Irawati Karve: Between the personal and the scientific

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The maverick philosopher J. Krishnamurti would remind his audience of the important distinction between hearing and listening.

The act of hearing is a shallow formality. The act of listening is a profound engagement. The anthropologist, sociologist, Indologist and essayist Irawati Karve was a listener of the best type.

Her Marathi essays often feature stray conversations with people she had met in a bus or a village market. She would take this seemingly transient raw material to ask penetrating questions about the human condition. In one of these essays, Paripurti, or fulfilment, she begins by asking why women are always identified in terms of the men in their lives rather than as autonomous individuals, and ends the essay on a wry note.

She overhears schoolboys on the street whispering that the woman walking past is their friend Anand’s mother. Irawati says her life is now fulfilled: She is a daughter, a wife, a mother. Did she mean it or was she being ironic? Debates on this essay still break out among Marathi readers.

My own view is that the conclusion to Paripurti is knowingly ironic, almost sarcastic. “Irawati, in her unfettered vision of the world, looked in earth and stone, body and blood, song and text, for answers," write Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa in their excellent new biography of the extraordinary anthropologist, essayist and thinker, who is perhaps best known today for Yuganta, her essays on the Mahabharat. The collaborative venture, Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve, is interesting.

Deshpande is a creative writer, Barbosa an anthropologist. She is the grand-daughter of their protagonist, he has done his PhD on Irawati. The book thus moves between