By Thiago Pinto Barbosa
Published in 2024
DOI 10.25360/01–2024-00008
Photo: Irawati Karve (sitting in the middle) taken around 1927–1930 in the KWI‑A’s doctoral students’ room. Source: family archive (courtesy of Chanda Nimbkar, Nandini Nimbkar-Rajvanshi, and Urmilla Deshpande).
Table of Contents
Introduction | Irawati Karve | P. C. Biswas | Archival Collections | Final Remarks | Endnotes
Introduction
This article examines German archival documents about Indian students who were researchers at the infamous Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie, Menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik (Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, KWI‑A), a centre located in Berlin-Dahlem from 1927 until the end of World War II. Several students and researchers, many of whom came from outside of Germany, took classes or developed their projects at the KWI‑A, and several were under the supervision of its professors. The significance of the KWI‑A for the production of eugenicist and racializing knowledge has been especially drastic in Europe, as the practical application of that knowledge culminated in Nazi genocidal policies. But also due to the transnational circulation of its researchers, the KWI‑A’s intellectual influence was not only contained within European borders. Therefore, it is relevant to ask: to what extent has this site of scientific research and training left a mark in the intellectual formation and later work of its alumni, especially those with international trajectories? This is a question that I and a few other scholars have started to explore in the last years.[i]
Among the foreign students and young researchers at the KWI‑A, there were at least three from India: Irawati Karve (1905–1970), Profulla Chandra Biswas (1903–1984), and Sasanka Sekhar Sarkar (1908–1969).[ii] In the following sections, I trace a short panorama of the first two. Both were among India’s most influential anthropologists in the decades following its independence in 1947, in a time when the discipline was being institutionalized. I offer a glimpse of their presence in the Archiv der Max Planck Gesellschaft (Archive of the Max Planck Society) in Berlin-Dahlem, which inherited the KWI-A-related documents that were not destroyed at the end of World War II, as well as the Universitätsarchiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Archive of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), which inherited the documents of its predecessor Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, where most of the students at the KWI‑A were enrolled. I also deploy a picture found in the archives of the Karve family. This article draws from my research on Irawati Karve, which has been elaborated in several outputs.[iii]
Irawati Karve
Irawati Karve was India’s first woman to be appointed as a sociology and anthropology lecturer in the Deccan College in Pune, where she became a professor and worked until the end of her life in 1970. Karve trained several students with her holistic approach that combined social, cultural, physical, and biological anthropology, including racial anthropometric methods. While Karve’s vast and multifaceted work is most known in India today for its progressive contributions in the study of Indian culture and gender,[iv] the physical and biological anthropological accents in her work were underpinned by her training in racial anthropology in Berlin.
Exceptional for a South Asian woman at the time, she travelled to Germany in 1927 to undertake her PhD in anthropology. In Germany, Karve received a Humboldt Fellowship, which was at that time within the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service, DAAD), a state agency for international scientific/academic exchange that was directly linked to Germany’s foreign ministry. Karve’s doctoral thesis was supervised by Eugen Fischer, an anthropology professor and race scientist, who had made a career by applying Mendelian genetics to the study of “mixed marriages” in German South-West Africa, present-day Namibia. Fischer gave her the task to compare the skull asymmetry of human crania of different racial groups. This task was motivated by a racist hypothesis: Skull asymmetry (whereby the right side of the skull—the one allegedly responsible for culture and rationality—was larger) was considered an indicator of the civilizational evolutionary achievement of white Europeans, while Africans were supposed to have more symmetrical skulls and thus be less rational.
