Dinu and Iru are aboard a steamship that is returning from Europe to India. On dreary days, they decide to “embroider a whole tablecloth together”. Over the years, this will be passed down as a family heirloom; all their children and grandchildren will have heard of it. Today, though lost, it remains treasured through its story. “Sometimes, a thing resides in the memories of those who saw it and knew what meaning it held, beyond its function,” write her granddaughter Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa in Iru (Speaking Tiger), an intimate new biography of Irawati Karve (1905-70). Stories about her home, travels, friendships, and conversations at work, make up the five sections of the book. To the world, Karve was a woman who walked across Berlin and parts of Maharashtra, measuring skulls and bones, to reveal the cracks on which Eurocentric and Brahmanical beliefs of the 1920s were built. To her husband, Dinkar Karve (Dinu), and her children, she was Iru.

Fieldwork in 1944. Pics Courtesy/Urmilla Deshpande; (right)  Iru and Dinu at the house on Law College Road, 1931