Irawati Karve, regarded by many as India’s first female anthropologist and certainly the first woman to occupy a university position in the discipline, ought to be a household name. While some may know her for Yuganta, a series of Marathi essays examining the morality of figures in the Mahabharata that won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1968 and received great acclaim in its English translation as well, Karve’s life (1905-1970) and work encompass much more. 

As the COVID-19 pandemic raged on in 2021, at a time when India was suffering its highest number of daily deaths, and ties between India and China had frayed due to clashes over the disputed border, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) posted a picture on its Weibo account mocking funeral pyres in India, juxtaposing them against an image of a recent Chinese rocket launch. The caption read: “Lighting a fire in China vs. lighting a fire in India” (see Figure 1).

On June 15, 2020, the Indian Army was taken by surprise as its troops clashed with the Chinese Army on the Galwan heights, in Ladakh. At least 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese soldiers were killed in the first fatal clash between the two countries in more than three decades. Was this an instance of intelligence failure?

At the start of 2024, it seemed as if a massive victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Indian General Elections was a given. When the BJP turned in a middling performance, falling below the halfway majority mark in the Lok Sabha, it meant that—for the first time under Prime Minister Narendra Modi—the party would actually be reliant on coalition partners to remain in power, while also facing a much more powerful opposition block in Parliament. The narrative emerging out of that result made it seem as if the Congress-led INDIA grouping was ascendant.