A life lived in the margins

January 11,2009 Mail Today
Book Review: The Weave of My Life

Urmila Pawar’s memoir is an account of rare courage and the desire to succeed that gave purpose to her life

A DALIT feminist manifesto, is how sociologist and noted academician Sharmila Rege in her afterword describes Marathi writer Urmila Pawar’s autobiography, The Weave of My Life . It indeed is one, but is also much more. The sight, sound and smell of a small village tucked in the folds of the Western Ghats beyond two steep hills and two rivers guarded by tigers come alive in the book, which is not an angry Book of the Oppressed. Even the wretched daily trudge of the village women carrying all that they could sell in Ratnagiri is turned into a travelogue of a different kind; a view from the ground and a matter of fact account of village life among the most poor and oppressed, celebrating life’s many vicissitudes.

It is not just a, “ Dalit woman’s memoirs” as the book cover claims it to be. It is also about growing up poor in Ratnagiri, a small town on the Konkan coast, falling in love, doing well in school, hating the English classes and the lighting of the fires of adolescent dreams. Pawar’s description of her village women collecting crabs and shellfish from a creek in her neighbourhood exemplifies the book’s tenor. The detailed account of how Konkan women fish for crabs and oysters, along with a beautiful pen sketch of the locale only adds to the dominant narrative of the woes of everyday life. That is how Pawar strikes a different note.

Even the politics of change from Maharhood to Buddhism, from being meek victims to proud Ambedkarites is drawn in vignettes of marriage ceremonies and their new songs. Ambedkar’s death and the family’s conversion become part of this narrative, which never gets pedantic or overtly political: “ Everyone in the house was weeping. I too began to weep since they all were. After a while, Nathuram said that he would go to Mumbai the next day for the last darshan of Babasaheb and left. Gradually I came to know who Babasaheb was and then the conversion happened quite suddenly.

From the surrounding villages crowds of people marched to the grounds of Gogate College in Ratnagiri… Then came the rever- berating sound of Buddham Saranam Gachchami and we too joined the chanting…” Pawar is the youngest of a family of many siblings. Her father is a teacher and a village priest and her mother incessantly weaves baskets ( the original Marathi title is Aaydan , which means basket). Despite this ‘ creamy layer’ status of the family, her struggle to get educated, to reach out to modernity and to a life liberated from tradition makes the book a breath- taking account of courage and determination.

The home- maker who buys fenugreek, cleans it on her way home and finishes of her chores, presses her often drunk husband’s feet and head, has mandatory sex with him and then sits down to study or write fiction is an oppressed modern woman.

The poverty and the caste oppression of the adolescence when even her tenant and friends had shoed her away because of her caste, is of little consequence here; a Brahmin colleague’s life couldn’t be any different.

Pawar’s account of a lower middle class working woman in Mumbai, crushed by the weight of office, home and aspirations, thus is also a feisty feminist study of the flip side of modernity.

The hesitant writer’s journey to celebrityhood is yet another facet of the author’s evolution, and so is her gradual progression towards Dalit and women’s activism. Her burning desire to succeed as a student, worker, a writer and an activist wipes off the bitterness of a loveless marriage and much else.

But she couldn’t escape the ultimate curse that could visit a mother.

The loss of her son at his prime is a debilitating blow that again universalizes Pawar’s trials. Pawar’s son, an excellent student could not suffer the ridicule of the upper castes in his medical college. Though it is not spelt out, it appears that the son committed suicide, because his college was “ anti- reservation”. It is the story of a life lived fully, that of an unending saga of brave resistance.

Also, as the splendid translator Maya Pandit puts it in her introduction, “ It is a complex narrative of a gendered individual who looks at the world initially from her location within the caste but who also goes on to transcend the caste identity from a feminist perspective.” The translation yet again proves that real literature in India happens in regional languages and if translated well these works could render the agonies and ecstasies of the real India much better than what writers on holiday with their convent school copy books often do.