'The Weave of my Life- a Dalit woman's Memoirs' is an autobiography by an award winning Dalit writer and feminist, Urmila Pawar.
'The Weave of my Life- a Dalit woman's Memoirs' is an autobiography by an award winning Dalit writer and feminist, Urmila Pawar. The author links her mother's act of weaving baskets, aaydans, to her own 'act of writing'. Translated for the first time into English as The Weave of My Life, her memoirs describe the long journey from a Konkan village to Mumbai, bringing to fruition the struggle of three generations.
In Urmila's words, this is not her story but of every woman. "My mother used to weave aaydans, the Marathi generic term for all things made from bamboo. I find that her act of weaving and my act of writing are organically linked. The weave is similar. It is the weave of pain, suffering, and agony that links us."
Conceptualised into a play by Ramu Ramanathan, he says that traditionally what has been happening in Maharashtra is that since the '70s, a lot of biographies by Dalit writers have primarily been male. "...the importance in Urmila Pawar's work is two-fold - one is great literature and the second is because she was connected with the movement, there is a sense of modernity she brings in terms of the sensibility."
Maharashtra has a long history of writers and poets like Mukta Bai, feminists and social reformers like Tarabai Shinde who have pushed the boundaries in their fight for caste. Urmila Pawar's writings in the same way, breaks radical new grounds.