John Lehmann was a writer, poet and publisher. He was the editor of the hugely influential magazine New Writing (1936-40), which also published South Asian writers such as Ahmed Ali and Mulk Raj Anand. He was managing director for Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press from 1938-46, before founding his own publishing company.

Aldous Leonard Huxley was born near Godalming, Surrey, to Leonard Huxley and Julia Frances Huxley, who was the daughter of Thomas Arnold and niece of Matthew Arnold. He enrolled at Eton College in the autumn of 1908. This coincided with the death of his mother, Julia, which left him devastated. In 1911, he was struck down by a staphylococcic infection in the eye which left near-blind for eighteen months. He went on to study English literature at Balliol College, Oxford. While at Oxford he started writing poetry and short stories.

During the First World War, Huxley worked as a farm labourer at Garsington Manor, home to Lady Ottoline Morrell. Here he met Edith Sitwell, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Clive Bell and Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy, most of whom were later associated with the Bloomsbury Group. It was at a sherry party in Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop, Bloomsbury, London, that Huxley first met Mulk Raj Anand, who was then a student of philosophy. Also attendant at the party were Nikhil Sen, Professor Bonamy Dobrée, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Edith Sitwell, Laurence Binyon, Leonard Woolf and John Middleton Murry. They discussed the literature of James Joyce, Mohammad Iqbal, Rudyard Kipling, Rabindranath Tagore and E. M. Forster. In Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981), Anand sums up the party as follows: 'I was too overwhelmed by the presence of these legendary literary men. I felt that they did not know very much about my country, and what they knew was through Kipling, or through superficial impressions, except for Leonard Woolf, who had lived and worked in Ceylon and even resigned from the Civil Service, because he did not want to be a part of Imperialist rule. And Aldous Huxley felt differently from others, and even differed from himself of the days of his Jesting Pilate, because he had doubts about our benign white sahibs. All the others seemed to believe, more or less, in the "Empire on which the sun never sets"' (p. 29).

A few days after the party, Huxley met Anand again; this time in the British Museum Reading Rooms. The two of them went for coffee at Cafe Italiano, overlooking Great Russell Street, near Monro's Bookshop, where they discussed Ananda K. Coomaraswamy's The Dance of Shiva, Kierkegaard, T. S. Eliot, André Gide and D. H. Lawrence, as well as the nature of Englishmen and Indians. In November 1935, Huxley met Jawaharlal Nehru in Oxford. On Nehru's return visit to London in January/February 1936, he was anxious to meet with him again. When his best-selling novel Brave New World (1932) was published, Huxley and his wife were living outside Paris, and in 1937 the couple moved to Hollywood, California.

Huxley's friend Gerald Heard introduced him to Vedanta, meditation and vegetarianism, and he was introduced to J. Krishnamurti and Swami Prabhavananda. As his sight deteriorated, he experimented with LSD and wrote the collection of essays The Doors of Perception, based on his experiences of LSD. By 1962, he had developed cancer, and he died at his home on 22 November 1963.

David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood, near Nottingham, to coalminer Arthur Lawrence and Lydia Beardsall. Lawrence won a County Council scholarship and went to Nottingham High School. He did not excel, but went on to teach at the British School in Eastwood. In 1906, he started to write what would eventually become his first novel, The White Peacock (published in 1911). While teaching at Davidson Road elementary school in Croydon in 1908, he continued to write. His friend Jessie Chambers showed his writing to Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford), who recommended it to William Heinemann for publication.

