by Snehal Morey
Review: IRU: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve
Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa
Published by Speaking Tiger, 2024
Thiago Pinto Barbosa, an anthropologist based in Germany, has studied the production and circulation of anthropological knowledge in Dr. Irawati Karve’s work and legacy. He co-authors her biography with fiction writer Urmilla Deshpande, Karve’s granddaughter. Titled IRU: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve, the biography of India’s first woman anthropologist, written about a time when anthropology and sociology were still developing as university disciplines, was published by Speaking Tiger.
Over the years, Barbosa has written extensively about Karve’s legacy, shedding light on and contextualising the complexities of her practice. His articles and PhD thesis have been invaluable resources. His research-driven contributions, combined with Urmilla’s command over storytelling, make IRU an engaging and insightful read. It attempts to unfold Karve’s complex, and sometimes contradictory sides of her persona – one that was simultaneously conservative, yet bold, charming, and modernist.
IRU provides glimpses into Karve’s personal interests, curiosities, and life with her parents, husband, and three children. It can also be read as the story of a working woman in a Maharashtra metropolis in the 1940s, showcasing Karve’s annual routine of balancing teaching responsibilities, research, writing, and budget-conscious summer excavations. The biographical account offers vivid anecdotes from Karve’s life, being Pune’s first woman to ride a Lambretta scooter in the 1950s, an avid swimmer admired for her confident breaststroke, a woman who, owing to her above-average height, wore specially tailored handwoven sarees throughout her life. We also learn about her role as a Professor at Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute and about her physical fitness when we read about her days at excavation sites. It also shares Karve’s interest in birds, her tales of worshiping Vithoba, details of Dinkar Karve’s rose garden, while gradually revealing the intellectual environment fostered by Irawati and Dinkar Karve in their home. It includes an intimate account of Karve’s relationship with her youngest daughter, Gauri, who is also the mother of the co-author, Urmilla Deshpande. IRU portrays Karve as a mother who, when teasingly urged by her mother-in-law to name her daughter Krishna because of her complexion, chose instead to name her Gauri. The book further provides glimpses of Karve’s struggles to understand her daughter’s worldview, offering a nuanced portrayal of her life and relationships.
As we begin to look for a thread that ties together her practice and helps us grasp its fundamentals, IRU invites us to delve deeper and form our own perspectives through firsthand resources. It is striking not only to uncover the details of her remarkable personality but also to appreciate the significance and complexity of the subjects she chose to address. Her contributions emerged during a pivotal period – spanning twenty years before and after independence, when India was shaping its postcolonial identity as a newly formed nation-state.
While pursuing her doctoral studies in anthropology in Germany in 1930-31, Irawati Karve (1905 – 1970) observed asymmetries in skull samples across various population groups from the colony of German South West Africa (today Namibia), and concluded that the anthropometric differences were too minor to warrant separate analysis. The samples that she measured were evidence of violent and troubling histories of colonialism around the time of WWI in Germany. Her conclusion was courageous, especially because it came from a student of Eugen Fischer (1874-1967), a German anthropologist and eugenicist whose work significantly influenced Nazi racial ideology.
Upon her return to India, Karve delved into the study of Chitpavan ethnic affinities, conducted community-focused surveys, and explored a wide range of topics, including kinship terminologies and models, racial conflict, caste in modern times, Hindu society, genetics, as well as social structures reflected in chief Hindu epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata. Having been based in Maharashtra for most part of her life, the focus of Karve’s anthropological investigations expanded from this region. She led an anthropometric survey of the Marathas, the agricultural community of the Maratha country made of Kunbis, Marathas, and Malis, in 1943 and 1944 covering all the Marathi districts of the Bombay Presidency and published her findings in 1948, titled Anthropometric Measurements of The Marathas. In her concluding remarks in this survey report, Karve proposes to classify data according to the theory of the ninety-six clans to find out whether each group is homogeneous within itself without reference to the region it comes from. The viewpoint expressed in her PhD thesis seems to shift upon her return, leading us to wonder if it has anything to do with her privileged position in India.
