but bunkum.
The India that Karve returned to was also hierarchical, where caste discrimination held sway. By interrogating the idea of caste mobility through a study of the nomadic Nandiwala tribes in Maharashtra and Gujarat, for instance, or that of the Mahars, Karve showed how focusing on the lived realities of marginalised communities could throw insights into the problem of social stratification.
Karve's approach to Hinduism was similarly unorthodox: she dissected its rigid hierarchies and gendered injustices. In Yuganta, for instance, her seminal critique of the Mahabharata, she exposes the moral hypocrisy of Yudhishthira, whose obsession with truth, she argues, comes at the cost of Draupadi's suffering. For Karve, Hinduism was not a static dogma but an evolving tradition, shaped by centuries of exchange and contradiction.
Like the discipline she helped redefine, Karve resists easy categorisation. She was at once a rigorous scientist and a literary humanist, a traditionalist by birth and a radical by choice. Deshpande and Barbosa's biography captures this complexity, drawing on family archives, scholarly works and the voices of those who knew her. The result is a portrait of a woman who was always in motion — questioning, adapting and reimagining the world around her. In an era that demanded conformity, Irawati Karve remained gloriously, relentlessly uncontainable.
The writer is assistant professor, Department of English, MIT ADT University, Pune