1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Irawati Karve (15 December 1905[1] – 11 August 1970) was an Indian sociologist, anthropologist, educationist and writer from Maharashtra, India.

[6][7] The time in Germany, which commenced in November 1928, was financed by a loan from Jivraj Mehta, a member of the Indian National Congress, and was inspired by Dinkar's own educational experiences in that country, where he had obtained his PhD in organic chemistry a decade or so earlier.

She studied at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, was awarded a doctorate two years later[b] and then returned to her husband in India, where the couple lived a rather unconventional life less bound by the social strictures that were common at that time.

She had wide-ranging academic interests, including anthropology, anthropometry, serology, Indology and palaeontology as well as collecting folk songs and translating feminist poetry.

Sundar says that although Karve was very well known in her time, especially in her native Maharashtra, and gets an honourable mention in standard histories of sociology/anthropology, she does not seem to have had a lasting effect on the disciplines in the way of some of her contemporaries.

There was also the issue of her use of a niche publisher — her employers, Deccan College — for her early works rather than a mainstream academic house such as Oxford University Press, although this may have been imposed upon her.

[12] Her range of reading was wide, encompassing Sanskrit epics such as the Ramayana to the Bhakti poets, Oliver Goldsmith, Jane Austen, Albert Camus and Alistair MacLean, and her library of books related to academic subjects now forms a part of the collection of Deccan College.