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This book is a contribution to the sociology of embodiment—mediated by gender and class—in the context of women’s lives in urban India today.

The writings of dalit women are gaining greater visibility today, especially through translations. The Weave of My Life, Maya Pandit’s English translation of Urmila Pawar’s autobiographical work Aaydan (2003), is a welcome addition to this fast-growing archive.

The book under review with its intriguing title is by Gail Omvedt, the pioneering historian of Jotiba Phule and his movement. Since the publication of Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society (1976) Omvedt has maintained a steady stream of publications on Ambedkar and lower caste movements which have enlarged our understanding of dalit resistance and assertion.

The essays in this book reflect the general intellectual climate of the 1990s in India. Ravikumar’s essays—as Susie Tharu eloquently puts it in the Foreword entitled ‘Labour of Theory’—‘even in the black and white of print .

This collection of essays has a sense of polemic, since the writers are keen to bring the analyses of class as a category back into the sociological debate.

‘Subhashini’, the author declares at the beginning of the book ‘is all but absent from history, though history is not absent from her life’. A cryptic statement as this carries us nowhere. Who is it who does not have history in their lives, although not all lives are in history or are material for history?