‘A creative narrative based on facts’: How anthropologist Irawati Karve’s biography was written

Irawati Karve, regarded by many as India’s first female anthropologist and certainly the first woman to occupy a university position in the discipline, ought to be a household name. While some may know her for Yuganta, a series of Marathi essays examining the morality of figures in the Mahabharata that won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1968 and received great acclaim in its English translation as well, Karve’s life (1905–1970) and work encompass much more.

As Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa lay out in Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve, Karve was a pioneering scholar working across anthropology and sociology, a path-breaking researcher unafraid to spend weeks and months out in the field, a prolific essayist, feminist, and public intellectual. Beyond these prodigious achievements, the book uses the arc of her life as an opportunity to engage with a whole host of questions about 20th-century Indian society, the academic world, caste, gender, and much more.

Iru begins with Karve’s remarkable journey to Berlin in the 1920s, where she would end up disproving a racist theory about skull sizes in defiance of her supervisor, Eugen Fischer, whose work would later influence the Nazi party’s ideas of racial superiority and its approach toward science. It ends with a series of…

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