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. 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. The author links her mother's act of weaving baskets, aaydans, to her own act of writing'.
Like her work on dalit women in the Ambedkarite movement, now archived, her memoirs too are of high documentary value. A long-term member of the dalit and women's movements, Urmila offers a cogent critique of feminist and dalit politics. Her short stories, though comparatively few in number, have caught the imagination of present-day readers. Urmila Pawar is one of the foremost literary figures in Marathi.
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