According to Nandini Sundar, Karve was the first Indian female anthropologist, a discipline that in India during her lifetime was generally synonymous with sociology. She had wide-ranging academic interests, including anthropology, anthropometry, serology, Indology and palaeontology as well as collecting folk songs and translating feminist poetry. She was essentially a diffusionist, inspired by several intellectual schools of thought and in some respects emulating the techniques used by W. H. R. Rivers. These influences included classical Indology, ethnology as practised by bureaucrats of the British Raj and also German eugenics-based physical anthropology. In addition, she had an innate interest in fieldwork. Sundar notes that "as late as 1968 she retained a belief in the importance of mapping social groups like subcastes on the basis of anthropometric and what was then called 'genetic' data (blood group, colour vision, hand-clasping, and hypertrichosis)".