Very often, in the underbellies of history, we find people who helped drive change but were never fully recognised for their efforts and abilities. Most, if not all, of these people are women. One such woman was Irawati Karve. Born in Burma (currently Myanmar), she was an academic who dared to defy her German doctoral supervisor, Eugen Fischer, and his Nazi thesis.

After studying at a boarding school at Pune, Karve went to Germany in the 1920s to pursue her doctoral research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (KWI-A), an institution that was established to undertake research on 'racial hygiene'. Fischer expected her to provide evidence linking skull shape to race — a claim meant to uphold European superiority as better development in the right side of the brain meant better intelligence. Instead, Karve’s dissertation calmly dismantled the idea, showing no correlation between race and brain asymmetry. Out of all the articles published by the KWI-A at the time, Karve’s ‘normal asymmetry of the skull’ was the only paper that did not condone a racial theory.

Back in India, Irawati Karve became one of the country’s first female anthropologists and sociologists. She wrote across disciplines: detailed studies of kinship and caste, essays on Indian society, and perhaps most famously, 'Yuganta', where she re-read characters from the Mahabharata with a proto-feminist sensibility. For a generation of readers, she proved that scholarship could also be sharp and empathetic storytelling.

But Karve’s legacy is not so simple. Even as she critiqued racial superiority in Germany, she carried anthropometric methods that she studied in Berlin back to India, applying them to study caste and tribal groups. Critics have noted how this work echoed colonial frameworks long after they were being abandoned elsewhere. Her writings during Partition also revealed biases against Muslims in 1947, a contradiction when set against her more inclusive cultural essays.

Her granddaughter, writer Urmilla Deshpande, and scholar Thiago Pinto Barbosa who worked together on Karve’s biography : ‘Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve’ have described her as a figure of “contradictions” — pioneering and progressive in some spaces, complicit in others. And perhaps that is why Karve matters today. 

When it comes to historic figures, it is important to see them not just as static images in encyclopedias and history books, but as whole human beings — products of their society, shaped by both their privileges and their prejudices. If Karve had been a man, she might already have three biographies and a film about her, but as a woman — especially in academia — it is all too easy for her to be lost in the archives of our libraries. Irawati Karve was neither a saint nor a villain. Her importance lies in the wholeness of the legacy she left behind: the good, the great, the bad, and the ugly.

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