Mala Sen

Mumbai, India

1965–2011

Mala Sen was born in Mussoorie, India in 1947. Her father was Lieutenant-General Lionel Protip Sen, a decorated general in the Indian army. She grew up with her father after her parents divorced when she was 6 years old. Given the nature of her father’s work, Sen moved around India regularly. As a teenager, she moved to Bombay to study home sciences at Nirmala Niketan College. Whilst living in Bombay, Sen met Farrukh Dhondy, who had won a Tata Scholarship to study natural sciences at the University of Cambridge. Given this, Sen and Dhondy decided to elope to the UK in 1965, where Dhondy pursued his degree whilst Sen worked as a seamstress in London.

Sen became increasingly aware of the racism immigrants faced whilst working as a seamstress. Her early anti-racist activism included a campaign to secure improved working conditions for Indian labourers who worked in a factory in Leicester.

Sen was a leading member of the Race Today Collective, as well as a member of the British Black Panthers. As a writer for Race Today, Sen used her journalism as a method of instigating collective action amongst mainstream audiences for anti-racist campaigns. This included the 1974 Imperial Typewriters strike, when the collective galvanized grass-roots support for South Asian employees who walked out of the Leicester-based factory. Sen interviewed the strikers for an article in Race Today which detailed the rising popularity of the National Front in Leicester and the lack of formal union support for the strikers. This article, alongside the collective’s efforts on the ground, encapsulated the ethos of Race Today, to combine anti-racist journalism with action.

During the mid-1970s Sen became increasingly concerned with the lack of safe housing for Bengalis living in east London. Sen was closely connected with Terry Fitzpatrick, a leading member in the Bengali squatting movement, and the editor of Race Today, Darcus Howe, with whom she and Dhondy formed a vigilante group to protect buildings that were housing South Asians from targeted attacks. She led the formation of the Bengali Housing Action Group (BHAG). The BHAG was a self-organized grass-roots movement that worked to tackle housing discrimination in east London and, more broadly, the institutionalized racism seen in the Greater London Council (GLC). The GLC was ignorant of the harassment faced by Bengalis when they were housed as small groups within white-dominated areas. Mala Sen empowered these Bengali communities to squat in abandoned buildings as a direct challenge to the GLC’s housing policies. The Pelham Building in Southall housed forty-one Bengali squatter families. Sen also used her position as a writer of the Race Today Collective to publicize the GLC’s institutionalized racism as a nationwide concern. Throughout the 1980s, Sen’s articles and her dedication to a two-year campaign resulted in over 10,000 protesters coming from Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds to join protest efforts.

In later life Mala Sen was renowned for her work with Phoolan Devi. Her book India’s Bandit Queen explored the exploitation of women in rural India through Devi’s own experiences. The documentation of her abuse highlighted the brutality faced by Indian women.

Sen and Dhondy divorced in 1976. Sen died in 2011 in Mumbai.