‘Iru’: A biography in motion about anthropologist Irawati Karve, who lived life on her own terms

Nefertiti, the queen of Ancient Egypt, who lived during the 14th century BC, was believed to have been her husband’s co-ruler rather than just a consort. A rather forgotten and erased figure till about the early 1900s, Nefertiti, it seems, was never given much credence by history. Rediscovered by a German archaeological mission in 1912 – in the form of a bust unearthed from the ruins, with a missing left eye – Nefertiti has been on display at a museum in Berlin since the 1920s.

Much like her, another woman – “vaguely remembered” – as informed by authors Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa in the early pages of this book – began her “remarkable” journey in Berlin in the late 1920s. Irawati. Named after the Irrawaddy River in Myanmar (then Burma), Irawati was born in 1905 in Myingyan, a city at the “river’s edge”. Little did this girl with an unusual name know, she would be living her life on the edge and rattling those around her with her ways and manner.

Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve, written by Urmilla Deshpande, Irawati Karve’s granddaughter, and Brazilian anthropologist Thiago Pinto Barbosa, is divided into four parts and does not follow a linear chronology. These segments could be treated as rites of passage(s) in the life of one of India’s most revered anthropologists – Irawati Karve (1905-1970).

A biography in motion, there is hardly a moment of rest or pause as one gets immersed in Irawati’s journey. The protagonist of this research-backed biography is on the move. Quite literally. She is either on a passenger steamship travelling from the Port of Bombay to the Port of Hamburg, or, on a train to Leipzig from Berlin to spend Christmas with the Seebass family; she might be on a second-class compartment of a train travelling to some of the remote tribal areas of her motherland to collect blood samples of Adivasi communities; probably in a jeep navigating the forests of Coorg on a research trip, else, she is riding her Lambretta scooter to her university in Pune, or she could be “on a plane from Cairo to Paris”. If nothing else, she is walking in silence and listening intently to the chatter around and absorbing every little detail of being human.

Skulls and sensibility

In 1927, pursuing a PhD in anthropology under a supervisor who wished to scientifically (and emphatically) prove the “racial” superiority of white Europeans over others was not the only challenge for Irawati, a person of colour and inferior gender. As a Chitpavan Brahmin, right on top of the caste hierarchy in her own society, Irawati was a minority – the only woman of colour in class – at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWI-A). Her caste superiority did little to push her cause. Professor Eugen Fischer, her supervisor and “doctoral father,” whose works on “racial hygiene” had inspired Hitler, assigned his twenty-something student to measure European and non-European skulls to validate his hypothesis that the Whites possessed more “logic” and reason than the other “primitive” social groups. The issue was not really about studying the differences among human skulls belonging to varying backgrounds and ethnicities. The concern for Irawati was the obsessive need to establish a hierarchy between humans in the name of differences. One of the endearing scenes in the book is when, while measuring 149 human skulls, Irawati whispers a soft apology to each.

“Forgive me,” she says, as her conscience pricks her, leaving her unsettled at this sense of violation she couldn’t find a reconciliation to. A remarkable feat achieved by the authors through this book is the way they have imagined and then woven an intricate narrative around Irawati’s interiority and her inward gaze, her dilemmas, her worries, and confusions. It is as if you can actually see and hear her as she ruminates sitting by the window in a concrete laboratory of a foreign university in an alien land. As an anthropologist, Irawati’s sensibility, compassion, and her deep sense of empathy lend a subjective dimension to a profession, which is otherwise defined on the merits and tenets of objectivity and detachment. An approach considered not “the proper anthropological attitude” by the canon of internationally acclaimed male anthropologists, stalwarts like Louis Dumont passed caustic remarks on Irawati’s seminal works, such as Kinship Organisation in India (first published in 1953), and questioned her for following a “Hindu, Brahmanical method”.

