G. V. Desani was born in Nairobi, Kenya, where his parents were working as wood merchants. The family returned to Karachi in 1914, where Desani was educated. He arrived in Britain at the age of 17, to escape from an arranged marriage. When he arrived in England in 1926, he was befriended by George Lansbury, who helped him acquire a reader's pass to the British Museum Reading Room. During this period he also found work as an actor in films. Furthermore, he worked as a foreign corespondent for a number of Indian newspapers and news agencies, such as the Associated Press, Reuters and The Times of India. He returned to India in 1928, touring Rajasthan, on which he subsequently lectured extensively for the Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway Company.

Desani returned to Britain in the summer of 1939, only weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War.  He continued to work as a writer, journalist, and broadcaster for the Indian Section of the BBC Eastern Service and the Home Division. Desani broadcast both in Hindustani and in English and was praised for his wit, humour and ability as a script-writer. He also acted in radio plays. Furthermore, Desani lectured for the Ministry of Information and the Imperial Institute, regularly touring the regions and speaking to soldiers, schools and university colleges. These lectures featured as one of his Talks Programmes in Hindustani, titled 'My Lecture Tours' (broadcast 8 May 1943). They were widely praised and drew large audiences.

During this period, he wrote his best known work of fiction, the experimental novel All About Mr. Hatterr (later republished and revised as All About H. Hatterr). On publication the book was very well received by critics. For example, T. S. Eliot praised it as a remarkably original book: 'It is amazing that anyone should be able to sustain a piece of work in this style and tempo and at such length'. The critic C. E. M. Joad compared the book to 'Joyce and Miller with a difference: the difference being due to a dash of Munchhausen and the Arabian Nights'.  With its inventive use of language and its endorsement of hybridity, the work is a trailblazer for the fiction of Salman Rushdie, who has acknowledged its influence.

While in England, Desani also published his ‘poetic play’ Hali, as well as short fiction, sketches and essays. Shortly after the publication of Hali, Desani left Britain and returned to India. He was offered a position as cultural ambassador for Jawaharlal Nehru, however he did not take this up. In 1959 he travelled to Burma to study Buddhist and Hindu culture. During the 1950s and 1960 he wrote a regular column, 'Very High, Very Low', as well as articles for The Times of India and Illustrated Weekly of India. In 1967 he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, a position he held until his retirement in 1978. He spent the final years of his life in Dallas.

D. F. Karaka was born in Bombay in 1911. He is the grandson of Dosabhai Framji Karaka, whose History of the Parsis became the authoritative text on the Parsee community in the late nineteenth century. Karaka arrived in England in the autumn of 1930 and joined Lincoln College at the University of Oxford to study law. Karaka became an active member of the Oxford Union, participating in debates. He would occupy a number of posts - Treasurer, Secretary and Librarian - before being elected the first President of South Asian origin of the Oxford Union. He succeeded Michael Foot, who was a close friend of his. 

Karaka was Secretary of the Union when it held its controversial ‘King and Country’ debate (9 February 1933). The Union discussed the pacifist motion ‘that this House will under no circumstances fight for its King or Country’. The controversy provoked heated debate in the national press and among Oxford students. At a subsequent meeting of the Union, Karaka’s minutes were torn from him and destroyed. He also received protection from the university police for a limited amount of time. During his time at Oxford, Karaka started writing non-fiction, especially about his experience as an Indian in Britain and his position as a 'coloured' man. After Karaka finished his degree, he sat the examination for the Indian Civil Service. He failed but went on to pass his Bar examination in London. In order to earn some money, he briefly worked at the clothes store Simpson's on Piccadilly, advertising the store to newly-arrived Indian students in Britain. Against his parents wishes, he decided to pursue a career in journalism. He published an article on the colour bar in 1934 in the Daily Herald, one of the most widely read newspapers in the 1930s. He also wrote several non-fiction books that dealt with the colour bar and the position of Indians in the British empire and Britain, most notably The Pulse of Oxford, I Go West and Oh! You English. Some of his journalism of the period is collected in All My Yesterdays.

