Urmila Pawar

Pawar at the Savitribai Phule Pune University

Urmila Pawar is an Indian writer of Marathi language. Best known for her socially-relevant writings, she was awarded the Maharashtra Sahitya Parishad for her contributions to literature. 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.[1] Pawar is also an activist and an advocate of Dalit and women's rights.[2]

Early life and family background

Pawar was born in 1945 in Adgaon village of Ratnagiri district in the Konkan district of Bombay Presidency (now the state of Maharashtra).[3] When she was 12 years old, she and her family converted to Buddhism along with other members of their community after B. R. Ambedkar called for people from the Dalit community to renounce Hinduism.[2]

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.[4] She has described how her community lived in the centre of the village, unlike Dalit communities elsewhere in the Presidency that were usually expected to live at the periphery.[3] She has also noted that her father neither participated in the Mahad satyagraha organised by Ambedkar nor inter-dining arranged by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, although her elder sister, Shantiakka, often missed school to attend the inter-dining lured by sweet delicacies served there.[5]

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

Aaidan (The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs)

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"[6]

Recognition

Pawar won the Laxmibai Tilak award for the best published autobiography given by the Maharashtra Sahitya Parishad, for Aaidan.[5]

References

  1. ↑ Geeta Dharmarajan (2004). Separate journeys: short stories by contemporary Indian women. Univ of South Carolina Press. p. 126. ISBN 978-1-57003-551-7. Retrieved 10 March 2012.
  2. 1 2 "Notes From the Margins: Dalit writer Urmila Pawar's autobiography inspires a Marathi play". The Indian Express. 2014-07-20. Retrieved 2016-10-08.
  3. 1 2 Rege, Sharmila (2006). Writing caste, writing gender: reading Dalit women's testimonies. Zubaan. ISBN 978-81-89013-01-1.
  4. ↑ "Urmila Pawar's "Aayadan" - A New Perspective" (PDF).
  5. 1 2 Rege, Sharmila (2006). Writing caste, writing gender: reading Dalit women's testimonies. Zubaan. pp. 256–265. ISBN 978-81-89013-01-1.
  6. ↑ Urmilā Pavāra (June 2009). The weave of my life: a Dalit woman's memoirs. Columbia University Press. pp. xv–xviii. ISBN 978-0-231-14900-6. Retrieved 10 March 2012.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.