Irawati Karve
| Irawati Karve | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1905 Burma |
| Died | 11 August 1970 |
| Residence | Pune, India |
| Occupation | Anthropologist |
| Spouse(s) | Dinkar Dhondo Karve |
Irawati Karve (1905 – 11 August 1970) was an anthropologist,sociologist, , educationist and writer from Maharashtra, India.
Karve was born in 1905 to a wealthy Chitpavan Brahmin family and was named after the Irrawaddy River in Burma where her father, Ganesh Hari Karmarkar, was working for the Burma Cotton Company. She attended the girls boarding school Huzurpaga in Pune from the age of seven and then studied philosophy at Fergusson College, from which she graduated in 1926. She then obtained a Dakshina Fellowship to study sociology under G. S. Ghurye at Bombay University, obtaining a master's degree in 1928 with a thesis on the subject of her own caste titled The Chitpavan Brahmans — An Ethnic Study.
Karve married Dinkar Dhondo Karve, who taught chemistry in a school, while studying with Ghurye. Although her husband was from a socially distinguished Brahmin family, the match did not meet with approval from her father, who had hoped that she would marry into the ruling family of a princely state. Dinkar was a son of Dhondo Keshav Karve, a campaigner for women's rights who, somewhat contradictorily, opposed Dinkar's decision to send her to Germany for further studies.
The time in Germany, which commenced in November 1928, was financed by a loan from Jivraj Mehta, a member of the Indian National Congress, and was inspired by Dinkar's own educational experiences in that country, where he had obtained his PhD in organic chemistry a decade or so earlier. She studied at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, was awarded a doctorate two years later and then returned to her husband in India, where the couple lived a rather unconventional life less bound by the social strictures that were common at that time. Her husband was an atheist and she explained her own visits to the Hindu shrine to Vithoba at Pandharpur as out of deference for "tradition" rather than belief. Despite all this, theirs was essentially a middle-class Hindu family in outlook and deed.
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