He returned to Bombay in 1938 where he worked as a journalist for the Bombay Chronicle, later being promoted to its editorial board. During the Second World War, he worked as a war correspondent. Initially he was posted to Chungking, covering the Chinese war against the Japanese, before becoming effectively an embedded journalist with the 14th Army in Burma in the run-up to the battles of Kohima and Imphal. He transferred to the Western Theatre of War in early 1945, covering the advances of British, American and Indian Forces in Italy. After a short time in London, where he was able to reconnect with friends such as Michael Foot from his Oxford days, as well as gain an exclusive interview with Lord Amery, Secretary of State for India, he was accredited to Southern Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force to witness the Allied Forces’ final push through France and the Low Countries into Germany. He was one of the first journalists to reach Bergen Belsen concentration camp. He was also among the journalists who travelled to Rheims to witness Germany surrender on 8 May 1945.

After the end of the war in Western Europe and his return to England, Karaka wanted to move via New York to the Pacific to cover the war there. However, he did not make it to the Pacific theatre in time. At the end of 1945, Karaka returned to India. After falling out with the editor of the Bombay Chronicle, he founded his own weekly newspaper, The Current. Karaka supported Indian independence and the Indian National Congress, while also supporting the British war effort. He was witness to partition violence, covering for his newspaper the displacement of 10 million people and the atrocities that accompanied it. After independence he became increasingly critical and sceptical of Nehru’s policies. He wrote critically about corruption, and Nehru’s ‘autocratic’ style of government, which led to his phone conversations being tapped and the monitoring of his movements. In 1971, with heightened tensions between India and Pakistan, he was imprisoned briefly on grounds of national security. D. F. Karaka died in 1974 from a heart attack.

Stafford Cripps was born in 1889 in London to Charles Alfred Cripps and his wife Theresa. His father was a Conservative MP and later a Labour cabinet minister.

After turning down a scholarship to New College, Oxford, in 1907 he studied for an MSc degree at University College, London. In 1911, he married Isobel Cripps (née Swithinbank), whom he had met a year earlier when helping out with his father's campaign. When war broke out in 1914, Cripps, still recovering from a breakdown, did not join the forces. Instead, he became a lorry driver for the Red Cross. In 1929, Cripps joined the Labour Party and became a minister in Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government the year after. His campaign to become an MP was supported by Sukhsagar Datta. In 1933 he became chairman of the Socialist League, which he dissolved in 1937. Cripps was also heavily involved with the Left Book Club.

At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Cripps went on a tour of India, China, Russia and the United States. Cripps' first visit to India was intended to explore the possibility of self-government; he was warmly received by Jawaharlal Nehru. After India he went to China where he befriended Chiang Kai-shek, then he went to Russia where he met Foreign Minister Molotov. From June 1940 to January 1942 he served as the British Ambassador to the Soviet Union. Cripps succeeded in bringing Russia and Britain together as allies during the war, and consequently, in February 1942, Churchill brought Cripps into the government as Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons. Only a month later, on 22 March, Cripps would fly to Delhi on the so-called Cripps Mission, which was intended to secure Indian self-government after the war in return for support in the British war effort. The Cripps Mission failed and the Indian National Congress and the British Government became further estranged. The failure of the mission was the catalyst for Gandhi  to launch the Quit India movement in August 1942. After his return to Britain, Cripps' status within the Government had diminished and in the autumn of that year he resigned from the War Cabinet and took up the post of Minister of Aircraft Production.

After Clement Attlee's Labour victory in 1945, Cripps remained interested in the question of Indian independence, and from March to June 1946 Cripps travelled to India for the third time, along with Secretary of State, Lord Pethick-Lawrence, and Lord of the Admiralty, A. V. Alexander. The Cabinet Mission's offer of a three-tier structure was accepted by Jinnah and the Muslim League but Gandhi and the Congress turned it down. Cripps realized that the future government of India lay in the hands of the Indian leaders. By the end of 1946, at the behest of Cripps, Attlee appointed Lord Mountbatten the last Viceroy of India and set a date for British withdrawal. This paved the way to Independence and Partition in 1947.

