Kartic Godavarthy

𝐕𝐢𝐝𝐮𝐬𝐡𝐢: 𝐖𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐌 | Irawati Karve

Irawati Karve was the first woman anthropologist in India. She headed the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Deccan College, Pune and also presided over the Anthropology division of the National Science Congress in 1947. Her book, Yuganta: The End of an Epoch, won the Sahitya Akademi Award.

Courtesy: National Council for Science Museums – NCSM

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A Brief Profile…

Irawati Karve, born on 15 December 1905, was India’s first female anthropologist and was a sociologist from Deccan College in Pune. She had previously served as the Registrar at Bombay’s S.N.D.T. Women’s University. She contributed to kinship studies, anthropometry, blood group analysis, and the study of fossil and archaeological remains. She was part of the general anthropology tradition. She also collected and examined folk tunes, and also translating women’s poetry. She also produced books and essays in her native tongue of Marathi, some of which have been translated into English. Karve was the head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Deccan College in Pune for many years (University of Pune). She presided over the National Science Congress’s Anthropology Division in New Delhi in 1947. She wrote in Marathi as well as English. Her work “Yugant”, which is based on the Mahabharat epic, won the Sahitya Academy’s award for best Marathi book.

Karve worked for a post-graduate degree under sociologist G.S. Ghurye after studying philosophy at Fergusson College. She chose to pursue the ethnology of her own caste, the Chitpavan Brahmin, for her dissertation, combining physical anthropological observations with caste origin evidence from Indology. Under the guidance of Eugene Fischer, she received a PhD from Germany in 1930 for a research on normal asymmetry of the human skull. Most of the debate surrounding racism at the time were based on such research claiming differences in skulls, hence this study was quite important. There were no ethnic disparities in symmetries, according to Karve’s research.

Karve’s work, which included four sub-specialties of anthropology, is divided into four groups by scholars:

1. Physical anthropological and archaeological studies, including anthropometric and serological investigations of communities, as well as excavations at prehistoric sites, some of which she conducted with her colleague H.D. Sankalia;
2. Social and linguistic anthropological investigations of caste, including kinship, folk songs, oral traditions, and so on;
3. Survey work covering the activities of weekly markets, urban populations, and people who have been replaced.
4. Articles on women, race, region, and language.

In her research on population variation she argued that each endogamous group should be viewed as a unit, because marriage keeps the group’s genetic structure intact across time. Endogamy is one of the primary elements that defines a caste, and it can be used in social and biological investigations. Because of their similar origin, it was formerly thought that the caste and its further divisions, i.e. sub-castes, had the same genetic stock. Karve’s socio-biological research led her to the conclusion that while the sub- castes may have sprung from diverse ethnic or racial backgrounds, they came to hold the same position as a result of pursuing the same occupation or living in the same place. As a result of their vocational and regional affinity, distinct biological groups have historically been grouped together. To better understand this, Karve created the concept of a ‘caste-cluster,’ which is a larger entity made up of smaller endogamous units called ‘castes.’ She disliked the word “sub-caste” because it was vague and ambiguous, and it implied a required biogenetic tie with the bigger entity that may or may not be accurate.

She conducted anthropometric studies of several castes and tribes in Maharashtra with this as her major hypothesis. These discoveries led to the publication of two well- received books: Kinship Organization in India (1953) and Hindu Society: An Interpretation (1961). Later, she encouraged her students to continue their research in the same direction, and as a result, Deccan College amassed vast amount of data on a variety of biological characteristics of caste groups. Karve was particularly fascinated by the biological variety of extinct populations and the nature of India’s past travels. As a result, she worked with Deccan College’s archaeology department on the excavation at Langhnaj, a Mesolithic site. She investigated the human skeletal remains found there in great detail. Despite the fact that Karve’s work on kinship was based on anthropometric and linguistic surveys that are now deemed questionable, scholarly interest in those and other parts of her work, such as ecology and Maharashtrian culture, has risen.

A significant portion of Karve’s study focused on socioeconomic surveys conducted throughout Maharashtra. One of her earliest surveys was in west Khandesh, among the Bhils. She found from a survey of four communities in the Poona area that caste had a stronghold on social connections. Another survey was carried out at Satara, a tiny sugar town. Contrary to what urban anthropologists would want to believe, she discovered that the town’s educated residents preferred to pursue agriculture since new cash crops (such as sugar and cotton) had made farming significantly more profitable than leasing the property. One of her market surveys in Nasik went into great detail regarding the informal economy.

Karve not only followed anthropology’s four divisions, but also added to each of them. She emphasised the importance of collaboration between cultural and physical anthropologists. Sub-castes as the smallest social units must be the starting point for sociological and anthropometric research. Karve proposed the hypothesis of caste separation and fusion. She used mythical, archaeological, historical, and fieldwork- based information to better comprehend the dynamics of Indian society. She also edited Maharashtra, Land and People (1968), a gazetteer volume.