the weave of my life a dalit woman's memoirs

Secondly, I too graduated from the Siddharth College, founded and run by an educational trust in honour of Dr. However, the basket-weaving Mahars in my village of Velim lived not in the centre of the village as in Ratnagiri, but at its edge at the foot of the hill. As one born and raised in Portuguese Goa, I could relate to her description of foods such as ambeel for many households in the Salcete district also prepared this sour-tasting congee in the 40s. Two aspects of her life kept me absorbed in her story – Ratnagiri and Siddharth College in Mumbai.

Pawar, now 63, and a well-known Marathi litterateur, writes with such honesty and truth that her narrative reads like good fiction, a shapely story that feels too good to be true. Indeed, her autobiography was first published in Marathi in 2003 as Aaydan, referring to her mother’s work of weaving baskets.Īnd the English translation published in 2008 is given the title The Weave of My Life, a Dalit Woman’s Memoirs, by the author to dramatise the significance of weaving as a metaphor for writing, a charming metaphor, indeed, for the act of writing an autobiography.

And to think that a woman from the Mahar caste could rise above her poor and deprived environment in the Ratnagiri village and survive to tell her story is nothing short of remarkable.Īnd so it is the weave of Pawar’s life that enthrals the reader through its many diversionary patterns, fascinating in complexity and creativity, like the basket her mother used to weave with bamboo strips. THE WEAVE of My Life by Urmila Pawar is more than a Dalit woman’s memoirs it’s a bold yet intelligent critique of casteism coupled with feminist politics in Maharashtra towards the last quarter of the 20th century.

The weave of my life a dalit woman's memoirs