Karve’s dissertation was published in Germany in the same year that she went back to India, 1931, with the title Normale Asymmetrie des Menschlichen Schädels (Normal Asymmetry of the Human Skull).[v] Surprisingly to her supervisor and KWI‑A colleagues, Karve’s research conclusion contradicted the racial theories of the place and time: she bluntly stated that she could not observe any correlation between racial differences and the measured skull asymmetry shapes. Instead of simply exploring the racist hypothesis that, as she emphasized, Fischer assigned to her, Karve’s dissertation explored the alternative hypothesis of whether a skull asymmetry could result from an asymmetry in the spinal column instead. In this sense, instead of resting on a racial explanation, she suggested that skull asymmetry could derive from another, possibly non-hereditary and non-racial physical characteristic. She concluded that “[her] own [doctoral research] investigations carried out on the skulls of different racial groups show no such racial differences in asymmetries in structure, which may warrant the supposition that the asymmetries are a product of civilization”.[vi]
As Karve’s files in the archives of the Humboldt University in Berlin demonstrate, Fischer’s written evaluation of her PhD thesis barely touched upon the actual content of her arguments and conclusion: it briefly explained that Karve answered “no” to the hypothesis of correlation between skull asymmetry and race, and it highlighted that Karve “then raised the question herself whether asymmetries could be related to sideways curvatures of the spine”.[vii] His criticism focused on the dissertation’s structure and succinct format, which, he argued, was also to blame on Karve’s “Fremdsprachlichkeit” (foreign language-ness). Fischer’s sparsely articulated critique is enhanced by his severe grading verdict: he evaluated Karve’s dissertation with Idoneum, the minimal grade necessary for a doctoral student to pass their exam.[viii]
As this story shows, Karve did not simply absorb the racializing knowledge she was taught in Berlin; instead she pushed back racist theories. However, as I elaborate in detail elsewhere,[ix] Karve also applied many racial theories and methods for her later studies of caste and ethnic groups in India. Karve’s work is permeated by this tension between, on the one hand, being rooted in this German school of racial anthropology and, on the other, reflecting on its racist underpinnings. This tension becomes most evident in the last decades of Karve’s life, when she engaged with post-World War II discussions on Nazi eugenics and racist effects of racial anthropology at the same time that she adapted her discourse towards a multiculturalist stance that was typical of the Nehruvian “unity in diversity” discourse. A question worth asking in this regard would be to what extent Karve’s knowledge production in India was shaped by her intellectual, personal, and affective rootedness in German physical anthropology. While I have explored this question elsewhere,[x] in the following I highlight some insights from archives in Germany.
A few documents found in the archives of the Max Planck Society in Berlin-Dahlem offer some insights to the personal connections between Karve and her Berlin professors. In the 1950s—decades after her doctoral studies—she was still fondly remembered by KWI‑A directors as a close student and colleague: She was mentioned in two letters by Fischer to the eugenics researcher Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer as a member of their “circle” of researchers at the KWI‑A, who should be invited for a party that would commemorate the KWI‑A’s opening anniversary.[xi] Verschuer planned this party to coincide with Fischer’s 80th birthday in 1954. Karve responded that she would not be able to make it and sent Fischer cordial birthday greetings along with a sample of her book Kinship Organisation in India.[xii] Verschuer also wrote letters to Karve on the occasion of trips of his friends to India, but she did not meet them;[xiii] a re-encounter between the two seems to have never taken place.
In 1959, on the occasion of Fischer’s 85th birthday, Verschuer collected different birthday messages by alumni and former colleagues. Karve sent a short anecdote about Fischer in which she praised him with the sentence: “He was scientific in his teaching, exacting but kind as a guide and always had a deep humanity” (emphasis added).[xiv] Karve’s stressing of Fischer’s humanity might have had a deeper meaning. In a personal text written around the same time, Karve dwelt upon the humanity of evil: her essay All that is you narrates her philosophical and personal confrontation with the news of the Eichmann trial.[xv] In the essay, she engages with the Hindu philosophical concept of atma to come to terms with the fact that everyone in a given society is entangled with—and responsible for—the evil that emerges in a given society, and that evil, too, is an intrinsic aspect of humanity. Interpreted in light of this essay, Karve’s appraisal of Fischer’s humanity in that birthday greeting might also be a sign of her coming to terms with her affection and bond vis-à-vis her Doktorvater despite his close involvement with Nazi politics.
P. C. Biswas
P. C. Biswas was the first lecturer and head of Delhi University’s Department of Anthropology, founded in 1947 just prior to independence, and a father figure to the subsequent generations of anthropologists instructed in this physical and biological anthropology-centred school.
