What Remains

Irawati Karve (1905–1970) is one of India’s most famous anthropologists. Lesser known in India today is that Karve was trained in a racial anthropological school in Berlin in the 1920s. In that school in Germany, Karve was the only researcher who contradicted a racist hypothesis that prevailed at that time and place, namely, that skulls of Europeans had a larger skull capacity on their left side. This story narrates Karve’s thoughts during her research and her confrontation with the implications of scientific racism.