By 1913, Lawrence had met and married Frieda Emma Maria Johanna, and the two of them lived briefly in Germany (near Munich) and Italy before the First World War. Forced to stay in England, Lawrence soon began to meet the people associated with Garsington Manor around Lady Ottoline Morrell. His new acquaintances included Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy, Bertrand Russell, E. M. Forster and Aldous Huxley. Their meeting on 29 November 1915 with Lady Ottoline Morrell along with Philip Heseltine, Aldous Huxley, Willy MacQueen and Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy is recorded in his letters:

There was an Indian there - a lineal descendent of the Prophet, whose curse is a dreadful thing - and a young musician, and Bertie Russell. Of course we talked violently in between-whiles, politics and India and so on. I always shout too loud. That annoys the Ottoline. The Indian says (he is of Persian family): "Oh, she is so like a Persian princess, it is strange - something grand, and perhaps cruel." It is pleasant to see with all kinds of eyes, like Argus. Suhrawardy was my pair of Indo-persian eyes. He is coming to Florida. (Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. II )

After the war, Lawrence moved to Italy, France and Sicily, before going to America in 1922. He briefly visited friends in Ceylon first, before leaving for Austrialia and arriving on the west coast of the United States. In 1926, he returned to Italy and revived his friendship with Aldous Huxley. There he started writing Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928).

During the late 1920s, Lawrence visted London frequently. He met Mulk Raj Anand at a sherry party at Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop. In Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981), Anand, who was still a student of philosophy then, describes the meeting thus: '"I am not sure which philosophy you are studying," said Lawrence and coughed a wheezy cough. "But I hope you can trust your eyes, nose, mouth, skin and the human sense against the ethereal Tagory"' (p. 23). Lawrence had previously been outspoken in his criticism of Tagore's indictment of nationalism, and his prejudices about the East made Anand uncomfortable. Already in 1916, Lawrence had scorned the writing of Tagore. In a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell dated 24 May 1916, he wrote:

I become more and more surprised to see how far higher, in reality, our European civilizations stands than the East, India or Persia ever dreamed of. And one is glad to realize how these Hindus are horribly decadent and reverting to all forms of barbarism in all sorts of ugly ways. We feel surer on our feet, then. But this fraud of looking up to them - this wretched worship-of-Tagore attitude - is disgusting. "Better fifty years of Europe" even as she is. Buddha worship is completely decadent and foul nowadays: and it was always only half civilized. (The Collected Letters, p. 451)

Lawrence and Anand would remain friends, though. After returning to the continent, Lawrence's health deteriorated and he settled in Bandol, in the south of France, by the sea, where his friends rallied around him in his last months. Mulk Raj Anand visited Lawrence a few weeks before his death on 2 March 1930.

Sasadhar Sinha came to Britain to study for a BSc at the London School of Economics. He stayed on to complete a PhD at the same institution, returning to India shortly afterwards. On his return, Sinha failed to get a job because of the anti-government content of his journalism and lectures. Fearing arrest, he soon returned to Britain, where, in 1935, he opened the Bibliophile Bookshop at 16 Little Russell Street. The Ceylonese writer Alagu Subramaniam worked as Sinha’s assistant there, and the magazine Indian Writing, to which Sinha contributed regularly, was also based there. Indeed, the Bibliophile became known as a political meeting place for Indians.

As well as being prominent in anti-colonial and left-wing political circles in Britain, Sinha worked as an evening lecturer at Eltham Literary Institute and at Lewisham and Dulwich Literary Institute, lecturing on current affairs, Indian history, economics and political science. Along with several other South Asians during this period, he was a regular reader at the British Museum Reading Room where his reading matter was monitored by government officials who kept surveillance reports on politically active South Asians in Britain. He was married to Marthe Goldwyn, a teacher at Prendergast Girls’ School, Lewisham, and registered as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. By 1941, the Bibliophile was running out of funds and Sinha began to incur debts. He sold the bookshop in 1942 - to either Krishna Menon or one Robert Scott Cleminson - but remained its manager. In 1945, he returned to India to take ‘an active part in the nationalist movement in Bengal’ (L/PJ/12/467, p. 17).

Venu Chitale was a talks broadcaster and assistant to George Orwell at the BBC’s Indian Section of the Eastern Service. She arrived in Britain in the mid-1930s. She had come to Britain with her teacher in Poona, Winnie Duplex, to study at University College, London.

