She was born in 1923 in Lahore, Punjab, British India to a Bengali Christian family. One of her sisters, Indu Mitha, is a Bharatanatyam exponent based in Pakistan.
Uma was the wife of the Bollywood film director Chetan Anand (married in 1943)[1] and mother of Ketan Anand and Vivek Anand. She worked as an actress in Neecha Nagar (1946). She also wrote Taxi Driver with her husband Chetan and her brother-in-law Vijay Anand, that starred her mother's cousin Kalpana Kartik[2] and her brother-in-law Dev Anand.[3] After estrangement from her husband, she became a companion of Ebrahim Alkazi.[4]
From 1965 to 1981, Anand was an editor of Sangeet Natak, a journal published by the Sangeet Natak Akademi. She also wrote many children books that were translated and published in different Indian languages by the National Book Trust of India.[5] Her last book, Chetan Anand: The Poetics of Film, was co-authored with her eldest son Ketan Anand,[6] and it portrayed life in the theatre and cinema in Mumbai, India in the early 1940s and 1950s.
She died on 13 November 2009.[7]
