Urmila Pawar

Urmila Pawar is an Indian writer, belonging to the Dalit community. She writes in Marathi, an Indian language. She also identifies herself as a feminist. According to Dharmarajan her work as a writer reflects her experiences of the difficulties of being a woman and a Dalit, according to her Pawar's "frank and direct" style has made her controversial.

Pawar was born in 1945 in Adgaon village of Ratnagiri district in the Konkan district of the Indian state of Maharashtra. 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 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. 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. Post-lunch, she also found herself as a topic of gossip for having eaten too much food. She also narrates an incident where her English teacher humiliated her for her poor English.

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 has a Master of Arts in Marathi literature. She retired as an employee of the Public Works Department of the state of Maharashtra.

Her feminism

Pawar considers herself a feminist. Her Dalit identity forms a very important aspect of her feminist politics. She has been actively involved with Dalit feminist organisations in Mumbai and Konkan region of Maharashtra. Caste, according to her, has not gone away and it will be visible to people who have their feet on the ground. 'Where are the dalit women?' is a question that has bothered her and forms a crucial part of her work.

In her book, Aaidan (The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs), she talks about the poverty her family faced.

Her writing career and awards

She won the Laxmibai Tilak award for the best published autobiography given by the Maharashtra Sahitya Parishad, for Aaidan.

Mahad satyagraha and inter-dining

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.

Aaidan her autobiography written in Marathi has been translated into English and titled as The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs. In her foreword to the English translation, Wandana Sonalkar writes that the title of the book The Weave is a metaphor of the writing technique employed by Pawar, "the lives of different members of her family, her husband's family, her neighbours and classmates, are woven together in a narrative that gradually reveals different aspects of the everyday life of Dalits, the manifold ways in which caste asserts itself and grinds them down"