In November 2021, Migrant Knowledge – a platform dedicated to advancing research on the intersection of migration and knowledge – published an interview in which Barbosa spoke with Deshpande about her upcoming book on Karve’s time in Germany. This discussion eventually led into their collaboration, in the form of Dr Karve’s biography, IRU, at the publisher’s request. Introducing Karve’s lesser-known contributions to racial studies of Indian castes and tribes, in this article Barbosa writes, “Using the same methods and instruments Karve was trained to use in Berlin, she measured and analysed various anthropometric and racial features across India’s social groups, thereby contributing to the racialisation of human differences – a legacy that began with British colonial anthropology. Although vocal on women’s issues, she remained largely silent on caste and religious discrimination in her early career (1930s–1950s). Only in her last decade did she adopt a multiculturalist and anti-racist stance, yet she continued to use racial methods in her research until as late as 1968 – just two years before her sudden death.”
In 1947, when British India was divided into India and Pakistan, marking independence but also resulting in a deeply impactful partition that solidified the political and religious divides between Hindus and Muslims, Karve delivered a speech at the First Asian Relations Conference, a historic gathering of leading scientists, politicians, and cultural figures from across Asia. In her speech, she discussed the “conflict between human groups” as primarily an economic struggle, amplified by physical and cultural differences between groups. She linked certain negative behavioral traits to the biology and culture of Muslims, attributing them to the history of Islam’s expansion, while emphasising that the Brahmanical Hindu tradition had supposedly fostered a sense of Indian cultural unity.
Karve’s regressive politics and her choice of words, both in English and Marathi, reveal a blend of careful thought and strong opinions. At times, one might wonder if she was cautiously anticipating and calculating the impact of presenting her findings through both contemporary and historical lenses.
In May 2023, Barbosa elaborates in another article that “…several connections to German (and more-than-German) racial anthropology – from Müller to Risley (and his wife) as well as the KWI-A with its alumni Karve and Biswas – show that the genealogy of racializing sciences does not only follow colonizer-colonized lines. Understanding these messy and serendipitous – but important – transnational connections helps to better understand both the historical resilience and the global capillarity of racial and racist knowledge.”
Throughout her professional career, Karve wrote extensively. Her bibliography, compiled by her student K. C. Malhotra, lists 122 published works and 20 unpublished manuscripts. For some of her anthropometric investigations, she collaborated with fellow anthropologists such as D. N. Muzumdar, H. D. Sankalia, and K. C. Malhotra, as well as statisticians like P. C. Mahalanobis. While drafting her anthropological investigations in English, Karve also created a space to reflect and share her thoughts in Marathi, with Yugant being a notable standout among her writings in her mother tongue.
Barbosa reviews Karve’s 1968 paper A Biological Comparison of Eight Endogamous Groups of the Same Rank, co-authored with K.C. Malhotra. The paper tested a sociological hypothesis that sub-groups (jatis) within the same caste rank (varna), specifically eight Brahmin sub-groups in Maharashtra, had distinct ancestries. This hypothesis challenged the Aryan migration theory, which suggested that all Indian Brahmins shared a common Aryan ancestry. While Barbosa expands on both the conclusions and the methodology used in this study in his thesis, he does not elaborate on these details in IRU. To gain deeper critical insights, one must turn to Barbosa’s critical writings or Prof. Nandini Sundar’s biography of Karve.
In his PhD thesis, Science and Human Difference in Germany and India: The Production and Circulation of Anthropological Knowledge in Irawati Karve’s Work and Legacy, Barbosa argues that Karve never completely moved away from a racial framework. While her research integrated molecular methods, she continued to use physical anthropological techniques, including anthropometry, which were closely associated with the racial anthropology of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology (KWI-A). We also observe that Karve never critically addresses the anthropological implications of atrocities such as the massacres during Hitler’s reign. This omission is striking, given that of her PhD thesis with courageous conclusions. As we know, her PhD guide, Eugen Fischer, and her alma mater, KWI-A, were pivotal in contextualising and implementing the theory of ‘racial hygiene’ in Germany and other neighbouring countries during World War II (1939–1945). The war started almost around a decade after she completed her studies at KWI-A under Fischer and his colleagues.
