Young scholars in the social sciences are often nudged by their professors to direct their curiosity towards the historical context of the production of written text. Moreover, with every text read there remains a sociological curiosity to learn and understand an author’s lived experience. The above holds especially for works like ‘Yuganta’, through its courage to challenge convention in thought and method and ‘Kinship Organisation in India’, with its comprehensive assessment of a fundamental tenet to Indian society. ‘Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve’ by Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa (Published by Speaking Tiger Books in 2024) offers much beyond the above, as a biographical exploration of one of India’s finest anthropologists. The book invites the reader to understand the context of her writing but leaves the mind amazed by life like none other.

With a name that signalled her uniqueness to the world, Irawati, named after the Irrawady river in Myanmar where she was born, had an exceptional life. The book captivates the reader through her journey, from her early life in Pune to pursuing her PhD in Berlin at the young age of 22, several field trips across India and life as an academician and researcher. The text also focuses on the figures and associations that shaped her life and moulded her thought, including her reformist upbringing in the Paranjpye and Karve household, her marital relationship with Dinkar Karve, chequered association with her PhD supervisor Eugen Fischer and several other friends and well-wishers.

The book foregrounds her maverick personality early on, through a young Irawati’s principled act of contradicting the racist hypothesis of her PhD supervisor through her meticulous research proving that there is no correlation between skull asymmetry and racial difference, even at the risk of jeopardizing her career. Notably, it explores diverse vignettes of Irawati’s remarkable agility to grasp the nuances of the unspoken and look past the obvious, a critical fixture of her anthropological gaze. The work devotes equal attention to her life as an academic and a writer, through riveting stories of her fieldwork across India and a balanced focus on her writings, from the evolution of her most esteemed works to the literary magic of her short essays. The authors also highlight Irawati’s rootedness in the vernacular, with the Marathi language being the medium of her devoted personal writings and philosophical musings.  The text also functions as a glimpse into the 20th century through her empathetic lens, observing the horrors of colonialism, the simmering of Nazism in Germany, the challenges of social reform work in India and the entrenched nature of caste and gender dynamics in Indian society, post-independence.

Irawati’s adeptness in disciplines beyond her anthropological identity is greatly explored, and her vivid academic journey from physical anthropology to social and cultural anthropology, including her trysts with history, philosophy and archaeology, attest to her interdisciplinary approach, a rarity in her time. Her observations on the unequal power relations in academia between the Global North and Global South, self-reflexivity in anthropological writing and the application of historical and textual methods in research exude prescience, setting a benchmark for future discourse in sociology and anthropology. An interesting anecdote covered in the book is Irawati’s friendship with the underrated physicist Lise Meitner in Berlin, a testament to her optimism towards the solidarity of women in academia.

A vanguard of pluralism in thought and practice, Irawati’s affirmation of the constitutional values of equality, diversity and social justice was unyielding, rejecting discrimination, fundamentalism and hate in all forms. The authors also highlight her constant practice of self-reflexivity in her thought encapsulated through the Hindu philosophical quote, ‘Tat tatvam asi’ meaning “all that is you, too” for she believed that all human beings had the same potential, to love and to hate, to indifference and compassion and to good and evil.

Iru is a compelling read for an aspiring social scientist and serves as a reminder to uphold ethics and progressive values in academic spaces and beyond and pursue an anthropological inquisitiveness towards society and its structures. Ultimately, the book sets a precedent to encourage more works on Indian academicians that shaped the future of their disciplines.

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Jose Benny is pursuing an MA in Sociology from the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.