Bride and prejudice

At home, Irawati had her own struggles. Growing up in a well-off family, Irawati was the only daughter of her parents who had six children – four were older than Irawati, who was the fifth child, followed by a younger brother named Sadashiv. Sent to a boarding school in Pune at the age of seven, Irawati would soon meet her second family – the Paranjpyes – and much later, through them, her marital family – the Karves. As pioneers of women’s rights, their education, employment, and even sexual freedom, the progressive men of these two families had a tremendous impact on Irawati. It is ironic then that when Irawati wanted to go to Germany like her husband Dinkar (Dinu) Karve did to pursue a PhD, there was stiff resistance from these very progressive men, the chief among them being Maharshi Dhondo Keshav Karve, her father-in-law, who was known far and wide to be an advocate of women’s education and rights of widows.

The other opponent was her own father, Ganesh Karmarkar, who, to begin with, did not approve of his daughter’s marriage into a humble family of social workers and outcastes (Dhondo Keshav Karve had married a widow and earned Marathi society’s condemnation). The prejudice and hypocrisy of her father-in-law came as a rude shock and bitter truth for the young bride, who had somehow misinterpreted her blessings of being married into a family that valued and encouraged women’s education. Thankfully, Dinkar, her husband stood by her like a rock, a pillar of strength and motivation.

Irawati’s adopted family in Pune doted on her. Long reading hours with the patriarch of the house were delightful for her and her friend and classmate Shakuntala, also the daughter of RP Paranjpye. Irawati played Fanny Price, the heroine of Jane Austen’s novel, Mansfield Park, and Shakuntala would take on the role of Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice. Irawati grew up on a healthy diet of world literature, especially the classics. Her curiosity, wandering mind, vivid imagination, and creative yet critical thinking, were shaped during the years she spent at the Paranjpye household where intellectuals, academics, activists, and renowned professors of the time paid regular visits.

Irawati’s nuanced and layered analyses of the lives of women around her – be it her mother Bhagirathi, her mother-in-law, the widow-wife Baya, RP Paranjpye’s wife, “Saitai,” the woman she called grandmother “Oma” in Berlin – reflected in her own collection of critical essays, Yuganta, on the women in the Mahabharata. The complexities and conundrums in the lives of Gandhari, Kunti, and Draupadi are captured through the lenses of gender, caste, social status, and identity. The questions she poses and deals with in Yuganta continue to hold true even today, which is why the collection is an eternal classic. For Irawati, myths and legends are not divested of reality. The socio-historical gaze with which she engages with the women characters of the epic has much relevance in the contemporary context.

Irawati fought for her education from a very young age. She overcame all odds and social barriers to emerge victorious in her ambition. A trendsetter, a game-changer, she was one of the first women to ride a Lambretta scooter through the streets of Pune. She was a married woman who wore no markers of matrimony by way of bangles, kunku on her forehead, or a mangalsutra. She defied social conventions whenever they were imposed on her. She spoke her mind, earned a matching income as a university professor like her husband, was an equal decision-maker in the family, and was a swimmer who swam with a swimsuit on (“made for her in a Pune hosiery factory”). An eyesore for many but a woman of heart and soul, Irawati was born to keep going forward, moving on, and never stopping, like a river. The world was her oyster and she, a preserver and keeper of everything human and humane in a field largely owned by men.

A large – not long – life

An undying desire to understand what makes us human drove Irawati to some of the remote places across the length and breadth of India. She studied blood samples of Adivasi communities, the Mahars (Untouchables), the Dhangars and Nandiwalas, the Namboodari and Nair communities to draw a scientific conclusion that race or caste is not and cannot be a biological identity. It is a social construct that divides humans and creates unnecessary hierarchies, further legitimising discrimination against minorities and exploitation of the lower castes. In her own relentless, steadfast, sincere, and compassionate manner, Iru wanted to tell all of us, probably urge us, to be humans and just that. A nature lover at heart, Irawati’s care and compassion for animals, birds, insects, trees and plants shines through in this fiction-like biography where the reader is bound to forget it is not a novel but a true story. She was someone who also expressed her scepticism about the displacement of indigenous peoples from their land in the name of progress and development during a time when urbanisation was slowly gaining a foothold in India.

Irawati was a woman who lived a short life but led a rich one while enriching others.

Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve, Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa, Speaking Tiger Books.