Ikbal Ali Shah was the Son of the Nawab of Sardhana, and great grandson of the Afghan statesman Jan Fishan Khan. He came to Britain before the First World War and studied at Oxford and Edinburgh University, where he met his wife, the Scottish author Morag Murray. They had three children, the Sufi writers and translators Amina Shah (1918), Omar Ali-Shah (1922-2005) and Idries Shah (1924-96), with whom Doris Lessing later studied Sufism. He wrote collections of tales and adventure, like The Golden Caravan, as well as non-fiction like The Spirit of the East. He later taught Sufi "classes" in England, which were the precursors to the Sufi school established by his son, Idries Shah. Ikbal Ali Shah also wrote biographies, including on President Kemal Attaturk whom he claims to have known personally.

Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah was a prolific writer of articles, and books relating to South Asia, Sufism and the Muslim World. He published in The Bookman and other journals, but struggled to live by his writing. In 1939 he contacted the India Office for work as a writer in the Information Department, for whom he wrote articles useful for Muslim papers in India and he provided the Ministry with a regular service of news along these lines. In a letter dated 19 January 1939, A. H. Joyce (Secretary Political, External Department) stated that the India Office had known Ikbal Ali Shah ‘as a contributor of articles, principally to the provincial newspapers in this country, on matters affecting the Muslim world and particularly those affecting India and Afghanistan. He is also the author of quite a number of books of a popular type covering a similar field’ (L/I/1/1509). He was also a prolific speaker and addressed the Oxford Majlis in 1941 on the topic ‘Incompatibility of Islamic and Fascist Philosophies’, and lascars in the East End on ‘English, Their Country and Their Ways’. He also wrote a paper ‘Little Arabia in Britain', on Cardiff’s Muslim community.

Ikbal Ali Shah was linked to the controversy surrounding the 1967 publication of a new translation of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, by his son Omar Ali-Shah and the English poet Robert Graves. The translation was based on an annotated "crib", supposedly derived from an old manuscript said to have been in the Shah family's possession for 800 years. L. P. Elwell-Sutton, an Orientalist at Edinburgh University, and others who reviewed the book, expressed their conviction that the story of the ancient family manuscript was false. Graves had been led to believe that Ikbal Ali Shah had access to the disputed manuscript. Shah was about to produce it at the time of his death from a car accident, to allay the growing controversy surrounding the translation. He and his wife are buried in the Muslim section of the cemetery at Brookwood, Woking, Surrey.

M. C. Chagla was born in Bombay in 1900. As a young boy he read Morley's Life of Gladstone and had the ambition to go to Oxford and join Christ Church college as Gladstone had done. In 1919, when Chagla went to Britain, he did not gain admission to Christ Church college, but did at Lincoln College. Here, Chagla read Modern History, with the intention to foster a public career.

Chagla had a very active social life as a student. He joined the Oxford Union and was elected to the Library Committee in 1921. He was a member of the Oxford Liberal Club, the Oxford Labour Club and Lotus Club. He was an active member of the Oxford Majlis and was elected President in June 1921. Chagla was also heavily involved with the Annual Indian Social Conference, that had begun in 1917 and would meet each year in Derbyshire for lectures, debates, games, and excursions.

Whilst studying at Oxford, Chagla also studied for the Bar as a member of Inner Temple. Having earnt a second class degree, and having been called to the Bar, Chagla returned to India in 1922. He joined the Bombay Bar where Jinnah was practising and joined the Muslim League soon after. However, Chagla broke off from the Muslim League when Jinnah began to espouse the two-nation theory. Chagla practised at the Bar from 1922 to 1941 and also taught law at Government College, Bombay. On Indian independence (15 August 1947), Chagla was appointed Chief Justice of Bombay. In 1958, Nehru appointed Chagla as Ambassador to the United States, and then High Commissioner in London in 1961. Chagla was Education Minister and then Minister of External Affairs in India, 1963-7.

K. P. S. Menon joined Oxford after the end of the First World War. He was President of the Oxford Majlis for a term in 1920. 

Menon served in the Madras ICS until 1924 when he was transferred to the Foreign and Political Department as Under-Secretary to the Resident of Hyderabad. In 1939, he was appointed as Chief Minister of Bharatpur, then Ambassador to China after independence, Foreign Secretary from 1948 to 1952 and then Ambassador to Moscow.