As Biswas explains in the Curriculum Vitae attached to his dissertation, he studied anthropology in Calcutta, where he obtained his Master of Science diploma in 1931. Thereafter he conducted some research in India under the supervision of Panchanan Mitra, who was head of the anthropology department at the University of Calcutta. In August 1934, the month Adolf Hitler became Germany’s head of state, Biswas moved to Berlin with a Humboldt fellowship. Like Karve, Biswas’ doctoral research was supervised by KWI‑A’s founding director Eugen Fischer, who in 1933 had become rector of the Friedrich Wilhelm Universität zu Berlin, also thanks to his affiliation and intellectual proximity to the Nazi party. Biswas’s doctoral thesis was entitled Über Finger- und Handleisten von Indern [On finger and hand ripples of Indians].[xvi] Based on the analysis of fingerprints and handprints, his thesis argued that Indians are racially closer to Europeans than to East Asians[xvii]—an argument highlighted by Eugen Fischer in his overall positive assessment of Biswas’ thesis, which was graded with the second-best mark: “good”.[xviii]
Biswas finished his dissertation in 1936 and soon returned to India, where, before being appointed to the important university position in Delhi, he was affiliated with his alma mater in Calcutta.[xix] Biswas’ doctoral training cemented his interest in comparative dermatoglyphics research, a field he continued to work on in India. In India, Biswas also wrote in favour of eugenicist population control policies, arguing that India “should learn from the eugenics policies of the Nazi German state”.[xx] He praised the eugenicist endeavours of Nazi Germany and argued that India should elaborate policies of mass sterilization and marriage restrictions for people of certain groups, which he considered to be genetically inferior or degenerate, like criminals and the mentally ill.[xxi] In the department that he once led, Biswas is remembered by some older faculty for his appraisal of Hitler (he allegedly took praise of wearing a jacket that he also wore when he met Hitler, as I was told in an interview).[xxii]
Although current professors and students at Delhi University might not remember Biswas or be critical of his work, Biswas did have a large influence in the department he led and lectured at. He shaped his Department of Anthropology closely in line with the anthropometry-based tradition he was trained in in Berlin. Although many anthropology departments in India follow anthropology’s four-field model, which comprises biological anthropology, the prominence of this specific field at the Delhi University is quite striking—and also remounts to Biswas’s legacy.[xxiii] He was a big influence on the following generation of Delhi anthropologists, many of whom followed Biswas’s trajectory and got a Humboldt scholarship to go to Germany to be skilled in the racial tradition of physical anthropology, also after 1945. One of these students was Indera Paul Singh, who later also taught at the same department as Biswas and published in 1968 the widely read Anthropometry: A Laboratory Manual on Biological Anthropology,[xxiv] which is a summarized translation of a famous German textbook of physical anthropology[xxv] including racial taxonomies. [xxvi] Singh’s textbook is still used in many physical and biological anthropology courses in different universities in India today.
While Biswas is only briefly mentioned among KWI-A-related documents in the Archiv der Max-Planck Gesellschaft (my analysis here also draws from my own interviews in India and secondary literature), documents related to his doctoral studies—including his PhD assessment by Fischer—can be found in the archive of the Humboldt University in Berlin.
Archival Collections
While many documents pertaining to the KWI‑A were destroyed at the end of World War II, the Archiv der Max Planck Gesellschaft (Archive of the Max Planck Society) in Berlin-Dahlem holds several documents and letters related to the Institute and its former staff, including (in fact, mostly) documents and letters dating after 1945. The Nachlass Verschuer (related to KWI‑A’s Department Director Ottmar Freiherr von Verschuer) contains letter exchanges between Verschuer and Karve and her husband Dhondo (Abteilung III, Repositur 86A, Nr. 412, 413) as well as letters between Fischer and Verschuer, in which KWI‑A alumni are mentioned (Abteilung III, Repositur 94, Nummer 69–10), and Karve’s birthday greetings to Fischer (Abteilung III, Repositur 86A, Number 52, 53). In the same archive, Fischer’s handwritten memories briefly mention the international students at the KWI‑A (Abteilung III, Repositur 94, Nummer 45).
