New Delhi, Nov. 2 -- The maverick philosopher J. Krishnamurti would remind his audience of the important distinction between hearing and listening. The act of hearing is a shallow formality. The act of listening is a profound engagement. The anthropologist, sociologist, Indologist and essayist Irawati Karve was a listener of the best type. Her Marathi essays often feature stray conversations with people she had met in a bus or a village market. She would take this seemingly transient raw material to ask penetrating questions about the human condition.

In one of these essays, Paripurti, or fulfilment, she begins by asking why women are always identified in terms of the men in their lives rather than as autonomous individuals, and ends the...