Kedar Nath Das Gupta, a Bengali and friend of Rabindranath Tagore, was involved in forming the Union of East and West in January 1914. This was a society for the British and Indians in London which put on dramatic performances (having subsumed the Indian Art and Dramatic Society, formed in 1912). Das Gupta and the Society were based at 14 St Marks Crescent, London, NW1. He hoped that through the Society he could promote better understanding and collaboration between India and the West.

Das Gupta collaborated with Laurence Binyon in 1919 to adapt Kalidasa's play, Sakuntala, for the English stage. Das Gupta was able to publish through the Society some of the plays that they put on. The publication of Caliph for a Day in 1917, a Tagore play, also included photos of Das Gupta dressed in Indian clothes with three of the female members of the Society's executive, and photos of the Indian soldiers for whom the Union of the East and West had put on performances during the War.

In 1918, he published a play that he had written called Bharata, a four-act play that Das Gupta explained in the preface was drawn from writers, historians and philosophers of East and West on the four stages of life. The publication included a dedication to King George V and a quote from Lloyd George on the dust jacket. Das Gupta then migrated to New York with the Union of the East and West in the 1920s to create an umbrella movement known sometimes as the 'Fellowship of Faiths' or the 'Threefold Movement' incorporating as it did the Union of East and West, the Fellowship of Faiths and the League of Neighbours. He organized an International Conference of Faiths in Chicago in 1933. Das Gupta was also involved in organising the classes given in London in 1936 by the Swami Yogananda.

Niranjan Pal was the son of the moderate Indian nationalist Bepin Chandra Pal. He came to Britain in the early twentieth century to study in London, and lived in a boarding house with Sukhsagar Datta, Ashutosh Mitter and his father. It was to this boarding house at 140 Sinclair Road in London that David Garnett was invited to by Datta and where he was introduced to Pal, who was also known as Nanu. In The Golden Echo, Garnett described Pal's politics as not clearly defined, but more sympathetic to Indian revolutionaries in contrast to his father's moderate views.

Niranjan Pal later rose to fame as a playwright and then film director and producer. His play, The Goddess, was performed in London in 1922. This play had a successful run, starting at the Duke of York's Theatre on 6 and 7 June 1922, it was then shown at the Ambassador's Theatre and finally moved to the Aldwych Theatre in July 1922. The play was performed 66 times in total and there were plans after the success to form an Indian Repertory Theatre Movement in London.

Niranjan Pal was married to an English woman, Lily, and they had a son called Colin in 1923. Pal then began a collaboration with the lead actor in The Goddess, Himansu Rai, and went to Bombay to produce films. He collaborated with the German silent film director, Franz Osten to film The Light of Asia in 1925 in Bombay, and then became a successful screen-writer for Bombay Talkies film studio in Bombay.

Laurence Housman, brother of the poet A. E. Housman, was a playwright, writer and illustrator. Houseman was a committed pacifist and socialist. He was an early supporter of Indian independence and a member of Krishna Menon's India League.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, USA, to Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Champe Stearns in 1888. He graduated from Smith Academy, St Louis, in 1905 before studying for a year at Milton Academy, outside Boston, and eventually following his brother to Harvard in 1906. He attained a BA in Comparative Literature in 1909 and an MA in English literature in 1910. From 1910-1911 he studied at the Sorbonne, Paris, before returning to his graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard the following year. As part of his studies there he took courses in Pali and Sanskrit, and on Hindu thought. He also met Bertrand Russell at Harvard.

In the summer of 1914, Eliot went to London on a travelling fellowship. There, he immediately struck up a friendship with Conrad Aiken and Ezra Pound, and in 1915 he was introduced to Vivienne Haigh-Wood whom he married in June of that year. He spent the next years teaching in High Wycombe and Highgate, London, until his first book, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917. His long poem The Waste Land (1922) consolidated his Modernist breakthrough.

Bertrand Russell introduced Eliot to Lady Ottoline Morrell and the people surrounding Garsington Manor such as Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, James Joyce and, later, Mulk Raj Anand. In Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981), Anand relates how he first met Eliot at a sherry party at Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop; also present was Nikhil Sen. By this time, Eliot was the editor of the literary journal Criterion and wanted Anand to to do some work for him. Anand describes more meetings with Eliot in the Criterion office where they would often talk about religion and writing. In 1925, Eliot was made literary editor of Faber & Gwyer (later Faber & Faber). He drew coloser to Christianity, and in 1927 he was baptised into the Church of England. Later that year he became a British citizen.

In the 1930s, Eliot focused less on his own writing and became primarily a cultural critic. After the Second World War he gave up writing poetry altogether and turned his attention to plays and literary essays. In the 1940s, he asked the Ceylonese poet and editor Meary James Tambimuttu to edit the anthology Poetry in Wartime (1942) for Faber. Eliot was a support of Tambimuttu's successful magazine Poetry London. He said of it: 'It is only in Poetry London that I can consistently expect to find new poets who matter' (back cover of Poetry London).

In 1948, Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature and was awarded the Order of Merit. In his later years, he assumed a more reclusive lifestyle, sharing a flat with his friend John Hayward in Carlyle Mansions on the Chelsea Embankment, until his marriage to his second wife Valerie Fletcher in 1957 . He died on 4 January 1965 of emphysema at his home in London.