Sundar says that She provides various possible reasons why Karve's effect has been less than that of people such as Ghurye and Louis Dumont. These include her location at an academic centre that carried less prestige than, say, those in Delhi and Bombay and because she concentrated on the classical anthropological concern relating to origins at a time when her fellow academics were moving from that to more specialised matters underpinned by functionalism. In addition, her lasting impact may have been affected due to none of her PhD students being able to carry her work forward: unlike, say, Ghurye's students, they failed to establish themselves in academia. 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.