Dr. Wandana Sonalkar retired in 2017 as Professor, Women’s Studies, TISS, Mumbai. She studied Mathematics, Ancient Indian Culture, and finally Economics at Cambridge University. As a student, she was active in the left and feminist movements. She taught Economics at Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University, Aurangabad, for over thirty years. Her doctoral dissertation was on Amartya Sen’s work on welfare economics and his engagement with feminist economists.
Wandana took the lead in starting a Women’s Studies Centre there in 2005. She has several research publications on issues of gender and caste. She has translated texts from Marathi into English, including Urmila Pawar and Meenakshi Moon’s book on Women in the Ambedkar Movement and some short stories and poetry (published by Sahitya Akademi and others). She translated the autobiography of R.B. More, published in 2019 by LeftWord Books as Memoirs of a Dalit Communist: The Many Worlds of R.B. More. Her most recent book (2021) is Why I am Not a Hindu Woman: A Personal Story. Wandana is a founder trustee of Alochana Centre for Research and Documentation on Women, Pune. She has been involved in the documentation of the lives of women activists. In TISS, she worked with others to promote inclusivity and diversity in the classroom.
