An extraordinary intellect

"She was my grandmother so I could have wanted to create a portrait of a person who was very fantastic and - she was fantastic and wonderful - but I didn't want to do anything that wasn't factual that tried to whitewash anything she did - there ware controversial things about her and her academic life and how she went about things. I knew this from my own mother 's view of her. One of the reasons Thiago and I did get along was because we were very clear that we weren't going to do a hagiography" -- Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa, co-authors of 'Iru; the Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve' talk to Manjula Narayan about the pioneering Indian anthropologist, her time in 1920s Berlin where she did her PhD under racist anthropologist Eugin Fischer, her use of the Mahabharata and other ancient Indian texts to help her interpret contemporary questions about language, culture and religion in Indian society, Yugant, their own use of critical fabulation in the writing of this book, and the strange similarity between the sarcasm and dourness of the people of Berlin and of Karve's hometown, Pune!