'Aalo Aandhari' (A Life Less Ordinary) is the autobiography of:

"Aalo Aandhari" ("Light and Darkness") is the autobiography of Baby Halder, written in Bengali and published in Hindi translation in 2002. Its English translation, "A Life Less Ordinary" (2006), was done by Urvashi Butalia and published by Zubaan.

About the book:

• Baby Halder was born in 1973 in Kashmir and grew up in Durgapur and Murshidabad, West Bengal.
• She was married at the age of 12 to a man much older than her and had her first child at 13.
• After years of an abusive marriage, she left her husband and moved to Delhi with her three children, working as a domestic help in Gurgaon (Gurugram).
• Her employer, Prabodh Kumar, a retired professor of anthropology and a grandson of the Hindi writer Premchand, noticed her interest in books and encouraged her to write about her life.
• She wrote her story in simple Bengali in notebooks, and Prabodh Kumar translated it into Hindi.
• The book became a sensation and was translated into many languages, including English, French, German and Japanese.
• It gave a rare first-hand voice to the lives of domestic workers and poor women in India.
• She later wrote "Eshat Roopantor" ("A Little Transformation"), a sequel.

Other autobiographies by Indian women from marginalised backgrounds:

• Bama: "Karukku" (1992), a Tamil autobiography of a Dalit Christian woman.
• Urmila Pawar: "Aaydan" (The Weave of My Life), a Marathi Dalit autobiography.
• Shantabai Kamble: "Majya Jalmachi Chittarkatha", the first autobiography by a Dalit woman in Marathi.

Earlier women's autobiographies:

• Rassundari Devi: "Amar Jiban" (1876), the first autobiography by an Indian woman.
• Binodini Dasi: "Amar Katha" (1912-13), by a Bengali stage actress.

Why not the other options?

• ✗Bama wrote "Karukku".
• ✗Rassundari Devi wrote "Amar Jiban".
• ✗Binodini Dasi wrote "Amar Katha".