Mahadai Das was born in Eccles, East Bank Demerara, Guyana in 1954. She wrote poetry from her early school days at Bishops High School, Georgetown. She did her first degree at the University of Guyana and received her MA at Columbia University, New York, and then began a doctoral program in Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Das became ill and never completed the programme. She was a dancer, actress, teacher, and beauty-queen, served as a volunteer member of the Guyana National Service in c1976 and was part of the Messenger Group promoting ‘Coolie’ art forms at a time when Indo-Guyanese culture was virtually excluded from national life.

As a young poet, Das published some of her first pieces in several editions of KAIE, the official literary publication of Guyana's History and Arts Council, as well as many other local publications. Her first major collection of poetry, I Want to be a Poetess of My People (1977), traced the roots of the Guyanese people from indentureship to independence. The collection calls for a new sense of nationalism independent of colonial powers, though it also bears the marks of being beholden to the sloganizing politics of the PNC. In her second collection of poetry, My Finer Steel Will Grow (1982), Das expresses a growing disillusionment with Guyana under the PNC and its corruption, authoritarianism and anti-Indianism. In her third collection, Bones (Peepal Tree, 1988), Das addresses her experiences as an Indo-Caribbean woman living in urban USA. Within a materialistic culture, she seeks to recover the beauty of her cultural heritage.

Mahadai Das was, with Rajkumari Singh, one of the first Indo-Guyanese women writers to speak to both the ethnic and gender issues facing Indo-Caribbean women, though this is a gradual, and still not wholly reconciled movement in her work. Her first collection of poetry, I Want to be a Poetess of my People speaks of her Indian heritage within a Caribbean environment, yet speaks little of her experience as a woman in this environment. Her second work, My Finer Steel Will Grow, attempts to reconcile the individual with the political with regard to gender. She speaks out about the discrepancy in fighting with men for racial equality, only to be suppressed by those same men in regards to gender.  Bones explores her changing individual female identity but only in two or three poems incorporates her Indian heritage within this identity.

Over recent years, Mahadai Das has, tragically, suffered from debilitating health problems that curtailed the writing career of one of the Caribbean’s most talented women poets. In April 2003 her life came to a tragically early end.

When Mahadai Das died at the tragically early age of 49, there was an outpouring of grief across the Caribbean world that a poet who never quite had the chance to build a literary career to match her talents had been lost. She had for some time been recognised as an outstanding Guyanese poet, but when Peepal Tree published her Bones< in 1988, there was widespread critical recognition that here was an outstandingly original new voice. Then severe illness struck and though there followed occasional poems that developed the achievement of Bones, there was no new collection. This selected poems, discussed with Mahadai Das before her death, now organised in co-operation with the poet’s sister, brings together all the poems we feel Mahadai Das would have wished to see republished.

The selection includes the whole of Bones and a number of poems written in the period when Mahadai Das was living in the USA. These poems explore more personal themes and in particular write with dazzling bravura on the themes of illness and death.