James Keir Hardie, originally James Kerr, was the son of Mary Kerr, a Scottish farm servant. His father was probably William Aitken, a miner from Holytown, but Mary Kerr brought up her son alone before meeting David Hardie, a former ship’s carpenter, who she married in 1859. Hardie is said to have raised his wife’s first son as his own, and he became known as James Keir Hardie. The family moved between Glasgow and the nearby countryside, suffering periods of poverty caused by unemployment. Keir Hardie received no formal education and started work as a miner at the age of 10. His early experiences of poverty were formative to his politicization. At the age of 17, he joined the Temperance Movement, and soon afterwards he became involved in miners’ associations becoming secretary of the Hamilton District Branch of the Lanarkshire Miners’ Union at the age of 21. At a similar time, he became a committed Christian, joining the Evangelical Union, a branch of the United Secession Church, in 1877. It was through the church that he met his future wife, Lillias Balfour Wilson, who he married in 1879. The couple had four children.

Hardie left the mines for trade union work in 1879, eventually becoming secretary of the Ayrshire Miners’ Union. He then progressed to party politics, rejecting liberalism for socialism, and launching his own monthly paper, the Labour Leader. Having moved to London in 1891, Hardie was returned for West Ham South as an ‘independent Labour’ candidate in the General Election of 1892. Described by his biographer Kenneth O. Morgan as the ‘prophet and evangelist’ of the Labour Party, Hardie played a key role in the major events of its early history, including the founding of the Independent Labour Party in 1893 and that of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 - which became the Labour Party in 1906. Defeated in 1896, he was elected MP to Merthyr Tudful in 1900. In 1906, he was elected first chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party but resigned from the post in 1907. Both within and outwith Parliament, he campaigned tirelessly for the unemployed, free schooling, pensions, Indian self-rule and, perhaps most of all, women’s rights. He had a close friendship with the Pankhurst family, particularly Sylvia who was probably his lover. Hardie was also a pacifist and outspoken in his criticism of the First World War.

Hardie was an internationalist and vociferous critic of the British Government in India, frequently calling for Indian self-rule in Parliament. On 20 July 1906, he made a particularly harsh denunciation of conditions in India, including death rates, low wages and the exclusion of Indians from local government, receiving support from many of his fellow Labour MPs. The following year, he toured India. He gave numerous speeches there, exposing the corruption of the Raj, speaking out in favour of Indian self-determination and against racism, advocating non-violent agitation, and encouraging the Congress Party. He was accompanied on his tours by the revolutionary Indian Nationalist B. G. Tilak as well as leaders of the swadeshi movement J. Chowdhury and Surendranath Banerjea, and is said to have peppered his speeches with the slogan ‘Bande Mataram’, even though he advocated a gradual extension of self-government rather than immediate withdrawal. Hardie’s tour of India alarmed the British authorities, and was stirred up by the press. There were calls for him to be deported and accusations of sedition. On his return, he continued speaking out for Indian self-rule in the House of Commons, campaigning (unsuccessfully) for the release from prison of Tilak, and publishing in 1909 India: Impressions and Suggestions which was formative to the Labour Party’s position on India for the next fifty years.

Born in a small village just outside Lucknow, northern India, Sajjad Zaheer remains one of the most prominent and iconic literary and political voices in South Asia and beyond. Zaheer was one of four sons in a privileged family. His father was Sir Wazir Hussain, a notable judge and Chief Justice of the Oudh Court. After completing his studies in politics and law at the University of Lucknow, Zaheer travelled to the UK to enrol at the University of Oxford. Initially, this was a course mapped out for him by his father, who wanted his son to become a barrister. However, Zaheer’s eight year sojourn in the colonial heartland would prove to be a defining moment in shaping his political sensibilities and the alternative path he would follow on his return to India.

Once he had reached Britain, the struggles against colonial rule in his homeland were thrown into sharp focus for Zaheer. His response was similar to that of his contemporary, Mulk Raj Anand. Together, these pre-independence diasporic intellectuals developed a keen appreciation of the urgent need for emancipation in their country. Formative to this was the presence of a South Asian community already vocalizing its concerns in the metropolitan capital. This included figures like Shyamaji Krishnavarma and V. D. Savarkar who played a leading role in the Ghadar Party. The injustices of colonial rule became apparent to Zaheer, as did the need to challenge the status quo through a marked socialist political activism. He established links with the Communist Party of Great Britain and was one of its first South Asian members. During his time in Britain Zaheer also became editor in chief of the periodical Bharat. This was a journal of socialist politics headed by South Asian students at Oxford and concerned with the struggle for independence and the plight of the poor in India. In the literary arena, he and Anand had several encounters with members of the Bloomsbury Group, and were deeply influenced by the modernist literary movement, if not its politics. Zaheer and Anand’s attendance of the International Congress for the Defence of Culture in Paris in 1935, organized by some of the most prominent names in the European artistic and literary landscape, was also a key influence. The previous year, Zaheer and Anand had laid the foundations for the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association at a gathering in a London restaurant where they drafted the manifesto. The organization sought to marry the political and social with the literary, and held numerous meetings in London where students and aspiring writers discussed articles and stories. Zaheer also began his novella, London Ki Ek Raat (‘A Night in London’, 1938) when in London, completing it on his return to India.

