Yuganta: The End of an Epoch

Biography of Irawati Karve and his Contribution towards Sociology.

Irawati Karve was an Indian educationist, anthropologist, sociol­ogist and a writer from Maharashtra, India. She was born to G.H. Karmarkar, an engineer in Myingyan, Burma, on December 15, 1905 and died on August 11, 1970. She was named Irawati after the great and sacred Burmese river, IrrKinship Organization in India (1953)awaddy. She grew up in Pune.

She was the daughter-in-law of Maharshi Dhondo Keshav Karve. Her husband Dinkar was an educator and the Principal of Fergusson College. Anand, son of Dinkar and Irawati, runs an NGO in Pune called ‘Arti’. Their youngest daughter, Gauri Deshpande, was a well-known Marathi writer of short stories and poems.

Methodological Perspective:

Irawati Karve was India’s first woman anthropologist at a time when anthropology and sociology were still developing as university disciplines. She was also the founder of Anthropology Department at Poona (now Pune) University, an indologist who mined Sanskrit texts for sociological features, an anthropologist, serologist, and palaeontologist, a collector of folk songs, a trans­lator of feminist poems, and a Marathi writer and essayist of no mean repute whose book Yuganta transformed our understanding of the Mahabharata.

The indological tradition that Karve subscribed to was of very different from Dumont’s in that there was no attempt at building or eliciting an underlying model of social relations. Instead, she was an indologist in the classical Orientalist sense of looking to ancient Sanskrit texts for insights into contem­porary practice (Cohn, 1990: 143).

Ghurye’s influence is apparent in much of Karve’s work. They shared common belief in the importance of family, kinship, caste and religion as the basis of Indian society, and also a broad equation of Indian society with Hindu society (Sundar, 2007).

BOOKS 

1,Kinship Organization in India (1953)

2. The Bhils of West Khandesh (1958)

3. Hindu Society: An Interpretation (1961; 1968)

4. Group Relations in Village Community (1963)

5. The Social Dynamics of a Growing Town and Its Surrounding Area (1965)

6. Maharashtra: Land and People (1968)

7. Yuganta: The End of an Epoch (1968)

8. Paripurti (in Marathi) (1949)

9. Bhovara (in Marathi)

10. Amachi Samskruti (in Marathi)

11. Samskruti (in Marathi)

12. Gangajal (in Marathi) (1972)

Irawati Karve (1905-1970) was born in Burma and educated in Pune. A Master’s degree in sociology from Mumbai in 1928 and a doctoral degree in anthropology from Berlin in 1930 marked the onset of a long and distinguished career of pioneering research. Karve, a researcher of international repute, known to have nurtured social sense in people and achieved supremacy in the fields of sociology, cultural and physical anthropology, was also an excellent author and a fine example of women’s liberation.

Karve had knowledge of both social and physical anthro­pology – a combination which in these days of specialization only few of us can claim. Beyond that her acquaintance with Sanskrit and Pali literature enabled her to write on Indian kinship diachronically, particularly as she has gone to the trouble of learning to read Tamil for the sake of the light which early literature can through on South Indian systems.

She wrote in both English and Marathi, on academic subjects as well as on topics of general interest, and thus commanded an enviably wide circle of readership. Whether through her Hindu Society: An Interpretation, a scholarly treatise in English, or through Yuganta: The End of an Epoch, her study in Marathi of the characters and society in the Mahabharata, we obtain ample illustration of the range and quality of her mind.

But, at the international level, she is known for her study of various social institutions in India, and through her book on Kinship Organization in India, which first appeared in 1953 and marked a notable advance in our under­standing of the structure of Indian society. It has not been superseded by any other general comparative treatment of Hindu kinship in India as a whole, and a reissue is more than overdue