02/03/2025
CASI Deep Dive: Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa on the Complex Legacy of Pioneering Indian Scholar Irawati Karve https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/iit/rohan-venkat-urmilla-deshpande-thiago-pinto-barbosa-interview-2025
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 (Speaking Tiger, 2024), Karve was a pioneering scholar working across anthropology and sociology, path-breaking researcher unafraid to spend weeks and months out in the field, 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 N**i party’s ideas of racial superiority and its approach toward science. It ends with a series of ruminations from Karve, grappling with the nature of societal violence and how each one of us is implicated in it. In between, Iru paints a picture of Karve’s life, scholarship, and writing without shying away from the less celebrated aspects of her work—such as applying German-inspired tools of physical anthropology on Indian subjects—that have mostly been discarded by the discipline today.
Deshpande, an author who is also Karve’s granddaughter, and Barbosa, a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute of Anthropology at Leipzig University, collaborated to create a nuanced portrait of Karve as an important figure of 20th century Indian thought. CASI Managing Editor Rohan Venkat spoke to Deshpande and Barbosa about their unlikely collaboration, what it was like to engage with Karve’s complex legacy, the impact of Eurocentrism in social sciences, and how they settled on “critical fabulation” fact-derived storytelling as the form for this biography.
The Center for the Advanced Study of India is the first research institution in the US dedicated to the study of contemporary India.
