Model answer & approach
- Highlight the significant contributions of B. S. Guha, Irawati Karve and S. R. K. Chopra to Indian Anthropology. (Answer in 250 words)
Introduction
The three represent the three limbs on which anthropology in India was built — physical anthropology and institution building, kinship and social structure, and Siwalik palaeoprimatology.
Body
1. B. S. Guha: trained at Harvard, he directed the anthropometric survey attached to the 1931 Census and produced the classification of the Indian people into six racial elements — Negrito, Proto-Australoid, Mongoloid, Mediterranean, Western Brachycephals and Nordic — which dominated Indian textbooks for half a century. He studied the skeletal remains from Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, and above all founded the Anthropological Survey of India in 1945 and served as its first Director, giving the discipline a permanent institutional base.
2. Irawati Karve: the first woman anthropologist of India, trained under Eugen Fischer in Berlin. Kinship Organisation in India (1953) divided the subcontinent into four kinship zones — northern, central, southern and eastern — correlating terminology and marriage rule with language family, and contrasting northern clan exogamy with southern preferential cross-cousin and uncle-niece marriage. Hindu Society: An Interpretation read caste as an extended kin group, and Yuganta applied anthropological reasoning to the Mahabharata.
3. S. R. K. Chopra: built Indian palaeoprimatology at Panjab University, excavating Haritalyangar and Ramnagar and describing Siwalik hominoid material, including the giant form named Gigantopithecus bilaspurensis. He trained the generation that carried Siwalik fieldwork forward.
4. Together: they made the subject national rather than colonial.
Conclusion
Guha gave anthropology in India its institutions, Karve its comparative sociology of kinship, and Chopra its fossil record. The discipline's present shape follows the division of labour they established.
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