In 1947, Cripps was appointed Minister for Economic Affairs but took over the post of Chancellor of Exchequer six weeks later. He fought hard to restore the British economy in the post-war years. At this point, Cripps was also seriously ill and was reconvalescing at the Bircher Benner clinic in Zürich. Cripps resigned as Chancellor and as MP on 20 October 1950 on grounds of ill health. He died at the Bircher Benner Clinic on 21 April 1952.

Noor Inayat Khan was the daughter of the Sufi preacher Hazrat Inayat Khan and Ora Ray Baker, an American of British origin (her father was half-English and half-Irish, her mother Scottish).

In 1914, Noor and her family moved from Paris to London, where they would remain until 1920. The family moved back to France in 1920, setting up home in Suresnes. In 1932 she enrolled at the Sorbonne, University of Paris, for a degree in child psychology. After leaving university, she began writing children’s stories. She published Jataka Tales, an English translation of stories and fables on the Buddha in 1939, and also wrote for the children’s pages of the Sunday edition of the newspaper Le Figaro. After the outbreak of the Second World War she trained as a nurse with the Red Cross in France.

With the imminent Fall of France in the summer of 1940, she fled to England with her brother Vilayat and her mother and she decided to join the war effort. Having previously trained with the Red Cross in France, she briefly worked at the Fulmer Chase maternity home for Officers’ Wives near Slough, before joining the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) under the name ‘Nora Inayat Khan’ in November 1940. Together with 40 other women she was chosen to train in wireless operation.  She trained as a wireless telegraphist at RAF Balloon Command, Edinburgh in December 1940, before being posted with RAF Bomber Command at Abingdon in June 1941. She was called for an interview by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) on 19 November 1942. Her language skills in French and English and her outstanding aptitude as a radio operator were of particular interest to the SOE. Despite controversies about her suitability for the job, she was recruited by Selwyn Jepson, who was responsible for recruitment for the SOE French Section, after just one interview. Her motivation was a great sense of justice and freedom and wanting to contribute to the liberation of France. During her time in London, Noor also had become increasingly aware of the Indian independence movement. Her brother Vilayat Khan was of the opinion that if Noor had survived the war the next cause she would have committed herself to would probably have been Indian independence.

Noor Inayat Khan joined SOE, F section on 8 February 1943 and was seconded to FANY (Women’s Transport Service First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) as a cover story for family and friends. There she trained in the use of firearms. On 16/17 June, after 4 months of training, she was flown to France under the code name ‘Madeleine’ and her cover name Jeanne-Marie Renier, one of the first female wireless operators to be infiltrated into France. However the team she was attached headed by ‘Prosper’ had  been betrayed, and by 24 June, only a week after her arrival, mass arrests had already begun. Nevertheless, she joined the ‘Prosper’ team, narrowly escaping from the Gestapo on a number of occasions. Within ten days of her arrival, the network was in complete disarray and Noor was lying low, moving between a number of safe houses. She re-emerged when matters had calmed down to inform London of the destruction of the Prosper circuit. Despite the dangers, she stayed and was the SOE’s last wireless operator in Paris. She continued transmitting messages to London under considerable personal risk to her own safety for arms and arms drops to be collected. By that time the Gestapo were already on her trail. She was arrested on 13 October 1943, a day before she was due to return to England, after someone, probably the sister of her first contact in Paris, had tipped off the Gestapo for 100,000 Francs. Despite hours of torture, Noor Inayat Khan did not reveal any information. However, because she had meticulously filed all her messages between her and London in cipher and clear, having interpreted too literally an order from SOE headquarters, the Gestapo could take over her station, and her arrest remained undetected by SOE.

Being deemed a difficult and uncooperative prisoner and after two unsuccessful attemps to escape, she was transferred to the Gestapo prison in Pforzheim, Germany, where she spent a lot of time in solitary confinement and in chains. On 11 September 1944 she was transported to Dachau concentration camp where she was executed on 13 September 1944. She was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre with Gold Star by the French Republic and in 1949 the George Cross by the British Government.

