Urmila Pawar is one of the foremost literary figures in Marathi. Her short stories, though comparatively few in number, have caught the imagination of present-day readers. A long-term member of the dalit and women's movements, Urmila offers a cogent critique of feminist and dalit politics. Like her work on dalit women in the Ambedkarite movement, now archived, her memoirs too are of high documentary value. 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, Urmila describes the long journey from the Konkan to Mumbai, bringing to fruition the struggle of three generations for a dalit modernity, about which readers have hitherto heard so little. Urmila writes frankly of the ‘private' and ‘public' aspects of her life: of falling in love with Harishchandra as a young teenager, and marrying him in the teeth of family opposition, of the young couple and their children moving to Mumbai, of her many sustaining friendships with women and her work, about familial and marital conflicts, of the grievous shocks that life dealt her. The late Sharmila Rege, Professor of Sociology, University of Pune, provided an incisive Foreword, placing the book within it tumultuous social context.