Book Excerpt-Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve by Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa

An exclusive excerpt from Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve by Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa (Speaking Tiger, 2024)

Prologue

Berlin, 1929

Human skulls are not smooth. Jagged seams run along the bony plates that form the curves of the human head. The skulls on the table had been examined and measured, as had over a hundred others. It had taken months to come to the conclusion that she had come to. She sat there, by a window, the fading light of a short winter day touching her face and hair, quite unaware of the world outside. She was turned inward, thinking about what she was about to write, and what that might mean for her immediate, and distant future.

The hypothesis must have been abhorrent to her, but it was the one she had had to prove. European skulls, when measured, would show asymmetry, because the right lobe of the European brain was overdeveloped. Logic and reason sat in the right lobe of the brain, and Europeans were logical. This must cause an asymmetry in the skull itself, which she would surely find when she measured European skulls. She also had to measure non-European skulls, which, presumably, would be symmetrical on the sagittal plane, because, not having the superior powers of reasoning of white people, the brains of non-Europeans would not have an overdeveloped right lobe.

She, a young, non-European woman, had measured the skulls of Europeans and non-Europeans for her PhD project, and after months of detailed examination and mensuration she had to now present her conclusion. But how?

She sighed. It would be what it was. Her conclusion went against her supervisor’s hypothesis, against the accepted thinking of the institute, and of the scientific community. She had been instructed to prove the hypothesis, not disprove it. What would her professor and colleagues say? Perhaps she would go home without the degree she had come so far for, so far and so alone. From the first time she went to school, through all those years to this one, she had fought for her education, year by year. She could almost not bear the thought that she would return without the title before her name. But, doctor or not, she was a scientist. And this was the truth her work had brought her to: Asymmetries did not belong to any particular group of people, or ‘race’. Nor did symmetries. Silently below this conclusion sat the other words that made her smile. 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 loud.

Irawati Karve’s PhD supervisor, Professor Eugen Fischer, would not have had to read Irawati’s entire thesis to know what it contained. She had stated her conclusion bluntly, right in her title:

Die normale Asymmetrie des Menschlichen Schädels: The Normal Asymmetry of the Human Skull.

Ausland

The Port of Bombay, June of the year 1927. The heavy cloud cover felt oppressive, as if the sky had settled onto the grimy asphalt of the city. Under the low sky, a symphony made up of so many individual sounds—the hum of ships, the occasional cry of gulls, the shuffling of feet, and the incessant chatter of dockyard labour and hundreds of passengers lined up to board a steamship that would take them to the Port of Hamburg. Among them a young woman with pale translucent skin, and grey-green eyes framed by round, silver-rimmed glasses stood taller than most of the people around her. Her hair, parted in the centre, formed a severely straight line down the top of her head, tied into a knot at the nape of her neck. She wore a pastel saree, the pallu held in place with a silver bar pinned at the shoulder to a white shirt, crisp that morning, but wilted now in the humidity and her own perspiration. She was almost as tall as her husband, the tall, dark, handsome man beside her, his black wavy hair combed straight back from a broad forehead, his square-jawed open face prone to a quick smile. They had travelled together to Bombay by train from their hometown, Pune. They did not hold hands, but looked directly into each other’s eyes as they talked. They had been married less than a year.

Excerpted with permission from the authors and the publisher of Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve by Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa (Speaking Tiger, 2024)

About the Book

In 1927, when Irawati Karve, aged twenty-two, arrived in Berlin to do her doctoral studies at the Friedrich Wilhelm University, she was faced with a dilemma. As a woman of colour, the subject of her thesis was to prove her supervisor Dr Eugen Fischer’s theory of the superiority of the European race over people of colour, based on the measurement of their skulls. After examining 149 ‘white’ skulls from Germany and ‘non-white’ skulls from German colonies in East Africa, Irawati came to the opposite conclusion: the shape of the human skull did not prove racial superiority. Fischer’s theory was later discredited, but at the time, it took courage to present the paper to him and it nearly cost Irawati her PhD.

Courage and a pioneering spirit continued to be her hallmarks on her return to India. At a time when such field trips were difficult if not dangerous, she travelled to the Adivasi areas in Coorg, Western Maharashtra, Assam, Kerala and Bihar. Her research resulted in two seminal works, Kinship Organisation in India and Hindu Society.

In 1968, she won the Sahitya Akademi Award for her book of essays on the Mahabharata, Yuganta. Irawati’s belief that the Mahabharata was not just an epic, but a historical record, earned her some criticism from her peers at the time, but Yuganta remains a classic to this day.

As the daughter-in-law of the reformist and feminist thinker, Maharshi Dhondo Karve, adored wife of Dinkar Karve, and privileged daughter of two families— her own parents, Ganesh and Bhagirathi Karmarkar, and her adoptive family, R.P. Paranjpye and his wife, Saitai—Irawati’s personal life was as rich and colourful as her professional one.

In this biography like none other, writer Urmilla Deshpande, Irawati’s granddaughter, and academic researcher Thiago Pinto Barbosa, have created an intimate, captivating portrait of Irawati Karve, the anthropologist and philosopher, and Irawati, the woman, wife and mother. As author and Joint Director, JLF, Namita Gokhale says, ‘Irawati Karve stood tall with the tallest of her generation. This biography is a beacon for those who want to understand the Indian way—an inspirational story of an iconic figure.’

About the Author

Urmilla Deshpande writes novels and short fiction. Her published work includes A Pack of Lies, Slither: Carnal Prose, and Body and Blood: Stories on Breaking the Ten Commandments.

Thiago Pinto Barbosa is a Brazilian anthropologist based in Leipzig and Berlin. Thiago’s doctoral dissertation, published as Racializing Caste: Anthropology between Germany and India and the Legacy of Irawati Karve (1905-1970) has received multiple awards.