Bone of contention: How anthropologist Irawati Karve took on race theory

In the cold, bleak winter of interwar Berlin, a young Indian woman sat by a window, trying to frame the conclusion to her PhD thesis.

She had spent most of the past year measuring European and non-European skulls, in order to prove her PhD supervisor Eugen Fischer’s hypothesis that Caucasian brains were overdeveloped, giving them a greater faculty for logic and reason.

Fischer’s work would go on to feed Nazi race theory, but that was later. In 1920s Europe, the theory he proposed fit neatly into existing scientific orthodoxy.
The Indian woman was considering the consequences of pushing back against that orthodoxy, because her research disproved this theory.
Eventually, she would decide that she could not ignore the evidence of the faceless skulls. “Logic and reason don’t belong to any particular group of people,” she famously said.
Berlin was just one chapter in the extraordinary life of Irawati Karve (1905-1970). She would go on to be a trailblazing anthropologist with a keen eye for women’s histories; would write critical essays on the Mahabharata, and win a Sahitya Akademi Award (in 1968).
A new biography, Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve, seeks to change the fact that most people still don’t know her name.
Co-authored by Karve’s granddaughter, the novelist Urmilla Deshpande, 61, and the Brazilian anthropologist Thiago Pinto Barbosa, 35, the book explores the pioneering researcher’s triumphs and stumbles; the strange dichotomy that allowed her to challenge her German professor’s racist ideas, but also discourage divorce and inter-racial marriage in her children.
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Before starting work on the biography, all Deshpande had of her grandmother, she says, were memories of a stern, distracted figure (Karve died when she was seven). “I actually set out to write a novel that wasn’t about her at all,” she adds, speaking from her current home in Tennessee.
Then Deshpande spent some time in Germany and began to plan a novel set there, in the interwar years, with an Indian woman as its protagonist. Hadn’t her grandmother been there at exactly this time? Deshpande started to dig for details, and received a research grant.
Nandini Sundar, who wrote about Karve in a 2007 book on the founders of Indian sociology and anthropology, put her in touch with Barbosa, whose PhD focused on Karve’s research in Berlin and its impact on her later work in India.
“I was amazed when I first learnt that Irawati was about the only person at that research centre whose work challenged a racist theory of that time and place,” says Barbosa, joining the Zoom call from Berlin. “I also found many interesting contradictions. What does it mean to be a scholar from the Global South and come to Europe to be trained in a very Eurocentric and racist perspective? So, my PhD focused on the legacy of racism in science.”
Serendipitously, soon after the two met, Deshpande heard from Renuka Chatterjee at Speaking Tiger that they were looking to publish a biography of Karve.
“I immediately said I’d do it,” she says. “I knew I had Thiago to help me. And I knew I didn’t want somebody else to do it.”
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Minutes into our call, the camaraderie and synergy between the two authors is clear.
Barbosa is the quintessential academic: serious, analytical, picking his words carefully. Deshpande is mischievous and full of jokes, even turning the tables to interrogate me at one point; but no less incisive. Iru benefits greatly from their voices, which combine to give the reader a narrative that is intimate and cinematic, but does not minimise the complexities of Karve’s life or work.
The book touches upon the anthropologist’s early years in Burma. (Her father, who worked with the Burma Cotton Company, named her after that country’s Irrawaddy river.)
It follows her as she goes to boarding school in Pune, then falls in love with and marries Dinkar Karve, the son of women’s rights crusader Dhondo Keshav Karve, against her father’s wishes. Dinu, as she called him, would be her staunchest ally through her life. Some of the tenderest scenes in the book deal with their love for and support of each other.
The authors offer fascinating glimpses into Karve’s inner world — her hopes, worries and dilemmas — as she goes on field trips to study the Adivasis of Assam and Odisha, digs for ancient human remains in Gujarat, and captures the majestic beauty of the Himalayas with her Leica.
The clarity, surefootedness and sweep of her multidisciplinary approach to anthropology stand out, as the book details how she incorporated ideas from Indology, palaeontology, literature studies and oral traditions into her work.
It’s an approach that earned her harsh criticism (the French anthropologist Louis Dumont called hers a “Hindu, Brahmanical method”, whatever that means). But anthropology would later embrace this method of viewing the past. “That happened in the 1980s, following a movement of postcolonial and feminist critique,” Barbosa says. “She was doing it much earlier, which is part of what makes her work so interesting.”
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Determined that the book not be hagiographic, Barbosa and Deshpande dig into Karve’s contradictions.
They explore, on the one hand, her feminist analysis of the lives of Indian women, and her own progressive lifestyle, and, on the other, her distress that her son Anand Karve was marrying a German, and her opposition to her daughter’s divorce.
When Deshpande’s mother, the Marathi author Gauri Deshpande, announced that she was leaving her husband, Karve responded that she had no reason to. He was an ideal man, given that he “neither beat her nor womanised”, she said.
The book’s final two chapters explore Karve’s evolution: her “spiritual devastation” in the wake of Adolf Eichmann’s trial, as she reflected on her associations with Germany and Nazi racial science; her belief, amid Partition and Independence, that “Hindu culture was what gave this country an identity”; and her shift from this worldview to one that saw Indians as “all thorough mongrels who have been thrown together and must learn to lessen our prejudices and live together.”
“She moved from an anti-Muslim view to a very progressive idea of India,” Deshpande says. “I think it’s really important to recognise that we can be anti-Muslim, or start out racist, and still — just by being open and curious about the world — do a complete about-turn. That, I think, would be a good takeaway.”