Kaw was born in Srinagar, then the capital of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, in 1941 to a family of Kashmiri Pandits.

[1] Kaw's family migrated to Delhi in the late 1940s in search of opportunities in newly independent India.

He was married to Dr. Raj Kaw, a professor of Hindi at Ram Lal Anand College, University of Delhi.

His younger siblings were the distinguished Indian physicist Predhiman Kaw and senior bureaucrat Asha Swarup (former Chief Secretary, Government of Himachal Pradesh).

A list of his works includes: One of his plays, Kehna Aasaan Hai, was converted by Doordarshan into a 13 episode serial.