IRU includes a translated excerpt from her essay titled All That Is You, originally written in Marathi.
What effort have you made to destroy those seeds of hate? Haven’t you lived in this same society by following the policy of saving your own skin? Then what is the point of saying that you share none of the responsibility for the crime in the world, in your own society? All of it is you.
When we as readers get acquainted with her reflections and monologues in response to the genocide, IRU also presents a letter written by Karve to her German Doktorvater Fischer in celebration of his eightieth birthday. She wrote:
He was scientific in his teaching, exacting but kind as a guide and always had a deep humanity. He and I belong to different religions, but I think he felt with me all that humanity, black and white, tall and short, was the manifestation and incarnation of the One Absolute. Thanks to his teachings as an anthropologist, this ancient teaching of the Hindus was manifested to me in a new light.
Appreciating Fischer while mourning the Holocaust presents a baffling contradiction that highlights deeper complexities. These layers of Karve’s practice compel you to pause and reflect.
IRU stands out for compiling diverse resources, allowing readers to explore and interpret Karve’s choices and actions. Barbosa mentions in his email communication, “We were clear from the outset that we did not want to write a heroic portrayal of Karve, and this is a book that looks deep into her flaws, conflicts, and contradictions.”
In IRU, Barbosa and Deshpande note that Karve remained relatively silent on caste-based social inequalities. In an email communication, both acknowledged that Karve’s writings lack engagement with Ambedkar’s ideas on caste, despite the prominence of discussions around caste-based social reform in the 1950s. Barbosa elaborated: “Besides the question of caste, I think this ‘unencounter’ – between Karve and Ambedkar – highlights fundamental differences in their scholarship. […] While both Karve and Ambedkar addressed the topic of caste in India – like most anthropologists and sociologists of their time – they approached the issue from fundamentally different perspectives. These differences reflect distinct anthropological traditions regarding the question of difference and inequality. Ambedkar viewed caste as a marker of inequity and injustice, while Karve, trained in a tradition that sought to understand caste as a system organising and structuring Indian society, tended to overlook the fractures and tensions within this system. This contrast in approach remains relevant in anthropology today.”
B. R. Ambedkar, who studied Anthropology at Columbia University, stated in his 1916 paper Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development, presented at Dr. A. A. Goldenweizer’s Anthropology Seminar, that “the superimposition of endogamy on exogamy means the creation of caste”. In discussing Karve’s 1953 work Kinship Organisation in India, Barbosa notes in his thesis that Karve defined caste as an endogamous group, a perspective deeply influenced by her training at the KWI-A, reflecting a physiometric and biological anthropological stance. While other scholars primarily defined caste through social status, occupation, or hierarchy, Karve’s definition focused on biological aspects, emphasising shared heredity and genetics, sidelining sociological dimensions.
IRU, though rich in details, falls short of offering a nuanced discussion on the subjects Karve chose to engage with – or avoided – and the broader impact and legacy of her work. While we acknowledge Barbosa’s scholarly contributions and Deshpande’s commitment to avoiding a heroic portrayal, this absence invites reflection on the complexities of biography as a form: its capacity to shed light on lives and its inherent limitations in fully capturing the intellectual and ideological contexts surrounding them. Barbosa, while interviewing Deshpande, before signing up for her biography, also reflects on the challenges of form of biography, “As Simone Lässig reminds us, every life is fragmented, and in writing a biography, we might not be able – or even want – to create a seamless whole from the diverse fragments of a person’s life and character. Although Karve, who even had a museum named after her, might be viewed as a heroine. I’m reminded of what Levke Harders describes as a post-heroic approach to biography: an approach that takes well-known heroic figures and offers more nuanced perspectives on their lives and work.” They also contemplate on how a text can balance being both critical and empathetic toward the same historical figure.
