Thiago Pinto Barbosa and Urmilla Deshpande

An excerpt:

Thiago: Umi, how did your interest in writing about Karve come about?

Umi: Iru died when I was seven. The idea of a novel based on Irawati’s time as a young woman in (Weimar) Berlin is irresistible. But, how to be clear-eyed about a woman who is part of me? When I started research, like you, I felt ambiguous and conflicted about what I encountered. I think we have the same underpinnings to our quite different projects: we want to be, as you said, at once critical and empathic.

Thiago: I often find myself oscillating between being overly critical and overly empathic towards Karve, depending on who I’m talking to (she has left many fans and a few sharp critics) and which of her texts I’m reading read. I admire the proto-feminist voice in her brilliant book about the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, Yuganta, but, as someone who researches critically the idea of “race” in science, I was troubled by her assertions on “racial elements” of castes and so-called tribes, and by her anti-Muslim utterances in 1947 (the year of the Partition of India). However, as Simone Lässig reminds us, each life is fragmented, and when we write a biography, we might not be able (or want) to create a coherent whole by putting together the heterogenous fragments of a person’s life and personality.² And although Karve, who even had a museum named after her, might be seen as a heroine, I have to think of what Levke Harders, for example, describes as a post-heroic approach in biography writing, when biographies take up figures known as heroes and present more nuanced insights about their lives and work.³ Umi, how do you deal with balancing these different, sometimes conflicting fragments in your practice of research and writing? Is the Karve you’re describing a character afflicted by contradictions?

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