Mayukh Sen is an independent culture journalist whose work focuses on immigration. He is the author of Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America (2021) and Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star (2025), both from W.W. Norton & Company. His project Brown Hollywood is a book-length examination of the history of South Asian immigration to America from the early twentieth century to the present day, told through the stories of South Asian performers in Hollywood whose lives intersected with—and were informed by—changes in American immigration policy.
He is the winner of the 2018 James Beard Award for profile writing, and his essays and reporting have been anthologized in four editions of the Best American Food and Travel Writing series. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and the Washington Post, among other outlets. He teaches journalism at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.
Selected Work
- A Tight Collar and Plenty of Gin: A story for Hazlitt which examines how the actor Boris Karloff obscured his Anglo-Indian roots to dodge the prejudicial anti-Indian policy enshrined in American law during the early 20th century, reinventing himself into an icon of Hollywood horror.
- Jungle Boy: This story in Hazlitt revisits the improbable Hollywood fame of the Indian-born Sabu, who became a star of Anglo-American cinema during the 1930s and 1940s despite America’s long-entrenched discrimination towards South Asians, codified in law at the time of his arrival. Sabu appealed to Americans with his image of a sunny, hopeful India—anticipating a major American policy shift towards South Asian immigrants.
- Illegal Bride: Days after Anna Kashfi wed the actor Marlon Brando in 1957, doubts about her purported Indian heritage surfaced, destroying her Hollywood career and branding her a liar. The truth, as this piece in Hazlitt shows, was more complicated than anyone knew—and the confusion surrounding her story reflects the precarious place of South Asian immigrants in America between the passage of the 1946 Luce-Celler Act and the landmark 1965 Hart-Celler Act.