In her teens, Balutai's parents sent her to stay in the hostel of the school for girls which Maharshi Dhondo Keshav Karve had started a few years earlier in Hingane, then in the outskirts of Pune.

After college education, Balutai joined the teaching staff of Pune's Kanya Shala, which again was a girls' school being run under Karve's guidance.

In 1950, Bedekar wrote her effective novel Bali (बळी) (The Victim) as based on her observations for three years about the extremely harsh daily lives of the so-called "criminal " tribes confined to the "settlement" area behind barbed wires by the British government in pre-independence India.

(By the time Bali got published, the government of independent India had abolished the same year, 1950, the concept of "settlement" area behind barbed wires for "criminal' tribes.

)[2] While her novel Wiralele Swapna (विरलेले स्वप्न) contained a compilation of pages from the imaginary diaries of two lovers, her novel Shabari (शबरी) was the story of a woman trapped in a stifling marriage.