[2] Writing in the journal Race Today, she reported on how Bangladeshis in the East End of London worked in sweatshops while living in dormitories where beds were shared around the clock by shiftworkers.

Together with her husband and other activists, Sen founded the Bengali Housing Action Group, which led to the establishment of Brick Lane as a safe living area for the Bangladeshi community in East London.

[7] Her writing is included in Here to Stay, Here to Fight – A Race Today Anthology (Pluto Press, 2019, ISBN 9780745339757), edited by Paul Field, Robin Bunce, Leila Hassan and Margaret Peacock, which features contributions to the journal between 1973 and 1988.

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.

Her book India's Bandit Queen, based on Sen's research over a period of eight years,[2] was subsequently published in London (Harvill Press, 1991; edited by Margaret Busby).

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.

[11][12] 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.

Mala Sen is depicted in a mural Brick Lane by artist Jasmin Kaur Sehra, part of a series commissioned in 2018 by the Tate Collective to celebrate the contributions of "unknown".