Balachandra Rajan was a scholar of poetry and poetics. He was Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, 1944–8. He was the editor of a series of slim volumes on literary criticism titled Focus which had at least four issues between 1945 and 1948 and was published by Dennis Dobson. The series had its beginnings at Cambridge, where Rajan co-edited (with Wolf Mankowitz) a collection of criticism titled Sheaf which was published by the university, and authored his own collection of poems, Monsoon and Other Poems. While in Britain, he also contributed poems to literary journals, including Life and Letters Today and Poetry London (indeed he was possibly the only South Asian to contribute to the latter, with the exception of its editor, Tambimuttu). Focus appeared to engage critically with work by some of the big literary names of the day, including Huxley, Sartre, Isherwood and Kafka. Contributors of essays include Kathleen Raine, D. S. Savage and Julian Symons, with poems by e. e. cummings, George Barker, John Heath-Stubbs and Vernon Watkins, as well as Rajan himself.

In 1948, Rajan left England for India where he served in the Indian Foreign Service until 1961, working also with UNESCO, UNICEF and as part of the Indian delegation to the United Nations. Later, he returned to academia, initially at the University of Delhi, before taking up a post at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Best known for his work on Milton, Rajan completed a critical book on Paradise Lost as well as an edition (with introduction and commentary) of this canonical work. He also wrote on Spenser, Yeats, Marvell, Eliot, Keats and Macaulay, and completed two novels.

Alagu Subramaniam was a Ceylon-born English short story writer. He was one of the founders and editors of the literary magazine Indian Writing. Mulk Raj Anand and Iqbal Singh also published one of his short stories in their anthology Indian Short Stories (New India Publishing Company, 1946). His short stories were published by a number of journals, such as Life and Letters Today and the Left Review. He was also involved with the anti-colonial organization Swaraj House.

S. M. Marath was born into an orthodox Nayar background in Trichur, at one time the capital of Cochin State. His ancestral home was Sri Padmanabha Mandiram in Tirunvambadi, Trichur. He combined a traditional South Indian background with a cosmopolitan education, studying for his BA in English at Madras Christian College and later, in 1934, enrolling at King’s College London. He went on to join the Indian Civil Service in London, working at India House after Independence in 1947. He married Nancy, an Irish woman, had two sons and settled permanently in Britain.

A Wound of Spring, his first novel, appeared in 1960 and is dedicated to his family. Prior to this, between 1934 and 1960, he published short stories, critical essays and reviews, and broadcast regularly with the BBC Home, Education and Eastern Service. Whilst Marath regularly reviewed Indian works in British periodicals – by Mulk Raj Anand, Bhabani Bhattacharya, Aubrey Menen, Jawaharlal Nehru and M. K. Gandhi, among others – he also wrote commentaries on British writers, French literature and religious philosophy. His published works are all set in Kerala, South India, close to his ancestral home. Written in English and drawing on a wide range of sources, they explore broad existential questions. In Janu, his last published novel, he addresses specific issues related to the Indo-British encounter which indirectly draws on his experience as an Indian living in Britain. He died in London in 2003.

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.

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.

Ahmed Ali, best known for his acclaimed literary fiction, was born to Syed Shujauddin, a civil servant, and Ahmad Kaniz Asghar Begum in 1910. Ali attended Wesley Mission High School in Azamgarh and Government High School in Aligarh before beginning his studies in 1926 at Aligharh Muslim University where he met Raja Rao and their English poetry tutor Eric C. Dickinson (Ali’s first mentor), and published his first poem in Aligarh Magazine. Just a year later he transferred to Lucknow University, where he published his first short story and graduated, in 1930, with the highest marks in English in the history of the university.

In 1931, Ali gained his MA from the same institution and became a lecturer there. It was in this year that he also met Sajjad Zaheer and Mahmaduzaffar. With Rashid Jahan, the daughter of the well-known advocate of women's education in India, Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah, the three men produced an anthology of short stories titled Anghare ('Burning Coals') which, because of its political radicalism and also, according to some, obscenity, provoked considerable hostility and was eventually banned. In the wake of this controversy, the four writers became involved in the All-India Progressive Writers' Association which had its beginnings in London in 1934 but its first official meeting in Lucknow in 1936. Ali also published his own first collection of short stories, Sho’le (‘Flames’) in that year.

Soon after the inception of the AIPWA, a rift developed within it; Ali disagreed with Zaheer and others about the function of literature within society, arguing that it should not be reduced to political propaganda. He severed his connections with the association, departing for London in 1939 with the manuscript of his first novel Twilight in Delhi. He remained in Britain for just over a year. During this time, he mixed with writers, both Indian and English. Introduced to E. M. Forster by his distant relative Syed Ross Masood, Ali became good friends with him and was introduced by him into London’s literary circles and, in particular, the Bloomsbury Group. He was one of the editors of the magazine Indian Writing, had short fiction published in John Lehmann’s journal New Writing, and was successful in securing a publishing deal for his first novel, Twilight in Delhi, with Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press.

