Bama, Baby Kamble, Urmila Pawar… these are some of the most iconic names in contemporary Dalit Literature. Writers, activists, teachers, feminists; they are also women known broadly for writing powerful memoirs exploring the contours of lives shaped by the constraints of identities externally imposed by societal practices of caste, gender, and patriarchy. The English translations of their memoirs from Tamil and Marathi, published in the first decade of the 21st century, have circulated globally and illuminated for the world the multiple and layered oppressions bearing down on Dalit women while building an archive of Dalit feminist theory and praxis. Through twinned emphases on both the generational trauma and wisdom shared among women, as well as an unstinting feminist critique of gendered hierarchies within Dalit communities, they have fundamentally changed the discourse on caste in modern India.Sumitra Mehrol’s A Flight on Broken WingsUrvashi Butalia’s translation of Sumitra Mehrol’s A Flight on Broken Wings is one of the first memoirs by a Dalit woman to be translated from Hindi – Sushila Thakbhuare’s My Shackled Life, a translation of her 2011 Hindi autobiography Shikanje ka Dard by Deeba Zafir and Preeti Dewan was published in 2025 by Speaking Tiger. It has been published as part of the Women Translating Women (WTW) series, a joint publication effort by Zubaan and the Ashoka Centre for Translation, supported by the Susham Bedi Memorial Fund. Focused in large part on coming to terms with the lifelong physical and psychological consequences of a childhood polio infection that left her legs disabled, Mehrol’s story adds a powerful new example of a woman’s resilience in the face of seemingly insurmountable societal obstacles. Butalia’s clear, sincere translation holds the hand of Mehrol’s prose as she unwaveringly unspools her life story, from a neglected childhood to an adulthood marked by professional and personal accomplishment but still marred by a sense of personal isolation. A dominant thread that runs through Mehrol’s autobiography is a persistent struggle with loneliness. Much of this she attributes to her disability, the legacy of a bout of childhood polio. Despite a successful professional career in banking and then as a college lecturer, and her successes as an author and a proud mother, Mehrol writes her story from the perspective of one who stands to the side, one who is denied closeness with others. She writes often of the “formality” others maintain with her, the distance born of both her caste and her disability. While shot through with pain and longing, this also gives her a particularly keen perspective on the casual cruelty of human nature.An unsparing gazeMehrol’s memoir is at moments downright remarkable for her unstinting and sharp gaze upon those closest to her. She is frank about her parents’ failures in treating her polio in time to mitigate her disability. She relates several painful childhood stories of neglect: being left behind, without a word, when the rest of her family went to go see a film, or being abandoned by teachers and children on a school picnic. She describes her wedding to her husband Satish as an out of body experience, watching it all with no excitement, as though it were happening to someone else. “He inspired no feeling, no aspiration, there was nothing in him that raised even a sliver of hope in me that would allow my heart to soar,” she writes. Though they build a life together and at times Mehrol hints at a sense of companionship, she more frequently points out the fundamental differences in their urban (hers) and rural (his) backgrounds: “…the truth was that Satish had spent over two decades of his life in the deeply patriarchal context of the village where the idea of love between a husband and a wife was virtually non-existent.”When Mehrol travels, after the wedding, to stay with Satish’s family in the village, she is horrified at the absence of toilet facilities and the meagre mattress on the bare mud floor. Worried the rats will run off with her meager wedding jewellery, she stuffs it in her shoe. Later, when she and Satish eventually buy a house in Dilshad Colony, where she works in a bank and he in a medical office, she describes a short period of caste-passing: their neighbors assume they’re from a background of caste privilege with their “neat appearance, well-paid job, and well-kept house.” But, like in C. Ayyappan’s well-known Malayalam short story, “Madness” it is Satish’s relatives, visiting from the village, who give them away: “They had spent their entire lives in struggle and everything about them, their way of dressing, talk, behaving, screamed that they were from a lower caste and the moment our neighbours realized this, they began to move away from us.”A life in literatureA distinct pleasure in reading Mehrol’s life story comes from tracing her life in literature, a consistent source of joy and hope for her. This begins with her discovery of popular children’s magazines at a neighbour’s home and her subsequent solo quest to obtain her own library card. Then there are the popular novels for rent, the hours whiled away reading newspapers and course books and recipe books. “Everything that I was seeking and not finding in human beings – the courage, the direction, the incentive to act – I found in books,” Mehrol writes. She pursues this literary interest through to college where she reads all the “big names” of Hindi literature: Premchand, Yashpal, Bhandari, and Renu, among others. “I read them all,” she writes, “and made them my own.”For this reviewer, encountering the contemporary world of Hindi writers with whom Mehrol finds acceptance and community was particularly exciting, because these have been my friends and guides as for decades as well: from Ramnika Gupta, who first published Mehrol’s stories in the pages of Yuddhrat Aam Aadmi to Rajendra Yadav, who first invited her to a writers’ symposium to a community of Dalit women writers like Anita Bharti, Rajni Tilak and Susheela Thakbhaure, who organised literary meetings and retreats, visited each other’s homes, and offered one another support. It’s the first time in Mehrol’s difficult life, one otherwise marked by profound loneliness and a constant feeling of being ‘apart’, where the joy of finding shared purpose in a literary and activist community emanates from her words. This is a common turning point in many Dalit autobiographies, when a life’s struggle ultimately finds expression among a community of writers, but in Mehrol’s story, throughout which you feel almost viscerally the pain of her isolation, it is a particularly poignant one.More than two decades after the first wave of translations of Dalit women’s autobiographies, it is exciting to encounter a new generation of Dalit women’s voices, and to experience the stories of their lives. Urvashi Butalia’s translation of Mehrol’s prose is porous and unassuming, never standing in the way of the author’s unambiguous perspective. It suggests that women translating women is more than just a publishing conceit, but a powerful commitment to translating as an act of empathetic listening and an exercise in speaking in solidarity.Laura Brueck is Professor of South Asian and Comparative Literature and Director, Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, at Northwestern University. She is the author of ‘Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature’ (2014).