Zaheer left London for India via Paris in 1935. Once in India, he continued to develop the organization, which held its official inaugural meeting in Lucknow from 9 to 10 April 1936, with the writer Premchand presiding. The group published several texts inspired by Marxist, oppositional and subversive politics, including a translation of Tagore’s Gora (‘White Man’), and Zaheer’s own anthology of progressive Urdu literature, Roshnai (‘Light’). After partition, Zaheer left for Pakistan, and continued to be an active socialist campaigner in his country’s tumultuous political landscape. This saw him jailed at various points throughout his life. His continued commitment to express the political through literature resulted in the creation of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association. It was en route to a conference arranged by this organization in Kazakhstan that Zaheer suffered a massive heart attack which ended his life.

C. E. M. Joad was an English philosopher and popular educator. He was educated at Oxford and, after serving as a civil servant, was appointed Head of Philosophy at Birkbeck College (University of London) in 1930. A prolific writer and conservationist, he shot to fame as a broadcasting star when he joined the BBC radio programme ‘The Brain Trust’ in 1942. He was convicted of fare-dodging and was sacked by the BBC in 1948.

As an undergraduate at Oxford, Joad became an admirer of George Bernard Shaw; he turned to socialism and was a committed pacifist throughout his life. He was a member of the Fabian Society but was expelled in 1925 due to his philandering (he rejoined in 1943). In 1931, he became Director of Propaganda for the New Party, but soon left the party along with John Strachey when its leader Oswald Mosley turned to fascism. In 1932 he founded with H. G. Wells and others the Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals.

Joad looked to eastern philosophy as an antidote to western modernity. He attended a number of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s lectures and wrote on his philosophy (Counter Attack from the East, 1933). He also wrote a book on Indian civilization (1936) assisted by Girija Mookerjee, and was a regular contributor to the Anglo-Indian Theosophist periodical Aryan Path. Joad was an admirer of Gandhi, and contributed to a collection of essays (edited by S. Radhakrishnan) on Gandhi to celebrate his 70th birthday.

Mulk Raj Anand, in Conversations in Bloomsbury, records a long talk he had with Joad about God and philosophy. Anand and Joad both attended Professor Dawes Hicks’s seminar at University College London, and it appears that this is how they got to know each other. Joad also met through Anand his fellow student Nikhil Sen and his girlfriend Edna Thomson.

Barbara Castle spent her formative years in Bradford before attending the University of Oxford where she read philosophy, politics and economics. In 1937, after working for her local Labour Party in Hyde and as a columnist for the left-wing paper Tribune, she became a Labour Party councillor for the borough of St Pancras, where she worked alongside Krishna Menon.

Castle was elected as Labour MP for Blackburn in the 1945 General Election, becoming the youngest woman in the Commons and holding her seat for the next thirty-five years. In the 1960s, she held several ministerial offices, including Minister of Overseas Development, Minister of Transport, Secretary of State, and Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity.

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.

H. M. Hyndman was a prominent English Socialist. He began his career working as a journalist, including on the Pall Mall Gazette. In 1881, using the London radical clubs as a model, Hyndman established the Democratic Federation, which was renamed the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1884. Hyndman was also the editor of Justice. He was a vocal supporter of Indian nationalism and independence from the British.

Hyndman became friends with Dadabhai Naoroji in the 1870s, after reading Naoroji’s Poverty of India. They collaborated in Anti-Famine agitation during Queen Victoria’s Jubilee year. Naoroji helped Hyndman in his own work on Indian Famine. Despite their friendship, Naoroji often found Hyndman’s politics too radical and extreme, preferring a more moderate nationalist path.

Shyamaji Krishnavarma, a nationalist in favour of more radical methods, was acquainted with Hyndman. He invited Hyndman to open India House in Highgate in July 1905. Through the India House organization, Hyndman met individuals such as Madame Cama and B. G. Tilak. After the murder of Sir Curzon-Wyllie by Madan Lal Dhingra, Hyndman wrote in Justice that he had long warned that terrorism would result from the British policy of ‘despotism’ in India.