Bone of contention

'Logic and reason don't belong to any one group of people,' Irawati Karve famously said. See how the anthropologist took on racist theory, won awards, and faced her own demons too

- Bhanuj Kappal

In the cold, bleak winter of interwar Berlin, a young Indian woman sat by a window, trying to frame the conclusion to I her PhD thesis.

She had spent most of the past year measuring European and non-European skulls, in order to prove her PhD supervisor Eugen Fischer's hypothesis that Caucasian brains were overdeveloped, giving them a greater faculty for logic and reason.

Fischer's work would go on to feed Nazi race theory, but that was later. In 1920s Europe, the theory he proposed fit neatly into existing scientific orthodoxy.

The Indian woman was considering the consequences of pushing back against that orthodoxy, because her research disproved this theory.

Eventually, she would decide that she could not ignore the evidence of the faceless skulls. "Logic and reason don't belong to any particular group of people," she famously said.

Berlin was just one chapter in the extraordinary life of Irawati Karve (19051970). She would go on to be a trailblazing anthropologist with a keen eye for women's histories; would write critical essays on the Mahabharata, and win a Sahitya Akademi Award (in 1968). A new biography, Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve, seeks to change the fact that most people still don't know her name.