Having worked as a high school teacher in her native Punjab, Savitri Chowdhary arrived in Britain in 1932 after a four- or five-year separation from her husband, Dr Dharm Sheel Chowdhary, who had come to Britain for postgraduate medical studies and recently begun work at a practice in the small Essex town of Laindon. On arrival, she found her husband had, to a large extent, adapted to English life and encouraged her to do the same. Shedding her saris for dresses and cutting her hair short, Chowdhary sought to fulfil the role of a doctor’s wife in an English town and to immerse herself in community life.

However, she also remained in touch with her Indian self, wearing saris for evening engagements, cooking curry at home, and socializing with the middle-class Indian community in London. Not only did she and her husband help establish early British Hindu organizations such as the Hindu Association of Europe and the Hindu Centre, but Savitry Chowdhary, on the encouragement of an English friend, Miss Cresswell, also became involved with the India League, attending – and occasionally speaking at – political meetings in London.

In the early 1950s Savitri Chowdhary published one of the earliest Indian cookery books with Andre Deutsch, subsequently giving talks on Indian cooking and even making television appearances to demonstrate her skills.

Iqbal Singh was a Punjabi author, journalist and broadcaster. Fearing that their son would become radicalized by the political climate of the Punjab in the 1920s and 1930s, his parents sent him to England and France to complete his education. In London, however, he became involved with a group of politically active writers and intellectuals, including Mulk Raj Anand, Sasadhar Sinha and Krishnarao Shelvankar. With Sinha, Shelvankar and the Ceylonese writer Alagu Subramaniam, he founded the magazine Indian Writing which combined literature with politics and was based at the Bibliophile Bookshop. Indian Political Intelligence surveillance files place him at several meetings of the Progressive Writers’ Association, and he contributed a short story to the first (and probably only) edition of their magazine New Indian Literature. He also attended numerous India League meetings, where he associated with British political figures of the left such as Reginald Bridgeman and Ben Bradley, as well as his fellow Indian writers and activists.

Singh published his first book, Gautama Buddha, an analysis of the Buddha’s life, in 1927 when in his early twenties. It shows the influence on him of European writers such as Shakespeare and Baudelaire, as well as Indian writers. In addition to short fiction, he wrote essays on Indian literature, art, history and politics which he contributed to a number of magazines. He published a book on the poet-philosopher Mohammad Iqbal, and co-edited an anthology of short stories by Indian writers with Mulk Raj Anand, and a collection of socio-political essays on India on the cusp of independence with Raja Rao. It is uncertain exactly when he returned to India. Once there, he continued to work as a journalist and writer, as well as a broadcaster.

A student at King’s College, London, and Girton College, Cambridge in the early 1890s, and a writer of precocious if imitative verse, Naidu was feted in London in the 1900s as the poet of an exoticized India.

From a Bengali family based in Hyderabad, Naidu was sent to Britain in 1895 on the Nizam's scholarship on the strength of her poetry. She was then not married and known as Sarojini Chattopadhyaya. However, she had already embarked on a romantic relationship with Dr Govindarajalu Naidu, in Hyderabad, who had studied medicine at Edinburgh; her father, Aghorenath Chattopadhyaya had also been a student at Edinburgh University.

She became the ward of Elizabeth Manning, the Secretary of the National Indian Association, whose step-mother had been involved in the foundation of Girton College, Cambridge. Naidu was heavily influenced by the poets Edmund Gosse, Arthur Symons and W. B. Yeats. Particularly interesting accounts of her very early Europeanized work appear as the introductions to her second and third collections, by Arthur Symons, and Edmund Gosse respectively. Her poetry also appeared in the Savoy. Appearances and readings by Naidu in the 1900s were reported in the Indian Magazine.

Naidu returned to India in 1898, beset by ill-health, that dogged her throughout her life. She maintained correspondence with poets in Britain but also embarked on a political career. Her returns to Britain were marked by poetry readings and receptions, convalescence in British nursing homes, as well as political rallies and meetings. She joined the Indian National Congress in 1904 and was vocal about women's rights. She gave evidence in 1919 to a Select Committee in favour of the women's vote in India. She also had a public confrontation with Edwin Montagu over the Amritsar Massacre. Naidu had met M. K. Gandhi in London in 1914 and became very close to him. She accompanied him on the famous Dandi salt march and accompanied him to the Round Table Conference in 1931. Naidu was appointed Governer of United Provinces in 1947 and died in office in February 1949.