C. L. R. James was born in Caroni, Trinidad, to Robert Alexander James and Ida Elizabeth Rudder. The family moved to Tunapuna, where James' friend Malcolm Nurse (George Padmore) lived. After graduating from Queen’s Royal College he pursued a writing career, publishing the short story ‘La Divina Pastora’ in 1927. At a similar time, he befriended the cricketer Learie Constantine, who moved to England in 1929. On his arrival in England in early 1932 James stayed with Constantine in Nelson, Lancashire, before moving to London in 1933.

James' collection of essays written for the Port of Spain Gazette shortly after his arrival in Britain (published as Letters from London, 2003) indicate his position on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group. In London, he was invited to join the Friends of India Society and to lecture on any subject connected with the West Indies at the Indian Students’ Central Association. James also attended several meetings of the India League. He began to read the work of Marx, Lenin, Engels and Trotsky and merged his interest in black politics with Marxist theory. He joined the League of Coloured Peoples, which also had a South Asian membership at this point, and wrote for their journal The Keys. He associated with other black anti-colonialists of the time, such as George Padmore, Amy Ashwood Garvey and Ras Makonnen. As a Trotskyist, James attracted the attention of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch. A 1937 Special Branch report shows that James was a regular visitor to Balkrishna Gupta, an Indian Trotskyist who was reportedly linked to Nehru. In 1938, James was living with Ajit Mookerjee (Ajit Roy), a Trotskyist law student at LSE and friend of Gupta, on Boundary Road, London. James and Mookerjee formed the Marxist Group in 1935 and later the Revolutionary Socialist League. In 1936, James' play Toussaint L’Ouverture was staged at the Westminster Theatre with Paul Robeson in the title role. James was also the cricket reporter for the Manchester Guardian from 1933 to 1935 and the Glasgow Herald in 1936. He was a fan of cricketer Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji and wrote about him both in his journalism and at length in his work Beyond a Boundary (1963).

In 1938, James left Britain for the United States where he stayed for the next fifteen years. In 1952, he was interned at Ellis Island for passport violations, and upon release in 1953 he went back to England before relocating to Trinidad in 1958. In 1962, he returned once again to England, settling in London for the majority of his remaining years. He died in his Brixton home on 31 May 1989.

Paul Leroy Robeson was born in 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey, to  William Drew Robeson and Maria Louisa Bustill. In 1915 he enrolled at Rutgers College, New Jersey, and in 1920 he entered Columbia University Law School. In 1922 he married his life-long partner Eslanda 'Essie' Cardozo Goode, and the following year he graduated from Columbia. Robeson launched his acting career in 1920 - a career that brought him to London in 1922, and again in 1925 to star in the Eugene O'Neill Play, The Emperor Jones.

Robeson returned to London in April 1928 and spring 1930 to act in Show Boat and Othello, respectively. After a visit to Moscow in 1934, his political views became increasingly influenced by socialist and Communist ideals. He also started associating with key African figures such as Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah. In 1934, he acted in Alexander Korda's Sanders of the River, a performance he later repudiated as glorifying British imperialism. His repudiation of British imperialism and growing support of the working class was applauded by Stafford Cripps, the leading Labour politician. There is also evidence that Robeson attended a League of Coloured Peoples meeting, led by Harold Moody, in 1934 (Duberman, p. 624, n. 38).

In the mid-1930s, Robeson met Cedric Dover who broadcast on Robeson for BBC Radio to India. The talk is published in George Orwell's collection Talking to India (1943). In Half-Caste (1937), Dover lauded Robeson: 'To know him, to feel his charm and unusually wide culture, is a privilege; to hear him sing at a packed Albert Hall recital is a spiritual experience' (p. 226). In the late 1930s, Robeson met Krishna Menon, Secretary of the India League. Menon enlisted Robeson's support in the struggle for Indian independence. In January 1938, Robeson visited Spain to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. In June of that year, Robeson acted in Plant in the Sun. In the audience were Jawaharlal Nehru, his sister Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and Krishna Menon who had just come back to London after touring Spain; the four of them became friends, and Robeson and Nehru met on several other occasions. On 27 June 1938, at the India League meeting in Kingsway Hall, Nehru and Robeson spoke on internationalism and the need for unified action against Fascism. Among the other speakers were Stafford Cripps, Harold Laski, Ellen Wilkinson and Rajani Palme Dutt.