On his return to India, Ali was appointed Director of Listener Research for the BBC, Delhi. In 1944, he left this post and was appointed Professor of English at Presidency College, Calcutta. In the following year, he attended the first All-India PEN conference in Jaipur, with Forster as chief speaker. Later, he founded Pakistan PEN with Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy. In China during the partition of the Indian subcontinent, Ali moved to Karachi in the newly formed Pakistan on his return and began a career in the diplomatic service which took him back to China and to Morocco. He was eventually retired from government service by General Muhammad Ayub Khan’s military regime in 1960, and went on to start up his own business. He was married to Bilquis Jahan and had three sons and a daughter.

During his lifetime, Ali published several more volumes of short stories in Urdu, as well as anthologies of English translations of Urdu poetry, the first anthology of Pakistani writing in English translation, the first anthology of Indonesian poetry in English translation, a study of China’s Muslim population, and his second and third novels (1964, 1985), continuing to produce new works until his death.

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.

Mulk Raj Anand was a distinguished writer, critic, editor, journalist and political activist. Born into the Kshatriya (warrior) caste in the Punjabi city of Peshawar, he was educated at cantonment schools before completing a degree at the University of Punjab, Amritsar, where his involvement in the 1921 Civil Disobedience campaign against the British resulted in a short period of imprisonment. He was just nineteen years old when he left India for England on a scholarship to mark the silver wedding of George V and Queen Mary. On his arrival he registered at University College London to study for a doctorate in philosophy which he was awarded in 1929.

In England, Anand quickly became involved in left wing politics as well as the Indian independence movement. He was vocal in his support of the coal miners’ strike in 1926 and of the General Strike that followed, and soon afterwards joined a Marxist study circle at the home of the trade unionist Alan Hutt. In the 1930s and 1940s, he spoke regularly at meetings of Krishna Menon’s India League, where he came into contact with a number of British intellectuals and activists including Bertrand Russell, H. N. Brailsford and Michael Foot, and in 1937 he left Britain for three months to join the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Drawing also on his talents as a writer in the struggle for socialism, Anand wrote numerous essays on Marxism, Fascism, the Spanish Civil War, Indian independence and other political movements, events and issues of the day. He turned down the offer of a post at Cambridge University. Instead, he lectured in literature and philosophy at the London County Council Adult Educational Schools and the Workers' Educational Association, from 1939 to 1942. Anand’s belief in an international socialism, evident in the range of his political activities, was matched by his conviction of the inextricability of politics and literature. This is reflected in many of his novels which depict the lives of the poorest members of Indian society. The first of these, Untouchable, was published by the left-leaning British firm Wishart in 1935. It can also be seen in his role in the founding of the Progressive Writers’ Association in London in 1935, along with fellow Indian writers Sajjad Zaheer and Ahmed Ali.

Anand immersed himself in London’s literary scene in the inter-war years, associating and in some cases forming friendships with eminent British writers including George Orwell, T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender and Bonamy Dobree. He was a regular reviewer for a range of national newspapers and magazines, including the New Statesman and Life and Letters Today. He also worked as an editor for Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, and for T. S. Eliot at Criterion. It was at Criterion where Anand met E. M. Forster whose endorsement of his first novel helped to secure the publishing deal with Wishart – and so his establishment as a novelist. Prior to this, he had already seen success as an art and literary critic, publishing his first book, on Persian painting, in 1930. Untouchable was followed by a string of novels which were, on the whole, reviewed favourably, as well as several essay collections on subjects ranging from art to cookery to India’s struggle for freedom. During the Second World War, Anand researched, scripted and broadcast numerous radio programmes for the BBC Eastern Service, working alongside George Orwell and the Caribbean poet Una Marson, in particular. In 1938, he married the Communist and would-be actor Kathleen Van Gelder, with whom he had a daughter, Rajani. The marriage did not last.

Soon after his return to India in 1945, Anand founded the art magazine Marg. He taught at various universities, including the University of the Punjab where he was appointed Tagore Professor of Literature and Fine Art. From 1965 to 1970, he was fine art chairman at Lalit Kala Akademi (National Academy of Arts). He continued to write fiction and criticism, and to support a range of national and international cultural associations such as the World Peace Council, the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association, the National Book Trust, and the UNESCO Dialogues of East and West. He died in Pune on 28 September 2004.