Iru: Read an exclusive excerpt from the book on anthropologist Irawati Karve

In 1945-1946, Irawati had been one of the first recipients of the Emslie Horniman Scholarship of the Royal Anthropological Institute of London. The funds had made some of her research and travels possible. But, for a large part of her career, there was no question of being able to pay a student or anyone else to accompany her during fieldwork. As a result, she resorted to family help: Dinu, and both her older children, even nieces and nephews, were recruited as assistants for some of these research trips. This was joyful work to Jai and Anand: both remember these trips with their anthropologist mother in vivid, nostalgic colours. 
Preparation for a trip began with the struggle for funding,a struggle that Indian anthropologists today still know very well. Irawati would write research proposals and ask for grants from institutions, foundations and various other sources.Whether she received the money or not, she would use holidays—summer and winter, as well as any religious and bank holidays—to make the trips. Before leaving, she planned as much as she could. She arranged lodgings and transport,and someone to interpret for her if she was going to a part of the country where the language was not one she spoke.Besides Maharashtra, she also went to fieldwork in different corners of the country: in states known today as Karnataka,Odisha, Gujarat and Bihar, to name just a few. 
In the summer of 1950, when he was fifteen, Irawati took Anand on his first stint as her assistant. Anand already knew how different his mother was from those of his friends. None of his friends or even anyone in any other family he knew called their parents by their first names, as he and his sisters did. All his friends’ mothers wore the symbols that indicated their married status: mangalsutra around their necks, bangles on their arms, and kunku on their foreheads. Iru had none of these. She did have some sort of pendant that she wore, but it could not be called a mangalsutra. It was a small brownstone with a black spot on it, that looked like an eye—Dinu’s eye—which was what she called it. No one else’s mother was as tall as Iru was, nor taught in a college, nor was invited abroad to give lectures. Nor did any of the mothers drive about town on a motor scooter. Anand knew for certain that no other person his age had a mother who would get into a proper swimsuit (made specially for her in a Pune hosiery factory) and swim a breaststroke from one end of Tilak Tank to the other, a full 100 metres, nonstop. The younger women and girls his age would sometimes get into the water,in their brothers’ shorts and shirts, but none of the older ones had conquered the water, like Iru had. And now here was something more that his Iru did that not only no other mother in his acquaintance did, but something that he could actually be part of: anthropological research. 
On Anand’s first research trip, he accompanied Irawati to the southwestern part of India. They travelled by train and then bus and then finally in a jeep, to a forest bungalow deep in among the trees in a wood within a coffee plantation in the area then known as Coorg, in the Western Ghats in Karnataka. They were there to take blood samples of the Adivasis, Hindi for aboriginal or indigenous people, also called ‘tribals’ in British colonial parlance. This was done by pricking the finger for a drop of blood, not from a vein with a needle and syringe. Like many other anthropologists of that time, and for the same reason that she measured people’s bodies, Irawati studied blood groups frequencies: to try to infer more about the sampled communities and their biological relations to other social groups, based on the theory that different populations would tend to have a different blood group profile. They would collect samples from two Adivasi groups, the Beta Kuruba and the Genu Kuruba—the latter known as a honey collecting tribe—and Irawati planned to compare the samples with non-Adivasi people. For Anand,as a young boy, this was an adventure. The area was not electrified, so they went to bed early after reading for a while by the light of a kerosene lantern. They could hear the hum of insects and occasional calls of owls and nightbirds as they fell asleep. In the morning, very early, after freshening up and eating a meal, they set off in a jeep to a place where local Adivasis would gather, as instructed by the forestry officer.
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Irawati also explained that sickle cell anaemia was, sadly, rampant among them, so they were in a way used to blood samples being drawn, and did not protest or object when she lined them up and took blood, as well as anthropomorphic measurements. Anand wrote down the numbers she called out to him.
When they were done for the day, the jeep driver took them back to the forest bungalow, an almost two-hour drive.In the forest he saw flocks of deer running through the trees,and glimpsed bison too. Though it was already quite dark,their work was not done. They did not have any way to store the blood samples they had taken that day—there was no electricity, let alone any form of refrigeration or ice. They had to do the testing immediately, and record the results for that day. This was Anand’s job. He had been Irawati’s assistant all day, carrying, writing, washing, following her instructions and doing whatever she needed him to do. Back in the bungalow they readied the items for the sample analysis: a little slab with twelve half-circle indentations in which they would place serum, and then the blood they had collected.These they would mix, and then record which ones coagulated and which did not. When all the samples were tested and the results recorded, Anand washed and dried everything and put it away. They ate a simple dinner prepared for them by the cook—as it would have been for passing civil servants in British times. Then they went to bed, to get enough sleep before another early start.
The next morning they were driven even further away.After waiting a long time they began to worry, there was no sign of any people to collect samples from. The forestry officer was visibly angry, and also surprised, that the men he had asked to come had not arrived. They finally did arrive, all at once, and were quite sanguine, and after talking to them a minute the officer was no longer angry. 
‘There was a bison delay,’ he informed the anthropologist and her assistant. A large herd of gaur bison—the largest wild bovine in the country—moving across their trail had made it impossible for the men to be on time. It was dark before Irawati and Anand made it back to the bungalow after collecting their samples, and late into the night before they finished the analysis to the sounds of the forest in the light of the kerosene lamp.
Anand went on one other trip with his mother, this time to Kerala, where they travelled to Travancore, Malabar, and Cochin. Here they drove hours and back again to remote places to obtain samples from Adivasi communities. They also sampled the Namboodari and Nayyar communities. Anand enjoyed every minute of his trips with his mother. He boasted about it at school, and he never forgot the thrill of seeing wild animals and meeting people who lived in the forests. 
(Excerpted with permission from Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve, by Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa, published by Speaking Tiger; 2024)