A young woman sits by a window. It’s a winter day in an unfamiliar country and she’s contemplating a decision that could change her life forever. It’s a difficult choice, but one she knows she can’t avoid. She looks at the fading light outside and sighs – what should she do?  

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the above is a scene from a romantic novel; a climax where the heroine must choose between the two great loves of her life. However, the context here is slightly different. This scene is the opening of a biography of Irawati Karve, the anthropologist and writer who later went on to become one of India’s most well-known sociologists. It locates her in 1929 in Berlin, right at the genesis of what would later become Nazi Germany. As a PhD student of anthropology, Irawati had arrived at a conclusion that scientifically proved that European skulls were symmetrical to non-European ones. The prevailing consensus on this was different. It was accepted that because Europeans have an overdeveloped right lobe, their skulls are asymmetrical in comparison the rest of the world. This theory proved the intellectual and emotional superiority of a White, primarily Aryan, race. Irawati’s measurements proved otherwise. 

So, her conundrum was this: Could she, a non-European woman, go against her PhD supervisor, her institute, and the wider scientific community? Her choices were: Stick to her scientific results and lose her career which she loved and had fought the world for. The alternative, was quite simply against her principles. 

When I read this scene in the book by authors Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa, I realized that the context might be different, but I was reading a romance novel with Irawati as the protagonist. Her work was her lifelong love. In true romance novel fashion, she was faced with a choice which could end everything. And ultimately, there was a happy ending – Irawati wrote her thesis with her principles intact and was able to research and write all her life.

This was a love story. 

For Indian working women, it’s easy to fall in love with work. But it is much harder to keep that love going. It’s a love story that is defined by economic compulsions, societal expectations, and unexpected support systems. Irawati’s decision to go to Germany to do her PhD in anthropology had two opponents; both within her family. Maharshi Dhondo Keshav Karve, Irawati’s father-in-law, was a champion of women’s education. Yet, within the home, he opposed her daughter-in-law’s wish to study further. Irawati’s father, Ganesh Karmarkar, also was not in favour of her daughter studying and working outside the home. 

But just as every good love story needs a champion, every Indian woman who falls in love with work needs a support system to anchor, guide, and come through – a teacher, a family member, that one mentor they found in their first job. For Irawati, that support system was her husband and lifelong companion, Dinkar Karve.  

He insisted that Irawati travel to Germany and do her PhD, even if it meant travelling alone as an Indian woman in a pre-Independent India on a passenger steamship from Bombay to Hamburg. Much later, as a mother and a professor, when Irawati’s work in anthropology meant that she had to travel to remote locations, Dinkar again became a champion of our love story. He took care of the chores and the children; in what I am sure in 2025 would make him the Internet’s pookie. 

But for Irawati, the decision to marry Dinkar – indeed enter marriage — was one that was guided by her career. It’s interesting that the book – which is written by one of Irawati’s granddaughters – doesn’t shy away from the fact that Irawati considered marriage only because she knew that marrying someone as progressive as Dinkar would mean that she could get the freedom she needed to continue her education. It’s even more interesting, and perhaps less surprising, that despite decades intervening, things haven’t changed that much when it comes to Indian working women finding ways to obtain freedoms when confronted with the question of marriage. 

In an essay titled “You are Next: Unmarried Urban Women in India and the “Marriage Talk,” published in 2024, feminist academic Shilpa Phadke writes how young Indian women use both education and careers as negotiations to further avoid the “marriage talk” with their families. In a paragraph from the essay that might have made Iru chuckle, Phadke writes, 

“The PhD or even the promise of a future PhD emerges as an important marker that not just women but also their families use, to signal to the extended kin and community that while their daughters might not be conforming by marrying, they are still nonetheless, achieving other desirable goals.” (Heidelberg University Press, 2024) 

“Other desirable goals” as a phrase to describe a woman’s career aligns with the societal expectations within a patriarchal setup where a woman’s first responsibility, and indeed role, might be perceived to be that of wife. That’s why in our love story of a woman and her work, the object of affection – or the beloved – invariably comes second. Or third; if kids come into the picture. But what if sometimes you do love your work more? Does that make you a bad mother? That’s what I found myself thinking while reading this passage about Irawati managing being a mother and an academic,  

“Late one afternoon, she (Iru) was at her desk in her office at Deccan College. While a pile of students’ essays waited to be graded, several books lay open beside her, and she was lost in writing…At some point she remembered someone had brought a cup of tea in for her and she took a sip of it. It was cold. She didn’t really notice and kept working. She was distracted by a sudden shiver going through her and realized that her sari and blouse were wet through. She thought she must have spilled some tea on herself. And then she remembered, something which had left her entirely for the past hour. She had a baby girl at home, whose existence she had forgotten, and who must now be very hungry. Nature had her own way of reminding her - she was soaked in breast milk.”  

In the book, Irawati runs off to nurse her daughter after this incident. But the fact that she lived close to where she worked, that her taking a break for nursing didn’t mean a significant loss of income, and that she had a support system in her family who didn’t mind that she liked being a mother and an academic – these are material advantages that allowed Irawati Karve to become the well-respected and renowned academic that she did. 

Unfortunately for many Indian women, that’s not a reality.  

Data shows that women with at least one child under the age of one have recorded a significant drop of participation of women in the workforce to 34% – and this across urban and rural areas. To make matters worse, 93.5% of women workers in India cannot access maternity benefits; especially those working in the informal sector. (IndiaSpend, 2024) How many working Indian women can afford to give their work the kind of time, attention, and labour that it needs?  

As I am writing this, Indian social media is busy in heated debates on gender politics in the kitchen due to the release of “Mrs” – a Hindi remake of the Malayalam film, “Great Indian Kitchen.” The film tackles the labour of the homemaker in a traditional Indian marriage by locating her, and the audience, firmly in the kitchen. In a scene in the film, the protagonist asks her father-in-law permission to apply for a job. Her father-in-law responds, “What’s the need? Your mother-in-law was in fact a PhD. But she gave it all up to take care of us, her husband and her son.” Watching that scene after just having read Iru discovering her intellectual prowess in Berlin, I wondered – what if that mother-in-law who remains nameless in the film could become a world-famous scientist? Could she have been Irawati’s compatriot in a different time and world?  

In real-life, friendships often proved to be a support for Irawati. When she was at SOAS University of London in 1951, she was struggling to finish her work due to the isolation she felt in the UK. Her seminal work, “Kinship Organization in India,” was still a work-in-progress and she was increasingly convinced that she would never finish it. Elizabeth Haimendorf, a professor of anthropology herself and the wife of the Chair of Asian Anthropology, Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, and her friendship proved to be the push that Irawati needed. She says of this friendship in the book, 

“At times I despaired of ever moving forward with the book and would certainly have ceased writing it but for the constant goading and ready help of Betty Haimendorf whose friendship for a lonely elderly Indian woman in a strange city was even greater and more useful than the former.” 

“Kinship Organization in India” went on to bring Irawati worldwide fame. But what remained with me long after I turned the last page of this book was this tiny story of friendship. Because it was a reminder of the joy of, and the importance of, feminist solidarity. Being a working woman in India, and being in love with the work, can often feel like treading a balancing rope that is unpredictable. Stable at best; swinging wildly at worst. But I’d wager that the best love stories have the greatest wingmen and wing(wo)men. The ones who make the balancing act a joy, and loving work feel like the most natural thing.  

I think Irawati Karve would agree.

Maanvi is the editor for research and media at the Godrej DEI Lab. She is a Mumbai-based award-winning editor, journalist, and writer by day; reader by night; and talking about Hindi cinema, always.