Malati Vishram Bedekar

Born: 18 March 1905

Died: 7 May

• She was a Marathi writer from Maharashtra, India.
• She was the first prominent feminist writer in Marathi literature.
• She also used pseudonym Vibhavari Shirurkar ( (Devanagari: विभावरी शिरूरकर).
• In her teens, Balutai’s parents sent her to stay in the hostel of the school for girls which Maharshi Dhondo Keshav Karve had started a few years earlier in Hingane, then in the outskirts of Pune.
• After finishing her education in that school, she graduated before her age 20 from the women’s college which Karve had also started.
• At both of those institutions, progressive ideas of Karve and his teaching colleagues like Vaman Malhar Joshi highly influenced her thinking.
• After college education, Balutai joined the teaching staff of Pune’s Kanya Shala, which again was a girls’ school being run under Karve’s guidance.
• In 1936, she left that high school in the position of its headmistress to take up a government job as an administrator of a “settlement” for certain tribes identified as “criminal” tribes by the British government ruling over India at that time.
• She met and married Vishram Bedekar in 1938, and took the name Malati Vishram Bedekar.
• She left the government job in 1940 to take up writing, voluntary social services, and participation in socialist political activities.
• She chaired a “parallel” Sahitya Sammelan (साहित्य सम्मेलन) which was held around 1980 in protest against excessive government meddling in the main Marathi Sahitya Sammelan.

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