IRAWATI KARVE

Irawati Karve (15 December 1905 - 11 August 1970) was an Indian anthropologist.
She was born in Mynjan in Burma and educated in Pune, India. She received a masters degree in Sociology from Pune in 1928 and a doctorate in Anthropology from Berlin in 1930. She served as the Head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Deccan College till her retirement. She wrote in both Marathi and English on a wide variety of academic subjects as well as topics of general interest.
She was the daughter-in-law of Maharshi Dhondo Keshav Karve. Dinkar Karve, her husband, was an educator. Her daughter, Gauri Deshpande, made a name for herself as a writer.
She presided over the Anthropology division of the National Science Congress held in Delhi in 1947.
She died in Pune of heart attack in 1970.


Her principal books are:

• Hindu Society - an interpretation(1961) - A study of the Hindu society based on data collected on her field trips and her perusal of texts in Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit. Paying, the most attention to the caste system, she discusses the pre-Aryan existence of the phenomena and traces its development to its present form.
• Kinship Organization in India(1953) - A study of various social institutions in India.
• Maharashtra -Land and People (1968) - A brief description of various social institutions and rituals therein.
• Yuganta - A look at the main characters of the Mahabharata. These character studies treat the protagonists as historical characters and use their attitudes and behaviour to understand the times they lived in. Written originally in Marathi, it was later translated by the author into English. The book won the Sahitya Academy award in 1968.
• Other Marathi works -Paripurti,Bhovara,Aamachi Samskruti,Samskruti, Gangajal.