Robeson's left-leaning politics were put to the test at the outbreak of the Second World War and the Nazi-Soviet agreement. He had discussed his views on the Soviet Union with other English socialists such as Harold Laski and George Bernard Shaw. Now in the United States, Robeson continued his socialist agitations and with the onset of the Cold War he was under surveillance, his passport was revoked and he was called before the Un-American Activities Committee. When his passport was returned in 1958, he immediately travelled to Europe again. In the 1960s, he went into semi-retirement and he died of a stroke on 23 January 1976 in Philadelphia.

Oscar Wilde was an Anglo-Irish poet, playwright, literary critic and dandy of legendary wit. Born directly outside Trinity College Dublin, where he was to later to excel as a Classicist, his father was a prominent eye surgeon and his mother was an Irish nationalist poet known by the nom de plume ‘Speranza.’ In 1874 he went up to Oxford to read Greats at Magdalen College, and it was there that he first began to publish verse, and to develop a uniquely enthralling cult of personality. Raising eyebrows with his contempt of physical sports and an almost religious attitude to literature and art, he became known by his detractors as the ignoble figurehead of an emerging party of so-called ‘Aesthetes.’ A moniker that rapidly took on satirical connotations, it in fact suited Wilde’s conviction, strengthened at Oxford by encounters with John Ruskin and Walter Pater, that sensibility of beauty was the defining characteristic of humanity, and that the cultivation of taste was a sacred task. He cultivated an aesthetics of supreme artifice, promoted by his work and encapsulated in his lifestyle, its own symbol the green carnation that often adorned his lapel.

Wilde met Manmohan Ghose in London and wrote a favourable review of Primavera, the poems published by Binyon, Ghose, Cripps and Phillips in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1890. His theatrical masterwork, The Importance of Being Earnest, premiered even as his own downfall was set in motion by the depositing of an insulting note at his club by the Marquess of Queensberry. The pugnacious noble’s son, Lord Alfred Douglas, had been Wilde’s friend and sometime lover since 1891. Wilde’s rash attempt to sue Queensberry for libel resulted in his own prosecution for gross indecency, and the humiliating revelation of a sexual life undreamt of by the contemporary public. Despite his public defence of ‘the love that dare not speak its name’, Wilde has sentenced to two years with hard labour, an experience that led to his last major poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and the prison letter De Profundis which is now read as his memoir and valediction. His health broken, he died in destitute exile in Paris aged forty-six.

Niranjan Pal was the son of the moderate Indian nationalist Bepin Chandra Pal. He came to Britain in the early twentieth century to study in London, and lived in a boarding house with Sukhsagar Datta, Ashutosh Mitter and his father. It was to this boarding house at 140 Sinclair Road in London that David Garnett was invited to by Datta and where he was introduced to Pal, who was also known as Nanu. In The Golden Echo, Garnett described Pal's politics as not clearly defined, but more sympathetic to Indian revolutionaries in contrast to his father's moderate views.

Niranjan Pal later rose to fame as a playwright and then film director and producer. His play, The Goddess, was performed in London in 1922. This play had a successful run, starting at the Duke of York's Theatre on 6 and 7 June 1922, it was then shown at the Ambassador's Theatre and finally moved to the Aldwych Theatre in July 1922. The play was performed 66 times in total and there were plans after the success to form an Indian Repertory Theatre Movement in London.

Niranjan Pal was married to an English woman, Lily, and they had a son called Colin in 1923. Pal then began a collaboration with the lead actor in The Goddess, Himansu Rai, and went to Bombay to produce films. He collaborated with the German silent film director, Franz Osten to film The Light of Asia in 1925 in Bombay, and then became a successful screen-writer for Bombay Talkies film studio in Bombay.

As a student at Oxford, Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy helped Robert Bridges (poet laureate) select the 'oriental' poems for The Spirit of the Man (London: Longmans, 1915). On 29 November 1915, Suhrawardy, with D. H. Lawrence and Philip Arnold Heseltine, visited Lady Ottoline Morrell. [A photo of which, taken by Lady Ottoline, is available in the National Portrait Gallery.] Other guests recorded in the visitors' book that day included Aldous Huxley.