Since the KWI‑A was linked to the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (the PhD students who researched at the KWI‑A were usually registered there), the Universitätsarchiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin is also relevant. It contains the PhD files (Promotionsakte) of the students before 1945 of its predecessor institution, the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität; the files being organized by faculty (see endnotes 7 and 18). Both Karve’s and Biswas’s PhD files are available there, containing documents related to their studies including their supervisors’ assessments.[xxvii]
Final Remarks
Documents in German archives can be an important source for explorations on the racial underpinnings of anthropological and other scientific knowledge production about human diversity in India. While a lot of the literature on this subject has highlighted the impact of British colonialism and its actors, I argue that this scholarship needs to consider other transnational and transcolonial connections.[xxviii] As the place where racial and eugenicist sciences reached an especially brutal political apex, Germany was a crucial site for the production and transnational circulation of racializing theories and methods. As I have argued elsewhere, the transnationalization of German sciences of race and eugenics played an important role in the racialization of caste, religion, and ethnicity in India.[xxix] Germany–India connections in the scientific objectification of human diversity are worthy of further exploration.
Endnotes
[i] Barbosa, Thiago P. et al, “Remembering the Anthropological Making of Race in Today’s University: An Analysis of a Student’s Memorial Project in Berlin”. Etnofoor 30, no. 2 (2018): 29–48; Huang, Weicheng, “Rasse Als Transnationales Konstrukt: Die „Mischling“-Studie Des Anthropologen Tao Yun-Kuei in Deutsch-Chinesischen Kontexten”. MA thesis, Otto-Suhr-Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin, 2022; Birkalan-Gedik, Hande, “Traveling Theories, Traveling Theorists: Seniha Tunakan, ‘die kleine Türkin’ at the KWI‑A at Ihnestraße 22–24 and at Ankara University”. Journal of Folklore Research (forthcoming).
[ii] On Sarkar, see: Mukharji, Projit B., Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2023.
[iii] Barbosa, Thiago P., “Racializing a New Nation: German Coloniality and Anthropology in Maharashtra, India”. Perspectives on Science 30, no. 1 (2022): 137–66; Barbosa, Thiago P., and Urmilla Deshpande. Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve. New Delhi: Speaking Tigers Books, forthcoming; Barbosa, Thiago P., Racializing Caste: Anthropology between Germany and India and the Legacy of Irawati Karve (1905–1970). De Gruyter, forthcoming. See also: Sundar, Nandini, “In the Cause of Anthropology: The Life and Work of Irawati Karve”. In: Patricia Uberoi, Nandini Sundar and Satish Deshpande (eds.) Anthropology in the East: Founders of Indian Sociology and Anthropology. Calcutta: Seagull, 2008, pp. 360–416.
[iv] See, for example: Karve, Irawati, “The Indian Women in 1975.” Perspective, supplement to the Indian Journal of public administration, no. 1 (1966): 103–35; Karve, Irawati, Hindu Society: An Interpretation. Poona: Deccan College, 1961; Karve, Irawati, Yuganta: The End of an Epoch. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2017.
[v] Karve, Irawati, Normale Asymmetrie des menschlichen Schädels: Inaugural-Dissertation. Leipzig: Schwarzenberg & Schumann, 1931.
[vi] Karve, Irawati, “The Normal Asymmetry of the Human Body”. The Journal of the University of Bombay VI, Part I (1937): 73.
[vii] Fischer, Eugen, Referat [Evaluation of Karve’s Doctoral Thesis]. Philosophische Fakultät, Littr. 5, No. 4, Vol. 511, 722. Universitätsarchiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Barbosa, Racializing Caste (forthcoming).
[x] Barbosa, Thiago P., “Indian Sociology and Anthropology Between a Decolonising Quest and the West”. Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines, no. 41 (2022): 181–211.
[xi] Fischer, Eugen, [Letter to Verschuer]. III Abteilung, Repositur 94, Bestellnummer 69–10. Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin-Dahlem; Fischer, Eugen, [Letter to Verschuer]. III Abteilung, Repositur 94, Bestellnummer 69–10. Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin-Dahlem.