Pulin Behari Seal was born to Ganga Das Seal of Sadarghat, Chittagong, Bengal, in 1899. He came to Britain for higher education, attending the University of Cambridge where he studied mathematics. He quickly showed himself dedicated to the struggle for Indian independence, first attracting the attention of the authorities in 1922 when campaigning for the Lascar Welfare League.

After graduating from Cambridge, Seal sought employment without much success. He offered his services to the Labour MP George Lansbury, and applied for a research scholarship at the London School of Economics, proposing to write a thesis on the history of Ireland. His return to India in 1924 could well have been precipitated by a lack of funds. A few months later he was back in London as representative of the Swaraj Party and foreign correspondent of the Calcutta-based newspaper Forward (edited by C. R. Das), which later became New Forward and then Liberty.

On his return to England, Seal established himself firmly as a radical political activist as well as a journalist. In 1925, he debated successfully against Michael O’Dwyer on the subject of self-government in India at the University of Leeds Student Union. He was an active member of the London branch of the Indian National Congress, and highly critical of the Simon Commission Report, as well as the Round Table Conferences – both for being ‘anti-Indian’. In 1926, he founded the Oriental Press Service, a service for supplying Indian news to British and US publications and British news to Indian publications. This enabled him to disseminate information (and propaganda) between the two countries, potentially helping to forge links between the British Left and Indian activists. For example, in 1928, he sent photographs of Indian mill strikers and their families living in impoverished conditions for publication in one of the outlets of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Critical of the Labour Party (he claimed their attitude to India was no better than that of the Conservatives), as well as of less radical Indian organizations, Seal aligned himself more closely with the Communist Party, associating with Shapurji Saklatvala in particular. Yet evidence suggests his relationship with the CPGB also had its tensions. With other Indian activists, including Surat Alley and Sasadhar Sinha, he organized a committee to coordinate Indian political groups, the Indian National Committee, and held political meetings at the Café Indien (later known as the India and Burma Restaurant) in Leicester Square. He was also a leader, along with Subhas Chandra Bose’s nephew, Amiya Nath Bose, of the Committee of Indian Congressmen.

Seal was considered an ‘extremist’ and a deeply suspect character by the British Government, particularly because of his support of Subhas Chandra Bose and alleged pro-Axis leanings during the Second World War. He was on the list of people who should be arrested in the event of invasion – and was threatened with arrest in 1942 when the police discovered, in the possession of one Marie Brett Perring, documents reportedly written by Seal that ‘glorified’ Subhas Chandra Bose and alleged widespread disaffection in the Indian Army. In 1946, when Seal was back in India, a note was issued to all ports indicating that his arrival into Britain should be reported immediately (L/PJ/12/186, p. 145). He was also debarred from attending functions held under the auspices of the Office of the High Commission for India.

Seal travelled to and from Europe on numerous occasions, and worked as the diplomatic correspondent in England for the Independent French Agency during the early 1940s. He was also a writer, securing a contract deal with the publishing firm Sidgwick & Jackson for ‘An Indian Who’s Who’. In addition, he founded two travel companies: Orientourist Ltd and later the East-West Travel Company which organized luxury tours to India. Despite his obvious energy and ability to turn his hand to a range of tasks, he was often beset by financial difficulties, moving frequently between different flats or hotel rooms, with his wife Judith (Jessie) Stuart and their three children. In 1941, his failure to pay rates led to his arrest and the threat of imprisonment if the money was not forthcoming within seven days. Fortunately, one of Seal’s many connections – possibly one S. E. Runganathan, advisor to the secretary of state for India – paid his debt.

Before arriving in London, to become director of the Indian Section of the BBC Eastern Service, Bokhari was the director of the Delhi Broadcasting Station of All India Radio. Bokhari was in London in July 1937, where he attended a reception held by Firoz Khan Noon at India House Aldwych. He moved to London to take up the post of Indian programmes organizer for the Indian section of the Eastern Service of the BBC from 1940 to 1945. Sir Malcom Darling recruited Bokhari on the recommendation of the controller of broadcasting for All India Radio, Lionel Fielden, to set up the Indian section of the Eastern Service. Initially Bokhari and his team only contributed a weekly news report and the odd cultural programme.

