The actress Devika Rani was Rabindranath Tagore’s grand-niece and the daughter of the first Indian surgeon general M. N. Chaudhuri. Devika Rani lived in London in the mid-1920s, studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) and the Royal Academy of Music. She also studied architecture and textile design and was for a while apprenticed to the studio of Elisabeth Arden. She met Himanshu Rai in London in 1928. He had originally trained as a lawyer but had become a film director and asked Devika Rani to design his next film, A Throw of Dice (1929). They married in 1929. The film was edited in Germany where Devika Rani met film directors such as Sternberg, G. W. Pabst and Fritz Lang, which heightened her interest in film-making. She subsequently joined UFA studios in Berlin, where she assisted Marlene Dietrich on the set of Der Blaue Engel (1930). She also briefly worked with Max Reinhardt. One of the early BBC broadcasts to India included a Devika Rani recital (15 May 1933). Rai and Devika Rani starred together in the film Karma (1933), which was completed at the Stall Studios in London. The film was the first Indian Talkie in English and Hindustani to be released in England, Europe and India. The film had its premiere, attended by the former Viceroy to India, Lord Irwin, in London in May 1933, and was well received by the critics and a big hit with the public. After the successful premiere of Karma, Devika Rani was asked by the BBC to act in an early television broadcast in Britain and was also chosen to inaugurate the first BBC broadcast on the short wavelength to India in May 1933.

Devika Rani and Rai returned to Bombay and set up the Bombay Talkies studio in 1934. It was hailed as one of India’s best-equipped studios and enlisted the work of cinema practitioners like the German director Franz Osten, and the cameraman Carl Josef Wirsching. The studio also launched the careers of many cinema icons of the immediate post-independence era, such as Ashok Kumar, Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor. After the death of her husband in 1940, Devika Rani became the manager of Bombay Talkies. In 1945 she married the Russian artist Svetoslav Roerich and sold her shares in Bombay Talkies. In 1953 she was awarded the Padamshree and in 1969 the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cinema.

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.

Kedar Nath Das Gupta, a Bengali and friend of Rabindranath Tagore, was involved in forming the Union of East and West in January 1914. This was a society for the British and Indians in London which put on dramatic performances (having subsumed the Indian Art and Dramatic Society, formed in 1912). Das Gupta and the Society were based at 14 St Marks Crescent, London, NW1. He hoped that through the Society he could promote better understanding and collaboration between India and the West.

Das Gupta collaborated with Laurence Binyon in 1919 to adapt Kalidasa's play, Sakuntala, for the English stage. Das Gupta was able to publish through the Society some of the plays that they put on. The publication of Caliph for a Day in 1917, a Tagore play, also included photos of Das Gupta dressed in Indian clothes with three of the female members of the Society's executive, and photos of the Indian soldiers for whom the Union of the East and West had put on performances during the War.

In 1918, he published a play that he had written called Bharata, a four-act play that Das Gupta explained in the preface was drawn from writers, historians and philosophers of East and West on the four stages of life. The publication included a dedication to King George V and a quote from Lloyd George on the dust jacket. Das Gupta then migrated to New York with the Union of the East and West in the 1920s to create an umbrella movement known sometimes as the 'Fellowship of Faiths' or the 'Threefold Movement' incorporating as it did the Union of East and West, the Fellowship of Faiths and the League of Neighbours. He organized an International Conference of Faiths in Chicago in 1933. Das Gupta was also involved in organising the classes given in London in 1936 by the Swami Yogananda.

George Bernard Shaw was an Anglo-Irish playwright and political activist. Born and schooled in Dublin, he came to England in 1876. He educated himself by reading in the British Museum, and started his writing career as a music and literary critic for several periodicals. After unsuccessful attempts at novel writing, Shaw turned to drama. He wrote over sixty plays in the course of his life, including Man and Superman (1903), Pygmalion (1912; posthumously adapted as a musical ‘My Fair Lady’) and Saint Joan (1923). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.

Shaw, inspired by Henry George’s work, became a committed socialist in the 1880s. In 1884, he joined the newly formed Fabian Society, and gave lectures and wrote articles to further its causes. Shaw was also a vegetarian, and supported Henry Salt’s Humanitarian League and its commitment to animal rights. During the First World War, he indefatigably campaigned for international peace and negotiation.

Shaw was an outspoken supporter of the Indian independence movement and a great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, whom he met in 1931 in London. Gandhi was also an admirer of Shaw’s works. Shaw visited India in 1933, but the two could not meet as Gandhi was imprisoned at the time. Shaw also met Rabindranath Tagore in London in May 1913. Two of Shaw’s close female friends later went to India and devoted themselves to Indian causes: Annie Besant and the actress Florence Farr. Shaw met Besant in 1885; she asked him to introduce her to the Fabian Society, and serialized Shaw’s novels The Irrational Knot and Love among Artists in her magazine Our Corner. The actress Florence Farr was at one time Shaw’s mistress, and Shaw frequently met W. B. Yeats at Farr’s home in London. In 1937, Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism was reissued by Krishna Menon’s Pelican Books, inaugurating Penguin’s paperback list.

H. G. Wells was an author, intellectual and social commentator. Marking the transition from the Victorian to the Modern era, he made his name as the writer of utopian and dystopian science fiction novels. In later years he became increasingly noticed as a  social commentator, which would overshadow his career as a playwright and novelist. His connections with South Asians in the UK were tentative; however Wells was incredibly well connected to a number of networks that had extensive links to the South Asian community in Britain, most notably through the Fabian Society.

Wells was openly critical of British imperialism. After the massacre at Amritsar in 1919, Wells concluded that the incident was an example of the failures of the British imperial system, which had not fostered interaction between the British colonial masters and Indian subjects. He concluded that ‘no race is fit to have the upper hand over any other race; the possession of the upper hand leads at best to an inconsiderate self-righteousness and at the worst to an extreme contempt and cruelty’ (quoted in Foot, p. 195).

H. G. Wells’s writings influenced the young dramatist and novelist Aubrey Menen, who was granted permission by Wells to adapt The Shape of Things to Come for his drama society while studying at the University of London. Wells was impressed by the young Menen and deliberately risked a confrontation with the film producer Alexander Korda, who had just acquired the film rights for the novel. Wells’s A Short History of the World provoked a hostile reaction among South Asians in Britain. The  Jamiat-ul-Muslimin organized protests against the book in 1938 leading the Indian High Commissioner Firoz Khan Noon to intervene.

In 1941, Bhicoo Batlivala approached Wells to speak on the Subject Charter at the India League meeting in October. Krishna Menon sought to enlist Wells’s support on the question of Indian independence and to raise the profile of his pressure group. In 1941 Wells had written an open letter to Sir Hari Singh Gour, who had sent him his pamphlet ‘Truth About India’. In the letter Wells highlighted the ill-treatment of Nehru and called for Indian self-determination. Wells was particularly interested in the treatment of Nehru and sent a number of letters to the India Office in 1941. However their response was less than satisfactory. Wells was privately engaged in conversations with Lord Amery, Secretary of State for India, about Nehru, worried about his treatment as a political prisoner. This had led Bhicoo Batlivala to pursue Wells on behalf of Menon. She persuaded Wells to attend a private India League meeting to discuss the position of India and the Atlantic Charta, held at the Savoy Hotel on 23 October 1941, after he had declined invitations to speak at one of the organization's public meetings. From 1934 to 1946, Wells was the President of the writers’ organization International PEN.  Wells died in London on 13 August 1946.