[xii] Karve, Irawati, [Letter to Verschuer]. III Abteilung, Repositur 086A, Bestellnummer 052, (Nachlass Verschuer). Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin-Dahlem; Karve, Irawati, Kinship Organisation in India. First Edition. Poona: Deccan College Research Institute, 1953.
[xiii] Verschuer, Otmar F. von, [Letter to D. & I. Karve]. III Abteilung, Repositur 086A, Bestellnummer 413 (Nachlass Verschuer). Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin-Dahlem.
[xiv] Karve, Irawati. [Anedcote About Eugen Fischer]. III_86A, Nr. 53 (Nachlass Verschuer). Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin-Dahlem.
[xv] Karve, Irawati, “‘All That Is You’: An Essay.” In: Eleanor Zelliot and Maxine Berntsen (eds.)The Experience of Hinduism: Essays on Religion in Maharashtra. Delhi: Sri Satguru, 1992, pp. 213–22.
[xvi] See: Biswas, P. C., “Über Hand- Und Fingerleisten Von Indern”. Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie 35, no. 3 (1936): 519–50.
[xvii] Investigations on the origins of Indian populations and their similarities to Europeans have had a longstanding curiosity among Indian and European scholars, at least since 18th century theories of Aryan migration. See: Barbosa, Racializing Caste (forthcoming).
[xviii] Fischer, Eugen, Referat [Meldung zur Promotionsprüfung / Evaluation of Biswas‘ Doctoral Thesis]. Philosophische Fakultät, Littr. P, No. 4, Vol. 619, 823. Universitätsarchiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
[xix] Bandeh-Ahmadi, Nurolhoda, “‘The Bad Stock’: Nazi Eugenics and the Growth of Anthropology in Delhi”, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2024): 1–18.
[xx] Bandeh-Ahmadi, “‘The Bad Stock’: Nazi Eugenics and the Growth of Anthropology in Delhi”, Ibid., p. 4.
[xxi] Bandeh-Ahmadi, “‘The Bad Stock’: Nazi Eugenics and the Growth of Anthropology in Delhi”, Ibid., pp. 4–5.
[xxii] Interview with Pooran Chand Joshi, New Delhi, 5 Sept 2017. In addition, Bandeh-Ahmadi’s assessment confirms this memory of Biswas. See: Bandeh-Ahmadi, “‘The Bad Stock’: Nazi Eugenics and the Growth of Anthropology in Delhi” (2024).
[xxiii] Bandeh-Ahmadi, Nurolhoda, “Anthropological Generations: A Post-Independence Ethnography of Academic Anthropology and Sociology in India”. Doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, 2018; Bandeh-Ahmadi “‘The Bad Stock’: Nazi Eugenics and the Growth of Anthropology in Delhi” (2024).
[xxiv] Singh, Indera P., M. K. Bhasin, Anthropometry: A laboratory manual on biological anthropology, Delhi: Kamla-Raj Enterprises, 1989 [1968].
[xxv] Martin, Rudolf, Lehrbuch der Anthropologie in systematischer Darstellung. Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1914.
[xxvi] Interview with B. V. Bhanu, Pune, 20 Sept 2017.
[xxvii] See also, Razak Khan’s Reflexicon article based on his research on South Asian students in Berlin which, among others, also relies on the files in the Universitätsarchiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Khan, Razak. “Entangled Institutional and Affective Archives of South Asian Muslim Students in Germany.” MIDA (2018). Retrieved 12 June 2024 from https://www.projekt-mida.de/reflexicon/entangled-institutional-and-affective-archives-of-south-asian-muslim-students-in-germany/, 2020.
[xxviii] For a discussion on transcolonial connections in the history of science, see: Mukharji, Projit B., Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2023; Schär, Bernhard C., Tropenliebe: Schweizer Naturforscher und niederländischer Imperialismus in Südostasien um 1900. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2015; Barbosa, Racializing Caste (forthcoming).
[xxix] Barbosa, “Racializing a New Nation: German Coloniality and Anthropology in Maharashtra, India” (2022); Barbosa, Racializing Caste (forthcoming).
Thiago Pinto Barbosa, Universität Bayreuth