Edward John Thompson was a historian, novelist and translator. He was an ordained Wesleyan (although he later resigned his ordination) and in 1910 he went to Bankura Wesleyan College in Bengal to teach English literature. In Bengal he became acquainted with Rabindranath Tagore, and was present in Santiniketan when Tagore heard that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. The relationship between the poet and Thompson was often marked by tension and misunderstanding.

In 1923, Thompson settled in Oxford and taught Bengali to ICS probationers. He translated works from Bengali to English, and was involved with the India Society. In 1922 he wrote the introduction to a collection of short stories by Sita and Santa Chatterjee, entitled Tales of Bengal. He became a Leverhulme Research Fellow (1934–6), and Honorary Fellow and Research Fellow in Indian history at Oriel College (1936–40). He maintained contact and correspondence with many Indians, and also formed friendships with Indian students at Oxford and other Indian visitors to the UK. The Rhodes Trust funded several visits to India by Thompson in the 1930s and it was he who suggested that the Trust provide grants and prizes for Indian writers (although these plans did not come to fruition).

Thompson was a friend to Indian politicians, including those who visited the UK for the Round Table Conferences in the 1930s. Thompson had been involved in the suggestion of inviting Jawaharlal Nehru as Rhodes Visiting Lecturer to Oxford in 1940, but Viceroy Linlithgrow advised against this visit. Thompson had close contact with other Congress leaders such as M. K. Gandhi. He died in April 1946 before he could see independence realized for the subcontinent. 

K. M. Panikkar was a Dixon Scholar at Christ Church College, Oxford. He went to England in 1914 with the help of his elder brother who was studying medicine in Edinburgh at the time. He became a member of the Oxford Majlis and friends with the Suhrawardy brothers. Panikkar began to write articles whilst at Oxford which he sent to periodicals in India. He also read a paper on 'The Problems of Greater India' to the East India Association.

Panikkar returned to India in 1918. His ship was hit by a German torpedo but the passengers escaped and were taken by another ship. He joined Aligarh Muslim University in 1919 to teach history and political science. He became the first editor of the Hindustan Times from 1924. Panikkar then decided to read for the Bar and returned to England in 1925 for a year. He enrolled in Middle Temple.

Panikkar then entered the Princely Service and served as Foreign Minister of Patiala and Bikaner. He participated in the Round Table Conferences as a representative of the Princes of India. He held various diplomatic posts for India after 1947.

Kuruvila Zachariah was an Indian Christian who having studied at Christian College, Madras, was sent to England in 1912 on a Government of India scholarship. Having arrived in London in September 1912, he visited Thomas Arnold, the education advisor for Indian students. He was advised that he had a place to read history at Keble College, Oxford, but upon consideration took up a place at Merton College instead.

Zachariah attended Oxford Union debates and became involved with the University Christian Union. He did not join the Oxford Majlis because they met on Sunday evenings. In 1915, Zachariah received a first-class degree in history. Zachariah applied for teaching posts in India from England, taking advice from the India Office about entry into the Indian Educational Service. He was offered a position at Presidency College, Calcutta, and so returned to India in November 1915.

Zachariah was Professor of History at Presidency College until 1930 and then Principal of Hooghly College and Principal of Islamia College following that. He then took up several advisory positions within the Government after Indian independence. In 1954, Zachariah was appointed Historical Advisor and Minister at the High Commission in London. He died in 1955. Presidency College, Calcutta, continues to hold an annual Kuruvilla Zachariah Memorial Lecture in his honour.

Romesh Chunder Dutt was the son of Ishanchandra and Thakamani Dutt. They were part of one of the Calcutta families who had prospered through their commercial associations with the British East India Company. In 1868, he left for Britain in secret in the company of two friends, Bihari Lal Gupta and Surendranath Banerjea. In London, Dutt secured admission to University College and sat for the Indian Civil Service examination in 1871. Dutt was called to the Bar at the Middle Temple in the same year. He joined the Indian Civil Service as assistant magistrate and collector. In 1883 he was the first Indian to be appointed district magistrate and, after serving in many districts of Bengal, was appointed divisional commissioner, first in Burdwan and later in Orissa (1894–5).

When the premier literary association of Bengal, Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, was set up in 1894, Dutt was elected its first President. In 1899 Dutt was invited to preside over the fifteenth session of the Indian National Congress held at Lucknow, and in 1905 he presided over the industrial exhibition held in Benares in connection with the twenty-first session of the Congress. Dutt shared his time between London and India. In 1897, he was appointed Professor of Indian History at University College, London. From 1898, Dutt regularly wrote letters to the Editor of The Manchester Guardian on Indian matters, particularly famine and tariffs. A collection of these letters was published in 1900. Dutt also wrote a number of works on history, economics and translations of Indian Classics for the 'Temple Classics' series.