She joined the BBC in 1940 when the service expanded to broadcast different Indian languages including Marathi, her mother tongue. From 1941, Chitale assisted George Orwell in his work as a talks programme assistant for the BBC Indian section of the Eastern Service from 1941-43. She broadcast on his series of talks ‘Through Eastern Eyes’ as well as his 1942 magazine programme 'Voice'. She also broadcast as part of the series of talks ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’, which focused on the role of women in the war effort. Like Indira Devi of Kapurthala, she also broadcast on the Home Service, where she served as a newsreader at the height of the war. She contributed to programmes such as ‘Indian Recipes’ and the ‘Kitchen Front’ series, which was produced by Jean Rowntree. Orwell was particularly impressed by Chitale and she was often complimented for her speaking voice. She became a full-time member of staff as the Marathi Programme Assistant in 1942.

While in London, Chitale also became involved with the India League and forged a close relationship with Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister. She returned to India in 1950 and married Prof T. G. Khare. She published several novels and died in 1995.

Aubrey Menen was a writer, essayist, broadcaster, journalist, drama critic and activist. His work explored the question of nationalism and the cultural contrast between his own Irish-Indian ancestry and his traditional British upbringing. He was born to an Irish mother and an Indian father in 1912 and was brought up in Islington, later moving to Forest Hill, south London. He studied philosophy at University College London (UCL), where he formed his own drama group, and befriended the artist Duncan Grant who introduced him to many members of the Bloomsbury Group, including John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf. He persuaded H. G. Wells to allow him to adapt The Shape of Things to Come, even though Wells had already sold the rights to Alexander Korda. Korda agreed to three closed performances, which caused a sensation. At UCL he was rejected for the Rosa Morrison Bursary by the then Jewish Master of the college on the grounds that he was not of 'pure' English descent.

After graduating in 1932, Menen became the drama critic for The Bookman from 1933 to 1934. He also became involved with Krishna Menon's India League and toured the regions as a speaker. So that he would not be confused with Menon, a friend of his father's, he anglicized his name to Menen. In 1934, Menen, together with the actor Andre van Gysegham, founded the Experimental Theatre, which sought to create a politically engaging theatre in alternative performance spaces. His radical plays regularly ran into difficulties with the Lord Chamberlain and he was sued for blasphemy and obscenity for his 1934 play Genesis II. From 1937 to 1939 he worked as director of the Personalities Press Service. In April 1939 he moved to Bombay, finding work at All-India Radio. During the Second World War, he worked as a script writer and editor for propaganda broadcasts for the Government of India. He also broadcast regularly on the radio and became a leading radio personality in India. He subsequently worked for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson's film department. In the late 1940s, after the war, he became a full-time writer. He briefly returned to Britain in the autumn 1947 to oversee the publication of The Prevalence of Witches. In 1948 he moved to Italy, to live in what he described as a space midway between India and England. He lived there until 1980. He spent his final years living in Kerala, where he died in 1989.

Menen's output was prolific and covered a variety of genres. Starting his career as a dramatist and critic, he moved to radio journalism. He authored nine novels, several travel books, autobiographical works, essays and reviews. He also published a version of The Ramayana, Rama Retold, which was banned in India but, despite its radical implications, performed in London amidst some controversy. His fiction is driven by a caustic satire and his essays reveal a passionate desire to break down the falsity of racial myths of 'Aryan' superiority, whether in India amongst Nairs or in Nazi Germany; a similar perspective is evident in relation to the hypocrisy of racial stereotyping in Britain. Menen expresses in his non-fiction the advantage of dual vision: born to Indian and Irish parents, brought up as a brown Englishman in Britain, and in India always a foreigner. This liminality takes on sexual dimensions throughout his autobiographical essays which reflect, despite his conversion to Catholicism, a radical homosexuality.