Urmila Pawar is a Marathi writer and activist whose stories, plays and memoir give voice to Dalit women, caught between the burden of caste and the burden of being a woman. Born in 1945 in Adgaon village in Ratnagiri district, the youngest child of a teacher who also served his community as a priest, she grew up amid the untouchability of the rural Konkan and was schooled there, her father insisting on education for his children. In 1957, at twelve, she and her family embraced Buddhism in the wake of Dr. Ambedkar’s conversion of 1956.
She moved to Mumbai in 1976 and joined Ambedkarite organisations documenting the movement’s history, and in the women’s groups of the 1970s and 1980s, among them Maitrini, she argued that Dalit movements had left women out and mainstream feminism had left caste out. With Meenakshi Moon she gathered more than fifty oral histories of Ambedkarite activists, women among them, in a book published in Marathi in 1989 and known in English as We Also Made History. She has spoken on caste to feminist audiences in six countries.
Her memoir Aaydan (2003) follows three generations of Dalit women through caste and poverty. Its English translation, The Weave of My Life (2008), carried it to readers abroad. Aaydan received the Maharashtra Sahitya Parishad’s Laxmibai Tilak Award for the best published autobiography.
