‘Iru’ Is A Remarkable Biography Of A Remarkable Scholar Iravati Karve!
[First published in YouthKiAwaaz]
Most people know Irawati Karve as the author of Yuganta, which was perhaps the first set of critical essays on the Mahabharata, and which is studied even today by students of topics as diverse as gender and leadership. Her name often pops up while discussing the now controversial work of her PhD guide, Eugene Fisher, who tried to prove the superiority of certain races by examining the skulls. She is also known in certain circles as the daughter-in-law of the renowned social reformer, Maharishi Karve and for her relationship with many prominent Chitpavan Brahmins who were working on gender upliftment and social change. However, not much is known about Irawati Karve, the person, which makes this biography such an engrossing read.
The book is authored by two people who approached the subject from very different perspectives. Urmilla Deshpande is the granddaughter of Irawati Karve and grew up hearing her mother (and other members of the family) speak about Irawati Karve. She started out wanting to write a novel about an Indian woman who went to Berlin in the 1920s to study and ended up doing a lot of research on Irawati Karve. Thiago Pinto Barbosa went to Germany from Brazil and while researching the racial and eugenics research in Berlin in the 1920s and 30s learnt that the only person who challenged the racist theory was an Indian woman called Irawati Karve. Their collaboration is seamless, and the resulting book clearly incorporates each of their different strengths.
Sadly, as in the case of similar biographies, there are not many written sources (apart from their professional output of the subject) that the authors can go on. This book relies deeply on the memories of people who knew Irawati Karve and on stories that have been passed down within the family. Such stories always get distorted by the years and by the prejudices of the people recounting them, and therefore are not always strictly reliable. In addition to these sources, the authors spent a lot of time in the places where Irawati Karve spent her formative years, and have used the technique of ‘critical fabulation’ to recreate what might have been her experiences there. What emerges, especially in the section on her stay in Berlin, is not just the picture of an Indian woman in a Germany which was moving towards a policy of racial superiority but a story of post-War Germany struggling to get back on its feet.
The most tender passages of the book are the ones that describe the relationship between Irawati Karve and her husband Dinkar. Theirs was a gender equitable relationship of the kind that rarely exists even today, and goes way beyond them calling each other ‘Iru’ and ‘Dinu’ and insisting that their children do so too. Very early in the book while describing the scene where Irawati boards the ship that will take her to Berlin for her doctoral studies, the authors say:
“He was letting her go, not in the sense of giving her permission- he was letter her go because he adored and admired her.”
Years later, when they had started a family, Dinu would run the house when Iru was away on the research expeditions that took her away for weeks at a time. Iru, however, quaffed at the fact that men were glorified for doing the basic minimum which every woman was expected to do. Iru particularly noticed this in her own highly emancipated family, where women were still expected to run the household in addition to performing other roles.
The irony, as the author points out is that when it came to her own daughter, Iru’s standards on what was expected of a husband were very low. According to Iru, there was no reason for her daughter to leave her husband because he was an
“ideal man- he didn’t beat his wife, or womanise or drink! This underlines the fact that: “the perceptions on women’s issues continue to change over generations, the younger generations always pushing towards new frontiers.”
This is a struggle that has been going on for over a century and might take another century before it is resolved.
The book also talks of the biases that existed in academic circles in those days. Despite Iru being a trained anthropologist working in India, white men often questioned her inferences when it contradicted their own. Iru was often accused of having an inherent bias on account of being an Indian- apparently only someone not from India could put sufficient distance between themselves and the subject of the study to draw impartial conclusions!
The long shadow of Yuganta falls over the entire book. As someone who has read Yuganta many times, it was fascinating to see how the essays reflected the evolution of many of Iru’s own ideas. Any reader who has not read Yuganta will almost certainly want to do so after reading this book!
This book is not just the story of “The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve”. It paints an authentic portrait of Berlin between the two World Wars, and of Pune during a time of social reform. It also examines the changing role of women within and outside the home, and of the evolving field of anthropology. There are also discussions on some of the problems she worked on which would be of interest to people. There are also delightful descriptions of the local flora and fauna which will appeal to nature lovers. Definitely a book I would recommend.
[I received a review copy from Speaking Tiger. The views are my own.]
