Babytai Kamble, from India’s lowest caste, wrote a searing memoir about what it means to be poor, female, and shunned—and forced the world to look.
As India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi concluded his first state visit to Trinidad and Tobago last week (July 3-4), Bookshelf turns its attention to the women whose lives remain far from the glare of diplomatic ceremony—specifically, one Dalit woman whose literary voice has, at last, been restored to India’s bookshelf. In a republic where women are both talismans and casualties of development, Babytai Kamble’s memoir The Prisons We Broke (1986) remains a visceral, necessary reckoning.
India is unmistakably global: a nuclear and space power with the world’s fifth-largest economy, a rising voice in G20 diplomacy, and a nation whose digital reach now stretches from the mangrove swamps of the Sundarbans to the arid edges of Rajasthan, from the Himalayan foothills to the beaches of Kanyakumari.
Its cities—Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Gurugram—are latticed with flyovers, metro rails, and IT campuses. Its marbled shopping centres are crammed with international brands. Undersea cables thread the coasts of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, feeding the world’s data demand. Expressways cleave through farmland, connecting state capitals to Special Economic Zones.
And yet: less than ten per cent of Indians own 77 per cent of the nation’s wealth (Oxfam India, 2023). In 2025, 20 protests occur daily. Seven states—including Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Nagaland, Manipur, Assam, Mizoram, and Tripura—signal separatist aspirations. And for the vast majority of India’s women, class, caste, and gender remain overlapping restraints.
The tensions that grip India—economic inequality, regional unrest, and daily dissent—are mirrored most acutely in the lives of its women, especially those at the bottom of the caste ladder.
To understand Babytai Kamble’s voice, one must understand caste. Though outlawed by India’s 1950 Constitution, caste remains the invisible architecture of Indian society.
There are four traditional varnas—Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (traders), and Shudras (labourers)—but Dalits, formerly called “Untouchables”, fall outside this system altogether. They are often assigned the most stigmatised and dangerous forms of labour and are subject to violent discrimination and social exclusion.
India has over 600,000 villages. While its megacities—Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai—are connected to global circuits of capital, fashion, and information, its villages often lack running water, functioning schools, or electricity. The worlds of village and city rarely converge. In the villages, caste still determines one’s job, marriage prospects, and even access to drinking water.
Babytai Kamble was born in 1929 in Maharashtra to a Dalit family of the Mahar caste. To understand the force of her life and work, one must understand that Dalits—the so-called “broken people”—have historically been barred from temples, schools, wells, and even the shadow of upper-caste Hindus.
They were condemned to “polluting” work: leather tanning, waste removal, corpse disposal. Even today, Dalits face systemic discrimination in education, employment, and justice.
Dalit women endure a double marginalisation. They are often victims of caste-based sexual violence, denied political voice, and excluded even from feminist discourse. The 2022 UN Women India report documented that Dalit women suffer higher rates of illiteracy, child marriage, and domestic abuse. Their lives remain largely unrecorded.
Kamble broke that silence with her memoir, Jina Amucha (Our Life)/ Translated in English as The Prisons We Broke by Maya Pandit and published by Orient Blackswan (2008), it was among the first autobiographies by a Dalit woman.
Kamble wrote not in English or Sanskritised Hindi, but in raw, spoken Marathi. Her story of growing up in Phaltan, a village where menstruating women were sent to cow sheds and Dalits to the margins, is told in searing detail:
“We were surrounded by dirt and squalor. The stench of dead animals filled the air. The Brahmins and Marathas walked past us holding their noses, their heads high, like we were invisible.”
Kamble describes watching her mother sweep dung from upper-caste homes before being handed stale bread for wages. When her father, a labourer, fell ill, no Brahmin doctor would treat him. The women in her mohalla ( neighbourhood) worked from before dawn until dusk, and were often mocked or assaulted by the men whose homes they scrubbed.
Kamble was a follower of B R Ambedkar, the Dalit lawyer and economist who drafted India’s Constitution and converted to Buddhism, rejecting Hindu casteism. Kamble followed him, both spiritually and intellectually. Education, for her, was a form of resistance. She wrote by night, after tending to her children and chores, her fingers aching from the day’s work.
“We had no lamp oil. I wrote with the firelight from our chulha (mud stove). I wrote because I had to remember. If I didn’t, who would?”
Kamble’s work remained unpublished for decades. She was a school dropout, a woman, a Dalit—three strikes in India’s literary world. But by the 1980s, Marathi Dalit literature had begun to find voice, and Kamble’s work was passed from hand to hand, copied by women who recognised their lives in it.
In The Prisons We Broke, Kamble writes: “We were women twice bound. First by men, then by caste. Our wombs birthed labourers for the world that despised us.”
This was no lament. It was a ledger of what had been done and by whom.
If Kamble’s childhood was spent watching from outside the classroom door, today’s middle- and upper-class Indian girls walk into air-conditioned international schools, toggling between Instagram and exam prep.
The gulf is not merely of wealth, but of inherited dignity. Dalit girls still face the possibility of rape on the walk to school. In a 2020 Human Rights Watch report, Dalit students were routinely denied entry to temples, made to clean toilets at school, and barred from dining halls.
Meanwhile, India’s privileged women—especially urban professionals—inhabit a different republic. They wear shorts in nightclubs, brunch in rose gardens, and glide through traffic in Pradas and Bentleys along highways and byways built under the ocean.
They have destination weddings in Europe, spend weekends in Dubai, summers in Switzerland, and have access to the best education in India and abroad at Ivy League universities. In the villages, privileged women of India will never see that girls their age still walk barefoot to government schools without functioning toilets.
Even feminist movements fracture: Dalit scholars point out how caste is erased from gender debates. Still, both groups live within a patriarchy. A 2023 Pew survey found 64 per cent of Indian women feel unsafe travelling alone at night.
Modi’s government has made efforts: Ujjwala (clean cooking gas), Jan Dhan (women’s bank accounts), and the PM Awas Yojana (housing schemes). But Dalit women continue to be underrepresented in Parliament, in media, and in boardrooms. Visibility is not power.
Kamble’s life was harder, but her voice rang clearer. Her prose was not shaped by workshops or publishing deals, but by the need to record. That India now studies her in universities—from Mumbai to Chicago—is a small victory.
When the PM of India arrived in Trinidad and Tobago last week, he was received by a republic led by women: President Christine Kangaloo, who conferred the Order of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago on him, and Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, who invited him to speak. These symbols matter. But so do the women without titles, whose lives are rarely seen.
Babytai Kamble saw the voiceless–the invisible, wrote them, and insisted they mattered right up until her death in 2023.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian Media columnist and winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction. Visit www.irasroom.org | Email: irasroom@gmail.com
Author inquiries: irasroom@gmail.com
