Over the years the couple played an important role in bringing attention to the Maharashtra region’s working class struggles, including over women’s issues and agricultural and environmental challenges as well as caste system constraints.
Ms. Omvedt gave up her American citizenship and became an Indian citizen in 1983. She began working with her husband to establish Shramik Mukti Dal (Toilers’ Liberation League), an organization credited with launching some of the largest organized mass movements against injustices experienced by workers in rural India.
Through that organization she launched a number of feminist campaigns, helping women who were victims of domestic violence, for instance, and those who were abandoned by their husbands and needed to find sustainable work.
For decades, while based at her home in Kasegaon, a village in rural Maharashtra, Ms. Omvedt collected and translated the texts and work of figures in the anti-caste movement and documented the lives of those around her.
For those studying the caste system and identity politics in India, Ms. Omvedt was a key archivist, chronicler and interpreter, said Ms. Manorama, the head of Dalit Women.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Omvedt is survived by her husband and a granddaughter.