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Book review: The many facets and contradictions of Irawati Karve
Summary
A new biography of well-known anthropologist Irawati Karve, ‘Iru: A Remarkable Life’, by Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa, moves between the personal and the scientific
The maverick philosopher J. Krishnamurti would remind his audience of the important distinction between hearing and listening. The act of hearing is a shallow formality. The act of listening is a profound engagement. The anthropologist, sociologist, Indologist and essayist Irawati Karve was a listener of the best type. Her Marathi essays often feature stray conversations with people she had met in a bus or a village market. She would take this seemingly transient raw material to ask penetrating questions about the human condition.
In one of these essays, Paripurti, or fulfilment, she begins by asking why women are always identified in terms of the men in their lives rather than as autonomous individuals, and ends the essay on a wry note. She overhears schoolboys on the street whispering that the woman walking past is their friend Anand’s mother. Irawati says her life is now fulfilled: She is a daughter, a wife, a mother. Did she mean it or was she being ironic? Debates on this essay still break out among Marathi readers. My own view is that the conclusion to Paripurti is knowingly ironic, almost sarcastic.
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“Irawati, in her unfettered vision of the world, looked in earth and stone, body and blood, song and text, for answers," write Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa in their excellent new biography of the extraordinary anthropologist, essayist and thinker, who is perhaps best known today for Yuganta, her essays on the Mahabharat. The collaborative venture, Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve, is interesting. Deshpande is a creative writer, Barbosa an anthropologist. She is the grand-daughter of their protagonist, he has done his PhD on Irawati. The book thus moves between the personal and the scientific, and the writers skilfully avoid jarring the reader with the resultant shifts in narrative and style. Some of the passages on her personal life in particular are beautifully written.
Irawati was born in Myanmar in 1905, and got her first name from the mighty river that flows through that country. She was packed off to school in Pune, and eventually grew up in the home of R.P. Paranjpye, a Cambridge University mathematician who was the principal of Fergusson College. She then married into the Karve family. Her husband Dinkar was a scientist who had earned his PhD in Germany—a country he chose because it was not England, the country that ruled India—and was a steadfast supporter in her battles to pursue the itinerant life of an anthropologist. His brother Raghunath left mathematics to preach the uncomfortable gospels of sex education, birth control, gender equality and the right of women to sexual pleasure. He fell foul of not just Marathi society but also the British authorities. B.R. Ambedkar donned his legal robes to defend Raghunath in an obscenity case in 1927.
The head of the family was Dhondo Keshav Karve, who spent his adult life promoting women’s education, married a widow when such a decision was against social mores and was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1958. However, he opposed Irawati’s decision to go to Germany—partly inspired by her husband’s choice for higher studies—for her PhD, arguing that she was well-educated enough to focus on teaching at the women’s university he had set up against all odds. Irawati and Dinkar resolutely held their ground. What particularly rankled later was that the senior Karve continued to sponsor other women scholars to study abroad. Such puzzles are not just the inconsistencies in individual behaviour but also the real dilemmas faced by a society that was negotiating the competing demands of tradition and modernity Irawati would herself later try to find the difficult balance between the two. She did not wear a mangalsutra, was famous for zipping around 1940s Pune on a scooter, but also dedicated one of her books to her husband, ending the dedication thus: “I place my head on your feet and ask for your blessing."
Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve begins with her journey to Berlin in 1929, to study anthropology under the guidance of Eugen Fischer. He wanted Irawati to measure human skulls to prove that Europeans had superior powers of logical reasoning compared to non-Europeans. Such racial thinking, or eugenics, was common in Germany on the cusp of the Nazi capture of power in 1933. It was not unknown in colonial India either: Anthropomorphic data had been used to study the people of Bengal in 1881 and it had featured in some decadal censes carried out by the colonial government.
Irawati diligently did as she was told, and came to a conclusion that Fischer did not like: There was no difference in the skulls of Europeans and non-Europeans. She carried the techniques of physical anthropology to her early work in India, and only decisively moved to social and cultural anthropology in her later work, showing that human differences are not explained by biology. She tried to find answers in the cultural traditions of people. Her two most celebrated books on anthropology—Kinship Organisation in India and Hindu Society: An Interpretation—were written after her shift in method.
