Aaidan (The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs)Īaidan her autobiography written in Marathi has been translated into English and titled as The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs. She mentions in her autobiography Aaidan that her father neither participated in the Mahad satyagraha organised by Ambedkar nor inter-dining arranged by Savarkar, though her elder sister Shantiakka she recalls often missed school to attend the inter-dining lured by sweet delicacies served there. She won the Laxmibai Tilak award for the best published autobiography given by the Maharashtra Sahitya Parishad, for Aaidan. In her book, Aaidan (The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs), she talks about the poverty her family faced. She retired as an employee of the Public Works Department of the state of Maharashtra. She has a Master of Arts in Marathi literature. She also talks about how her community lived in the centre of the village unlike other Dalit communities elsewhere that usually gets relegated to the periphery of villages in Maharashtra.

She also narrates an incident where her English teacher humiliated her for her poor English. Post-lunch, she also found herself as a topic of gossip for having eaten too much food. She talks about an incident in school where her classmates invited her for a potluck lunch but clearly told her not to bring any food. Pawar was acutely aware of her caste identity even as a child because of the repeated instances of discrimination and humiliation she faced in her school and other places. However, when she was 12 years old, she and her family converted to Buddhism along with other members of their community after B R Ambedkar's call to people from the Dalit community to renounce Hinduism. Pawar was born in 1945 in Adgaon village of Ratnagiri district in the Konkan district of the Indian state of Maharashtra. Book Review: Urmila Pawar, The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirsand Ravikumar, Venomous Touch: Notes on Caste, Culture and Politics ManuBhagavanView all authors and affiliations Urmila Pawar, The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs, trans.

The weave of my life by urmila pawar