The first child of her mother Bhagirathi and her father Ananthanarayanan, she was brought up mainly in Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu. She was formally taught Karnatik music and was said to have an excellent voice, but because she was somewhat slender and frail, her doctor father feared that it would tire her out to sing full-throatedly, and so she was taught to play the violin. She attended school only for a few years before she was married, at the age of eleven, in the year 1926. Conservative Brahmin society at that time was resisting the Sharada Act by which child marriage was sought to be prevented, and which was seen by some as a colonial imposition. My father was nineteen at the time. They had a busy life, she as a fulltime wife and mother of an official of the Indian Audit and Accounts Service. They moved from postings that included Tiruchi, Lahore, Shimla, Ambala, Delhi, Washington, D.C. and Bombay. He retired as Accountant General Maharashtra. She educated herself both in Tamil and in English, with his active encouragement. It was during their years in the US, when she took part in the Indian Embassy's cultural events, and helped organize musical programmes, that she wrote her songs, setting them to ragas. She passed away at the early age of 48 before she could write down the notations for her compositions. The lyrics and format were written from her notes and put into a volume some years thereafter. In the late sixties there was a performance of her keerthanais under the aegis of the Tamil Sangam in Matunga in Bombay (now Mumbai).