Facts contribute to fiction. Fiction, in turn, shapes a better understanding of the narrator, who draws on facts. Just as it happens in the case of the newly-released novel Findri (the unwelcome, unwanted girlchild) by Dr Sunita Borde. Written in the vibrant Marathwadi dialect—a glossary indeed eye-opening for the Marathi language speaker—the fictional account borrows heavily from the author’s personal struggle, which started from birth in a Mahar family way back in 1976. Findri is the step-back-to-take-stock space for Dr Borde. For the reader, it is a means to empathise with, and celebrate toiling women who defy caste, class and gender norms; many of whom go unsung, unwritten about, unmentioned in Women’s Day wins. 

Findri, the protagonist raised in an unimaginably unfair exploitative social order, rises as a winner, an Ambedkar scholar, an award-winning author-poet who now heads the History Department at Sangli’s C B Shah Women’s College. Dr Borde’s PhD research revolves around India’s Five Year Plans seen through the prism of women’s progress; her MPhil subject is Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar’s worldview on religion. Be it fiction or research-based writing or verse, she mirrors the realities of our times. “Findri is not just my story, but a bouquet of women’s voices, which hope to create a world in which a newborn girl is naturally entitled to respect and human rights.”