Publish Date
6 Sep, 2025
About This Book
‘…a fantastic, beautifully written, biography of one of India’s most remarkable scholars, Irawati Karve. Founded on deep research but written like a novel, the book is moving and inspiring, and filled with empathy and insight.’—Nandini Sundar, author, The Burning Forest and Subalterns and Sovereigns ‘Thiago and Urmilla’s racy and widely researched account of Karve, a remarkable anthropologist and a glorious woman, will shine as one of the finest biographies written on a scholar. Iru is a major achievement.’—Akshaya Mukul, author of Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya and Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India In 1927, when Irawati Karve, aged twenty-two, arrived in Berlin to do her doctoral studies at the Friedrich Wilhelm University, she was faced with a dilemma. As a woman of colour, the subject of her thesis was to prove her supervisor Dr Eugen Fischer’s theory of the superiority of the European race over people of colour, based on the measurement of their...
About The Author
Urmilla Deshpande lives in Tallahassee. Her works include Slither: Carnal Prose, A Pack of Lies and Kashmir Blues. She is working on her next novel, based on her grandmother, Irawati Karvé. Although Karvé went on to become a respected academic and award-winning writer, the novel is about her time as a PhD student in Weimar Berlin in the 1920s. Thiago Pinto Barbosa is a Brazilian anthropologist based in Leipzig and Berlin. Thiago’s doctoral dissertation, published as Racializing Caste: Anthropology between Germany and India and the Legacy of Irawati Karve (1905-1970) has received multiple awards.
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