Revision summary
Karve mapped Indian kinship by region in Kinship Organization in India. She joined Indology, ethnography, and cautious anthropometry. Caste was a marriage universe, not a nasal race. Yuganta treated Mahabharata figures as mortal kin. Marathi writing took the same method to a non-academic public.
Model answer
Introduction
Irawati Karve built Indian anthropology from kinship, caste, and field measurement, not from a borrowed African tribe model. Her literary work, especially Yuganta, carried the same kinship eye into the Mahabharata.
Body
Kinship and regional structure
- Kinship Organization in India mapped north, south, east, and central zones by descent, marriage, and household, using Indology plus ethnography.
- She showed that Dravidian cross-cousin marriage, northern village exogamy, and central hypergamy are regional systems, not one Hindu family.
- Work on Maharashtrian kinship and the joint family tested what census categories hide.
Caste, race, and method
- Trained under G. S. Ghurye and later in Germany, she used anthropometry without turning caste into Risley’s nasal races.
- She treated caste as a kinship and marriage universe with local ranking, which later village studies could use.
- Deccan College fieldwork joined linguistics, folklore, and physical notes, a four-field habit rare in Indian sociology.
Literary contribution
- Yuganta read Mahabharata figures as mortal kin in a collapsing order, not as plaster gods. That is anthropology of a text.
- Marathi essays and stories carried kinship and women’s place to a public that never opened a monograph.
- The literary file is not decoration. It is Karve’s method applied to epic persons, duty, and household ruin.
Limit
- Later feminist and Dalit criticism said her caste map still sat too close to Sanskritic centres. The kinship zones remain the teaching grid.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD K[Karve] --> Z[Kinship zones] K --> Y[Yuganta epic as kin] K --> C[Caste without Risley race]
Conclusion
Karve’s gift is a regional kinship map of India and a literary reading of epic persons as kin. Yuganta is that anthropology in public language.
Quick related
Students also ask
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What are the arguments for excluding Narmada Man from Homo erectus category?
Next question in the 2022 paper (Q2). View answer →
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Is Yuganta a novel?
It is essayistic literary anthropology of epic persons. Plot is the Mahabharata’s, the method is kinship.
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Did Karve follow Risley?
She measured bodies but refused to equate caste with a stable race type.
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