Suhrawardy was a poet and art critic, who also worked as a diplomat. He was the son of Justice Sir Zahid Suhrawardy and Khujesta Akhtar Banu and nephew of Abdullah Al-Mamun Suhrawardy who had also studied at Oxford. Suhrawardy was a graduate of Presidency College, Calcutta, before sailing for England. After graduating from Oxford, he taught English at the Imperial University of St Petersburg and at the Women's University in Moscow. Amongst his students was Alexander Kerensky, the Prime Minister of Russia. Suhrawardy was a member of the producers' committee at the Moscow Art Theatre and worked with the composer, Igor Stravinsky. He witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1919 and then moved to France. He returned to India in the 1920s to pursue research in art, teaching in Calcutta and Hyderabad. He also translated works from Russian and Chinese into English.

His younger brother, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, who was at Oxford at the same time, was Prime Minister (the post now called Chief Minister) of Bengal in 1946 and Prime Minister of Pakistan, 1956-7. Due to similar sounding names and the same initials with his brother, Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy is often known as Shahid Suhrawardy. He should also not be confused with his uncle Sir Hassan Suhrawardy.

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.

Born in 1929 to Benegal Rama Rau, a member of the Round Table Conference, financial advisor to the Simon Commission and ambassador, and Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, a pioneer of birth control and president of the All-India Women’s Conference, Santha Rama Rau was a journalist, dramaturge and travel writer. She travelled widely throughout her life, moving to England with her family in 1929, when just six years old, because of her father’s involvement with the Simon Commission. During the 1930s, she attended a Quaker school in Weybridge, Surrey, with her older sister Premila, before moving on to St Paul’s School, London. Her book Gifts of Passage describes the years of her childhood as ‘spent in English schools and in holidays on the Continent’ (p. 23), which underlines the cosmopolitan, elite character of her life. When in London, her parents took in refugees from concentration camps, including Lilian Ulanowsky, a Jewish refugee from Vienna who became guardian for the sisters when their mother went to join their father in South Africa. The family were all in South Africa during the outbreak of the Second World War. Unable to get passage back to England, they decided to return to India, when Santha was 16, to stay with the children’s grandmother. Rama Rau describes returning to India and experiencing nostalgia for Britain in her Home to India, the book which launched her career as a writer and was published when she was just 22 years old.

Rama Rau completed her university education at Wellesley College in the US in 1944, and made her home in New York City from the early 1950s. She married the diplomat Faubion Bowers, an expert on Asian arts and theatre. The two travelled together through Southeast Asia, Africa and Soviet Russia. They had a son together but later divorced, and Rama Rau went on to marry Gurdon Wallace Wattles in 1970.

In her book on Rama Rau, Antoinette Burton describes ‘the modicum of fame [she] achieved’ as resulting ‘mainly from her success at being recognized as an authority on India on the eve of independence’ (p. 4). To the ‘West’, she offered an ‘insider’s view’ of Indian culture, countering stereotyping and Orientalist misrepresentations, especially in This is India. Her literary achievement that is perhaps best known in Britain is her adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India for the stage, produced on Broadway in 1962 after runs in Oxford and London, which served as the basis of David Lean’s 1985 film of the novel.

Attia Hosain was born into a wealthy landowning family in northern India. Her father was educated at Cambridge University, and her mother was the founder of an institute for women's education and welfare. Hosain attended the Isabella Thoburn College at the University of Lucknow, becoming the first woman from a landowning family to graduate in 1933. She also undertook private tuition in Urdu and Persian at home, where she was brought up according to the Muslim tradition. Influenced by the left-wing, nationalist politics of her Cambridge-educated brother and his friends, Hosain became involved with the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association, a group of socialist writers which included Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand and Sajjad Zaheer. Encouraged by the poet and political activist Sarojini Naidu, she attended the 1933 All-India Women’s Conference in Calcutta, reporting on it for Lucknow and Calcutta newspapers. In this period, she also began to write short stories.

In 1947, determined to avoid going to the newly created Pakistan, Hosain left India for Britain with her husband, Ali Bahadur Habibullah, who undertook war repatriation work. The couple had two children, and Hosain chose to remain in Britain. She continued to write and began work as a broadcaster, presenting a woman's programme for the Indian Section of the Eastern Service of the BBC from 1949. During her time at the BBC, she broadcast on a wide range of topics, from art to music to religion to cinema. As well as reading scripts, she participated in discussion programmes and acted as a roving reporter for the Weekend Review. In 1953 she published her first work of fiction, a collection of short stories titled Phoenix Fled. This was followed in 1961 by her only novel, Sunlight on a Broken Column.