Bokahri together with Darling were instrumental in recruiting George Orwell, who would be an important asset also because of his friendship with Mulk Raj Anand, who had previously rejected Darling's offer of work at the BBC.  Bokhari hoped that he would be able to persuade Anand and other Indian friends to work for the Indian Section. During his time in London he managed the contracts and programming of the Indian Section of the Eastern Service, working closely with George Orwell. He was also an accomplished broadcaster, regularly transmitting talks in Urdu to India. He accompanied Richard Dimbleby to report on the Indian soldiers stationed with the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1940. Organizing and coordinating the activities of the Indian Section of the Eastern Service, Bokhari was instrumental in the the Service’s programming and bringing together the network of free-lance talks writers based at the BBC. In 1945 he took up the position of Director of the All India Radio Station in Calcutta and later moved to Pakistan to become Controller of Broadcasting in Karachi for Radio Pakistan.

Sudhindra Nath Ghose was a Bengali novelist. After studying at the University of Calcutta, he travelled to Europe in the 1920s to continue his studies in Western Art at the University of Strasbourg where he graduated with a D.Litt. He subsequently worked as a research scholar at the Universities of London, Paris, Berlin, and Geneva. While at university he worked as a journalist, becoming foreign correspondent for The Hindu of Madras from 1924-32. He was also associate editor of World's Youth, the official organ of the YMCA from 1929-31. In 1931, he joined the staff of the Information Section of the League of Nations Secretariat in Geneva.

Ghose moved to England in 1940. He lectured to H. M. Forces and to US units about India from 1940-6. He was part of the panel of speakers that regularly toured for the India-Burma Association. Much of the research of his papers was conducted in the British Museum Reading Room, for which he had a reader’s pass. In the late 1940s, Ghose worked as the librarian for Student Movement House, 103 Gower Street, London, WC1, trying to persuade the British Council to offer translations of books about British life into Indian languages. He also organized its literary events. Ghose was not part of the Indian organizations fighting for independence, but worked as part of the political system and through his lectures tried to counter what he called ‘the systematic misrepresentation and vilification of Great Britain’ (Mss Eur F 153). He wrote lengthy reports on India League meetings and also attended meetings of the Committee of Indian Congressmen in Great Britain in the 1940s to write detailed reports for the India-Burma Association. Furthermore, Ghose wrote reports for the India-Burma Association following his lectures for Bevin trainees ('Bevin Boys') from India at Letchworth in 1944, fearing they might be led astray by Indian organizations campaigning for Indian independence in Britain.

Ghose was the proof-reader for the Bengali version of the government-produced brochure ‘War in Pictures’. During the war, he also worked as an ARP Warden in North Ealing. He tried on several occasions to get work with the BBC Eastern Service. He was invited to participate in a Round Table Discussion on India for the Home Service Department in May 1942. He was severely criticized by his friends at the Bibliophile Bookshop for taking part in this debate. Subsequently he became an occasional broadcaster for the BBC. He was commissioned by George Orwell in June 1942 to write a talk programme on the Future of Hinduism. However the talk was not accepted for broadcast, as Orwell thought it was not altogether suitable. Bokhari had blocked the broadcast of the programme for fear of antagonising the Hindu community in India and Ghose was subsequently released from his contract because he was deemed to be too expensive, after another venture for a Bengali-language news bulletin fell through. While the organization recognized Ghose’s proficiency in Bengali and his excellent delivery as a microphone speaker, it did not rate him as a script writer and did not employ him again.

Ghose was intensely critical of the Eastern Service, especially Bokhari and Anand, whose left-leaning politics he denounced in his private papers. Ghose alleged that Anand, Shelvankar, and Bokhari were conspiring against him. From 1943 onwards Ghose was a lecturer for the Imperial Institute’s Empire Lecture Scheme to Schools. After the end of the war, he stayed in England and continued to lecture on eastern and western art, architecture, philosophy and literature. He also published a successful tetraology of novels, based on his childhood in Bengal. He returned to India as a Visiting Professor of English at Visvabharati University, Santiniketan from 1957-8. He died in London in 1965 from a heart attack.