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 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. Her husband was an atheist and she explained her own visits to the Hindu shrine to Vithoba at Pandharpur as out of deference for "tradition" rather than belief. Despite all this, theirs was essentially a middle-class Hindu family in outlook and deed.