Barbosa and Deshpande describe their decision to present the biography in the form of critical fabulation, a narrative approach rooted in meticulous archival research. This method infers from available resources, bridging gaps to construct stories about historical figures who might otherwise remain invisible in traditional historiography. (IRU, p. 24) Communicating complexities and making such discussions widely accessible is no easy task. And the use of critical fabulation has the potential to broaden the reach of Karve’s work and legacy. However, as with any narrative form, it comes with certain limitations. For instance, in IRU, Karve, during a bus journey, appears to delight in the thought of a person from the Mahar community winning an election, prompting readers to question whether she truly entertained this idea or if it were merely fabulation.
In addition to several insightful translations, IRU presents another translation of a text Karve wrote in 1954 during her Himalayan journey, completing the circle:
Language, ethnicity, dress styles, are not obstacles to this sense of oneness. Instead, these differences, this diversity itself is the core of our unity. It seems today that politicians are afraid of difference and diversity. There is a fight to centralise rule, and I think this has to do with cultural issues, but with the consolidation of power to the centre.
IRU skillfully presents an impressive timeline of Karve’s life’s work. The rich material provided by the Karve family adds great depth to this portrayal. Their willingness to support projects that critically explore Irawati Karve’s practice is inspiring. Together with Barbosa’s critical essays, IRU offers a compelling combination that serves as an excellent starting point for exploring the life and contributions of India’s first anthropologist.
Karve said, “I will pay my debt to society through research in my subject. And beyond this, I owe no other debt to society.”
Karve’s life and work, with its contradictions, conflicts, and significance, has the potential to transcend her time. IRU invites you to “feel” the gaps in her practice, prompting reflection on your own realities, as well as the personal and professional positions you hold. It serves as a reminder that even proven theories will be challenged, all sciences are in constant evolution, and our time here is brief. Yet, while we are here, it is our responsibility to set our markers carefully, despite all the logic and reasoning that may surround us.
About the Author
Snehal Morey, a museum professional, has been dedicated to her role as a Curatorial Associate at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum since 2016. In this capacity, she oversees the coordination of the PG Diploma in Modern and Contemporary Indian Art and Curatorial Studies, contributing her expertise to the museum’s educational initiatives. Fluent in both English and Marathi, Snehal designs and executes educational and outreach programs.
Through the Curatorial Intensive South Asia (CISA) program, developed by KHOJ and supported by the Goethe-Institut, she curated the exhibition x, y and in-between at the India International Centre, Delhi, in 2023. Currently, she is conducting research on the perfumery section of the silver collection at the Zapurza Museum of Art & Culture (ZMAC) in Pune, as part of the Archives and Museum Program, backed by the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA).
Works cited:
- Sundar Nandini. In Cause of Anthropology: The Life and Work of Irawati Karve, 2010
- Karve Irawati, Anthropometric Measurements of The Marathas, Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute, Poona, 1948
- Karve Irawati, Kinship Organisation in India, Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute, Poona, 1953
- Ambedkar B. R. Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development, Panther Paw Publication, Transcript of a speech delivered in 1916 at Dr. A. A. Goldenweizer’s Anthropology Seminar, Columbia University, New York
- Barbosa Thiago Pinto. Science and Human Difference in Germany and India: The Production and Circulation of Anthropological Knowledge in Irawati Karve’s Work and Legacy, Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences of the University of Bayreuth, Dec 30th, 2022
- Barbosa Thiago Pinto. Racial Anthropology from Germany to India: a trans-national look at the scientific racialisation of human diversity, May 30, 2023, published by Boasblog
- Barbosa Thiago Pinto Barbosa, Deshpande Urmilla. The Contradiction of Irawati Karve: A Conversation, Nov 09, 2021, published by Migrant Knowledge