With Major B. D. Basu and Dadabhai Naoroji, Dutt formulated what is now recognized as the classic diagnosis of the Indian economic problem under colonial rule. It emphasized the ‘drainage of wealth’ from India through home charges payable to Britain and unrequited exports, the absence of protection for India's infant industries, and the negative implications of even constructive efforts like the railways, which deprived many providers of traditional transport services and facilitated the import of British manufactured goods.

Atul Chandra Chatterjee was an administrator in India and later became High Commissioner in London. He first arrived in Britain in 1893, having won a Government of India scholarship to study at King’s College, Cambridge. He graduated with a Second Class in history in 1895. In 1896 he successfully sat the Indian Civil Service exam. He returned to India in 1897, taking up a post as district administrator in the United Provinces. Chatterjee pursued a successful career in the ICS. By 1921 he had been promoted to Secretary to the Government of India in the Department of Industries and in 1923 he joined the Department’s Executive Council.

In 1924, Chatterjee married Galdys Mary Broughton, who advised the Government of India on women’s and child welfare. In 1924, Chatterjee accepted the offer of the post of High Commissioner for India in London, which he held until 1931. He was the driving force behind the building of India House, Aldwych, which houses the Indian High Commission to this day. The building was opened in 1930 by George V. In London, Chatterjee represented the Indian Government at the International Labour Conference as well as the League of Nations. He also represented the Indian Government at the London Naval Conference in 1930.

His experience as an administrator and his diplomatic skills were highly respected and reflected in the honours that were bestowed on him. He was made a KCIE in 1925 and KCSI in 1930. Subsequent to being High Commissioner, Chatterjee sat on the Council of India for five years. In 1942 he became Advisor to the Secretary of State for India, a post he held until 1947.

Chatterjee also took an interest in the arts. He was a member of the council of the Royal Academy of Arts for twenty years and its chairman from 1939 to 1940. He was also a member of the Royal Asiatic Society and Vice-Chairman of the East India Association. He published widely on Indian history. He remained in England after Indian independence and died in Sussex in September 1955.

Basanta Mallik was a significant twentieth-century Indian philosopher who followed his studies in philosophy at the University of Calcutta (BA, 1902; MA, 1903) with a period as a student then academic at the University of Oxford. Mallik began his time at Oxford as a law student, gaining a BA in Jurisprudence in 1916; he went on to complete a Certificate in Physical and Cultural Anthropology (1918) and a Diploma in Anthropology (1919). His studies at Oxford were sponsored by the Prime Minister of Nepal (Mallik worked initially as a tutor for his sons but later took up many government roles, especially in foreign affairs). Unable to return home after the First World War broke out, he resumed his first love, philosophy, getting agreement from his patrons to begin a BLitt (PhD).

Able to remain in Oxford, he became part of closely knit group of friends and frequently visited Robert Bridges at Boar’s Hill. He met Robert Graves at a Lotus Club dinner in 1922 and significantly influenced the poet’s early work. Graves treated him as a mentor and was fascinated with his metaphysical and philosophical meditations on breaking down conflict, violence and the clash of civilizations. Traces of this influence are evident in Graves’s early work, in collections such as Mock Beggar Hall, appealing to the pacifist interests of the Hogarth Press and Leonard Woolf. Mallik also established close friendships with T. E. Lawrence, Sydney Lewis and Sam Harries who met up at Boar’s Hill or in Mallik’s Oxford rooms. He was active in the Lotus Club and was friends with many other Indians in Oxford. His ideas attempted to bridge philosophical debates drawn from ‘East’ and ‘West’; Mallick, like others of his generation, was widely read in both traditions. His belief that the effect of British rule in India had made untenable the concepts of equality and freedom on which humanist ideals were based made him an anti-imperialist, although he did not believe in violent resistance. Mallik went back to Nepal in 1923 and then to Calcutta. He returned to Oxford in 1938 where he continued to write, lecture and publish until his death in 1958.

The friendship with Graves is recorded in the first edition of Robert Graves’s autobiography, published in 1929, Goodbye to All That. Graves and his family cut off the close relations with Mallik soon after he returned to Nepal in 1923 and once Graves had decided not to follow him there with others of the group. Graves deletes all references to Mallik in later editions of his autobiography (see Sondhi and Walker on the complexities of this relationship).

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.