Irawati also conducted some landmark socioeconomic surveys. Her 1969 study of the people displaced by the Koyna dam in western Maharashtra can be read as an early warning about many subsequent debates in Indian development policy. However, the writers have inexplicably underplayed the role of her first mentor, G.S. Ghurye, under whom she studied in Mumbai before going to Berlin. Ghurye was a pioneering sociologist, with a Hindu nationalist world view, and could be a difficult man when he wanted. His other notable female student in those years was Durga Bhagwat, who would clash with him, but later get recognition as a Marathi writer of great originality. Her essays on the Mahabharat, Vyas Parva, have not achieved the fame of Yuganta, and remain, as far as I know, untranslated from their original Marathi.
In an essay on Irawati, sociologist Nandini Sundar writes of the four main components of her anthropological work, which “fed on each other". First, physical anthropology and archaeology based on the study of skeletons, blood samples and physical measurements of the human body. Second, cultural anthropology that drew from her study of caste, folk songs and ancient classics. Third, socioeconomic surveys of the dam displaced, weekly markets, pastoralists, urban life. Fourth, contemporary social commentary, especially on women, language and race.
The anthropologist often gets lost in the particulars of the community or tribe she studies. Irawati had the ability to step back to take in the bigger picture about the society in which we live. In a speech she delivered at the Asian Relations Conference hosted by Jawaharlal Nehru in early 1947, just months before Partition, she said the unity of India is based on an underlying cultural unity derived from the Hindu identity, implicitly keeping out Islam and Christianity. This was less an act of political exclusion than a reflection of her deep dislike for all forms of monotheism, even in politics. However, Irawati later wrote: “All those who are in India today, who feel it is their homeland, are Indians."
The polytheistic Irawati celebrated the diversity of India. She was a critic of rigid monotheism even in the worship of leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, Gandhi and Golwalkar. “Language, ethnicity, dress styles are not obstacles to this sense of oneness. Instead… this diversity is the core of our unity. It seems today that politicians are afraid of difference and diversity. There is a fight to centralise rule, and I think this is not to do with cultural issues, but with the consolidation of power in the centre," she wrote in 1960.
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Dinkar was an atheist. Irawati was not overtly religious. Yet, she went on pilgrimages to see how people from all parts of India came together with “a shared reverence for sacred places", as Deshpande and Barbosa describe it. She most famously used to go on the annual pilgrimage to Pandharpur, a town in Maharashtra, to visit the temple of Lord Vitthal. It was here that she saw the essential unity of India, rather than in government slogans. The temple is deeply connected with the Bhakti movement in medieval Maharashtra and attracts caravans of devotees during the month of Ashadh, though the temple itself was out of bounds for Dalits till 1946, when it was thrown open to all castes after a 10-day fast by the Gandhian activist Pandurang Sadashiv Sane.
Irawati negotiated the complex terrain between tradition and modernity with care, and should be seen as part of the larger flow in Marathi intellectual life, which gave rise to a culture of social reform that aimed to strengthen Hindu society by calling out its flaws, rather than pulling down the entire edifice. Much of this was driven by principles of equality as well as Brahmin progressivism from a sense of noblesse oblige. Ambedkar was critical of the latter. So, like many others in the two generations after 1875, it is hard, or perhaps even pointless, to place Irawati in neat ideological categories that are so much in demand today.
Yuganta is her widely read classic, structured as a series of pen portraits of some of the central figures in the Mahabharat, which won her the Sahitya Akademi award in 1968. It can be read in many ways, from a tale about the futility of war to the tragic lives of its main characters. The success of Yuganta has led too many people to singularly equate Irawati with it. By writing this new biography, Deshpande and Barbosa will hopefully spark a wider interest in the multi-faceted Irawati Karve.
Niranjan Rajadhyaksha is executive director of Artha India Research Advisors.
