Early years Born on 3 June 1947 in
Mussoorie in
Uttarakhand, Mala Sen was the daughter of
Lt-Gen Lionel Proteep Sen and
Kalyani Gupta. Following her parents' divorce in 1953, she was brought up by her father. Sen was of
Bengali heritage. After attending
Welham Girls' School in
Dehradun, she studied home sciences at Nirmala Niketan College in
Mumbai. In 1965 she eloped to England with Dhondy, who had won a scholarship to
Cambridge University. They married in 1968 and divorced in 1976, although they continued to maintain a friendly relationship. She was an early member of the
Race Today Collective. Her writing is included in
Here to Stay, Here to Fight – A Race Today Anthology (
Pluto Press, 2019, ), edited by Paul Field, Robin Bunce,
Leila Hassan and Margaret Peacock, which features contributions to the journal between 1973 and 1988.
Research and writing As a result of her effective involvement, Sen was invited to research television documentaries. While in India, she became particularly interested in press reports about a lower-caste, poverty-stricken woman called
Phoolan Devi who had suffered forced marriage at 11, gang rape and kidnapping. Seeking revenge as she grew older, Devi sought justice for rape victims while supporting the poor by stealing from the rich. When 24, she was charged with the murder of high-caste
Thakur men who had been involved in gang rape. In 1983, she negotiated her surrender, serving a prison sentence of 11 years. Sen visited Devi in prison, where she succeeded in persuading Devi to dictate her story to fellow prisoners as she was unable to write herself. Her book ''India's Bandit Queen'', based on Sen's research over a period of eight years, In the early 1990s, Sen was invited by
Channel 4 television, where Dhondy was now a commissioning editor, to draft the screenplay for a feature film based on her book about Devi. Directed by
Shekhar Kapur, 1994's
Bandit Queen became one of India's most critically acclaimed films ever. But it led to considerable controversy when, after its première in
Cannes, the activist
Arundhati Roy, supported by Sen, called for court action to ban its release in India in view of the gang rape scene, which invaded Devi's sexual privacy.
Death Mala Sen died, aged 63, on 21 May 2011 at the
Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, after undergoing an operation for
oesophageal cancer, which had been diagnosed earlier that year; at the time she had been working on a new book about women with
HIV in India. A memorial event for her was held in London at the
Nehru Centre in July 2011. ==Bibliography==