New bio explores complex life of 1930s Hollywood star who hid her South Asian roots

“I felt an immediate draw to her — not only because she was South Asian like myself, but also because she was raised in Kolkata, the city where my late father had come of age,” he tells The Rebel Yellow.

According to Sen, the idea of writing a biography of Oberon came early. “I wanted to know more about how this girl who had grown up in poverty became an Oscar-nominated movie star on the other side of the world,” he recalls.

Oberon, he says, seemed misunderstood: dismissed by cinephiles and ignored by many in the South Asian diaspora who were uneasy with her choice to pass as white. At the time, the only biography of her was a 1983 book by Charles Higham and Roy Moseley, whose claims have since drawn scrutiny.

“It’d take me a few years to actually realize my teenage dream of writing a proper biography of Merle Oberon,” he says. After his 2021 book “Taste Makers,” he felt ready. “I also felt — or at least hoped — that the culture might be open to accepting the complications of her story.”

One early priority was filling in the gaps about Oberon’s early life in India. “Finding those members of the Selby family who were willing to speak to me allowed me to construct those early chapters with more confidence,” Sen says. From them, he confirmed that Oberon’s mother Constance — whom Oberon believed to be her half-sister — was just 14 when she gave birth.

That personal history gave Sen a foundation — but public records offered a broader lens. “What most prior narrative treatments of Merle’s story seem to downplay, even ignore, is the fact that she came to America in a time when the Immigration Act of 1917 prevented immigrants from South Asia from coming to the country legally,” Sen explains. Additional restrictions on citizenship were in place until 1946, he notes, underscoring how those policies raised the stakes of Oberon’s decision to obscure her heritage.

For Sen, Oberon’s ability to work at all in Hollywood depended on a painful illusion. “Had Merle been open about her South Asian heritage in either Britain or America, she wouldn’t have received any roles of substance — at least in studio cinema,” he says.

Studios and publicists promoted a false origin story, marketing Oberon as a white woman born in Tasmania. It gave her access to roles like Queen Anne Boleyn and Cathy in “Wuthering Heights.” But, Sen adds, it meant enduring invasive scrutiny. “She was living and working under constant threat,” he says, recounting a day-long skin bleaching during production of “The Dark Angel” and studios’ concerns about her appearance on color film.

Sen notes that feedback from current South Asian artists underscores the continued relevance of Oberon’s story. “One of the more common responses I’ve gotten to my book from South Asian performers working today is this sentiment that little has changed since Merle’s time,” he says. The industry still encourages performers of color to “tamp down their perceived differences” to succeed. “There’s a chill of puritanical thinking in the air. That was the central bind of Merle Oberon’s career.”

Sen shares that he made a deliberate stylistic decision to write in the present tense. “Merle Oberon has, for so long, been a cipher rendered in opaque terms, thus making it easier for people to vilify her and deny her humanity,” he says. Writing this way allowed him to center her inner life. “I had to locate her interiority when my research material allowed me to, so that my reader could care about her even when she was doing or saying things that didn’t make her very easy to like.”

Sen is continuing this work in “Brown Hollywood,” which traces a wider history of South Asian-origin performers in the industry. He names Sabu and Anna Kashfi as examples, along with Boris Karloff, who was born to Anglo-Indian parents and adopted a Russian stage name. “Oberon was just one of many South Asian artists in Hollywood whose life was shaped by this overarching political environment whose effects still reverberate today,” he says. “The way I see it, ‘Love, Queenie’ is just the beginning.”