‘Iru’: Story of the anthropologist who broke barriers

She picked the skull nearest her and held it up like Hamlet. “Logic and reason don’t belong to any particular group of people either,” she said out aloud.

‘Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve’ by Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa is a biography that engages the reader like a novel. But that is not a surprise. The two authors, Urmilla a novelist and Irawati’s granddaughter, and Thiago, a social and cultural anthropologist, blend the academic and the artistic to perfection.

Irawati Karve, the first woman anthropologist of India, indeed led a remarkable life. She was born in Burma, studied in Pune, and then travelled to Berlin in the 1920s, alone, in pursuit of a PhD in anthropology. She then returned to India to set up some of the most important academic institutions in the social sciences. Yet, she is little known beyond the narrow academic circles of humanities and social sciences.

This book is aimed at changing that. It has been written for every reader, whether they know anything about anthropology, or care about it, does not matter. Irawati is a role model for everyone, irrespective of their gender, caste, race and religion. And these are indeed the topics that surfaced repeatedly in her life and research. This book addresses issues that were as relevant a hundred years ago as they are today.

I have never been to Burma, but I have studied in Pune, lived in Berlin, lectured across the United States, and worked in the UK, albeit a hundred years after Irawati. Yet, the descriptions of these places in the book are as true as if they were written for me.

The book is divided into four parts. The first is about Irawati’s time pursuing her PhD in the inter-war years in Berlin. This was a tumultuous time in Berlin. Hitler and his Nazi party were on the rise and would take total control a couple of years after Irawati’s return to India. The authors have done brilliantly to handle the elephant in the room, Eugen Fisher, Irawati’s Doktorvater (PhD supervisor). It was Fisher’s eugenic notions of German racial superiority and purity that resonated with Hitler and the Nazi party, and they used it to justify their inhuman philosophy. With such an influential figure holding such power over Irawati’s academic life (at least her PhD), it would have been easy to read her entire career through that lens. But the authors have refrained and instead given us an insight into Berlin through Irawati’s eyes.

The second part is about her early life and education in Pune. This section handles the complexity of her privileged yet complicated childhood. Going to a boarding school at the age of six could not have been easy, and yet, girls her age around India were being married off to husbands who were several times their age. Irawati was surrounded by powerful and supportive male figures like Maharshi Karve (Bharat Ratna awardee in 1958 for his work on women’s education). Yet, it was not always a red-carpet welcome. The book peels through layers of these complicated relationships between Irawati and her father, the father figure she lived with in Pune, her father-in-law and the many male professors she faced in her academic career.

The third part addresses her academic achievements and adventurous life, which involved travelling around India and the world doing groundbreaking research. This section has some of the best travel and science writing. Some of the passages have been reproduced from Irawati’s original writings, and they are some of the best I have read on archaeological research in India.

The fourth part tries to connect it by squaring Irawati’s writing, academic and otherwise, in English and Marathi, with events in her life and the world over. She lived through seismic events like the rise of Hitler, the Second World War, India’s Independence, and the riots that followed. Together with her husband, who was also an academic, they brought up three children. Irawati changed her views about caste, race, spirituality and religion with time. “In these reflections, Irawati learned the most difficult of lessons from Hindu philosophy: all that is you, too.”

Even though the book scrambles the timeline, it creates a vivid imagery so that the reader can view Irawati’s remarkable life as if watching a film. It does not try to convey information or overinterpret it. At times, it leaves some unresolved contradictions (such as RP Paranjpye’s atheist belief and yet his soft corner for this fellow Chitpavan Brahmin girl when he sees her for the first time). We are repeatedly reminded that Irawati is a Chitpavan Brahmin but never told what it meant to Irawati, if at all. Considering her training under Eugen Fisher, the proponent of racial purity, the reader is left wondering what she thought about the discourse of caste purity back home in India. There is some indication through a very vivid description of a meal in Berlin, but then why is there a need to remind the reader of her caste origins time and again? However, that might be down to the scrambled timeline.

The book makes wonderful use of Irawati’s original writings to help the reader connect with her directly. It ends on the sombre note of her reflecting, after the Eichmann trial, on the central question of anthropology: who am I and what does it mean to be human?

“My confession is done. And at the moment of knowing, I am ashes,” she wrote.

— The writer is an ecologist and conservationist