‘All those who are in India today, who feel it is their homeland, are Indians…The society we want to build is not a Hindu society or a Hindi society but a multi-cultural, multilingual society which has knowledge of one another’s culture and has decided to live and work together in comradeship’.
Irawati Karve wrote this in 1964 in her study The Racial Factor in Indian Social Life. It is not without reason that the authors, Urmilla Deshpande, Irawati’s grand-daughter and Thiago Pinto Barbosa, the Brazilian anthropologist, have chosen these lines to head their biography, Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve. The lines tell us immediately where Irawati stood in the social, cultural and political discourse of her times and, at the same time, prepare us for the unwavering conviction she brought to her professional and personal beliefs during her all too short life of sixty-five years.