Ariticle in Times Of India 19 June 2005 on Yuganta

Like many Indian kids, my first exposure to the Mahabharata was through a combination of Amar Chitra Katha and bedtime stories from my grandparents. These gave me the basic narrative, but I can't pretend they interested me greatly in the epic. Then in my adolescence, my mother handed me a slim book of essays: Yuganta by Dr Irawati Karve, translated from the Marathi original. Yuganta has never been out of print since it was published in Marathi in 1969 and English in 1974. An earlier Marathi version won the Sahitya Akademi prize in 1967. It is a starting point for anyone seeking to read the epic. Jean Claude Carriere used it for his brilliant script for Peter Brook's theatrical version of the epic, and Ashok Banker, who having finished his retelling of the Ramayana and is now set to start on the Mahabharata, writes that he is on his third copy of the book, the first two having simply fallen apart with use. Yet Karve herself, evidently a remarkable woman and scholar, is perhaps in danger of being forgotten. This year is her centenary, yet there seems to be little to mark it. This is tragic because in Yuganta she produced one of the most electrifying books on Indian culture. I still remember the shock of reading it. Suddenly those storied characters became real, complex personalities set in an identifiable world. Karve assumes a basic knowledge of the story and briskly takes the reader through the origins of the Mahabharata, its variants and the facts that are known, from archaeology and historical analysis, of the world it was set in. Her training was as an anthropologist, one of the first Indian women to leave the country to get a Ph.D in the subject, from Berlin, and this background shows in the precise way she describes the hierarchies and rituals of Kshatriya society in which the Mahabharata is set. Karve avoids iconoclasm for its own sake. All too often retellings of the classics become vehicles for putting forth the writer's own agenda, and while this can be valid and even interesting, the original usually suffers. Karve certainly has interests, for example in examining the often overlooked world of the women of the epic, Gandhari, Kunti and Draupadi, each of whom is the subject of an essay. But other essays deal with Bhishma, Drona, Karna and Krishna, and the focus is always on the Mahabharata, and how understanding it leads to a greater self understanding. Two essays stood out for me. The Final Effort looks at two of the most enigmatic characters of the epic—Vidura and Dharma (Yudhishtra). Karve uses her knowledge of Kshatriya customs to suggest (as have others) that the two were father and son, but could not acknowledge each other as such, for fear that Vidura's lower sutta status might imperil Dharma's claim to the throne. It's a twist more daring than any K-serial on TV could make, yet so scholarly is the evidence and Karve's presentation of it, that it seems quite plausible. The second, The Palace of Maya, demonstrates how the epic also tells the story of the historical displacement of the forest world of the tribes by the pastoral world of the Aryans. Both essays would have been controversial when Karve wrote them in the sixties and, sadly, perhaps they would be even more so now, at a time when the epics have been so politicised. All the more reason to value Yuganta then and the particular mindset that produced it. Karve's training in the West allowed her to use its techniques of scholarly observation and critical analysis, but her roots in Indian culture gave her a passionate identification with the story that few foreign observers would be able to summon. Girish Karnad's Hayavadana, based on an Indian folktale, but mediated through Thomas Mann's story from that same theme, is one of the few other examples I can think of this process. It was our good fortune that gave us Irawati Karve as a guide.  Not so quiet has flown the Iravati - Jai Nimbkar The name Iravati is rather unusual, but then her whole life was unusual. The daughter of Hari Ganesh Karmarkar was born in Burma in 1905 when he was working as an engineer there and was named after the river Irawady.   At the age of seven she was sent to India for schooling to Huzoor Paga, a boarding school for girls (and one of the first schools for girls in Maharashtra), in Pune. There she made friends with a classmate,   Shakuntala   Paranjpye,   daughter   of   Wrangler R.P.Paranjpye. Shakuntala’s mother took Iravati to stay with her family: this was to change the course of her life. At this intellectual, atheistic household, she was exposed to a wide range of books and people, one of whom was judge Balakram, who instilled in her an interest in anthropology, a field in which she was to work and leave her mark. It was during this period that she met and later married Dinakar Karve, a Professor of Chemistry in the Fergusson College, Pune, the second son of Maharshi Dhondo Keshav Karve, one of the pioneers in the field of women’s education and widow remarriage in the country.   After her B.A. from Fergusson College, Iravati got an M.A. in sociology under the guidance of Dr. G. S. Ghurye, the founder of the department of sociology in Bombay university.   Her husband, who had realized her intellectual ability, decided that she should study abroad in order to realize her full potential. She accordingly went to Berlin and obtained a Ph.D. in anthropology under the guidance of Prof. Eugen Fischer, Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity in 1930.  After returning to India, she worked for a brief period as Registrar of S.N.D.T. College in Pune. Her real interest, however, lay not in the administrative field but in scientific research and the academic field. She eventually accepted a post in the Deccan  College Post-graduate Research Institute, and spent her entire professional life working in her chosen field under the aegis of this institute.   The main problems she addressed in her work were, “What are Indians? Why are we what we are?”. The goal she thus set for herself was very much in line with the general aims and objects of anthropology. Specific questions she sought answers to were whether more detailed cultural and physical configurations can be established in India in terms of historical, proto-historical folk movements,   What were the physical features of the people who were responsible for the numerous historic and proto-historic sites found all over India,  What is caste ? To find answers to such questions, her approach was ethno-historical, perhaps the result of her training in Berlin.  She started simultaneous investigations in four inter-disciplinary branches: Paleo-anthropology, indological studies, epics and oral traditions, systematic physical anthropological investigations in various regions, and detailed sociological studies in different linguistic areas.   Iravati Karve felt that instead of haphazardly taking measurements of the people of India as a whole, a systematic study of the people of one limited region would be more significant for finding out the racial composition of a cultural region. She was not in favour of taking measurements of primitive groups or caste groups. She said that, for instance, a sample of a hundred subjects from the Maharashtrian Brahmins could not give an idea of the gene pool of the twelve endogamous sub castes of the Brahmins.  The two prominent Brahmin sub-castes, Chitpavans and Deshastha Rigvedi, are quite different from each other, and the latter is much closer   to   Marathas.   She   therefore   strongly   advocated   that   sampling for the Indian population should be done at the caste level and not the caste-cluster level. This concept of caste as a unit of study and a research tool has revolutionized Indian anthropology. Dr Karve also studied kinship terms and usages and family organization in the Rigveda, Atharvaveda and Mahabharata. She collected data from Gujarat, Karnataka, Orissa, Kerala, Tamilnadu and Uttar Pradesh. The results of these studies were organized into a book ‘Kinship organization in India’ (1953).  This work which has run into three editions, is a classic in cultural anthropology and a basic source book for scholars wishing to work in this field.Her work brought her recognition in India and abroad. She was elected President of the Anthropology section of the Indian Science Congress in 1947 and was offered a lecturership in the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. Her most important contribution includes a number of books such as ‘Hindu Society, an Interpretation’, in which she has presented a fresh interpretation of the caste structure, ‘Kinship Organization in India’, and ‘Maharashtra, Land and People’. She has also written ‘Yuganta’, a critique, in Marathi, on the Mahabharata, which earned her the Sahitya Akademi award. Her unorthodox interpretation of various characters hurt the sentiments of some traditionalists, but the book became vastly popular. It has been translated into various   Indian languages as well as into English, and is still going into new editions over thirty years after her death in 1970.          Iravati Karve died in her sleep on August 11, 1970 at the age of sixty five. She brought to her scholarship a combination of intellectual integrity, tremendous mental energy and an ability to find a rapport with a wide range of people, and left a permanent mark on learning and literature in modern India.