Swami Vivekananda was a charismatic Indian spiritual leader, founder of the Ramakrishna Mission in Calcutta, and a primary interpreter of Vedantic thought (non-dualist Hinduism) to the West. Though it was never his primary intention, he became a forerunner in opening the spiritual channels of connection between Britain and India that would draw disciples in both directions in the interests of further religious study, pilgrimage, fund raising, and proselytising the guru Sri Ramakrishna’s message. Margaret Noble, or Sister Nivedita, and the American Josephine Bull were among his foremost followers. His vigorous opposition to caste oppression probably exerted some influence on the development of M. K. Gandhi’s thought.

Born into a middle-class Bengali family, Narendra Dutta’s education initially took him on a secular path. An anti-orthodox thinker from an early age, though a spiritual seeker, he studied western philosophy and European history first at Presidency College, Calcutta (from 1879), and then at the Scottish Church College. Already at this stage he believed that India required scientific and technological modernization in order to achieve self-realization and escape the social stagnation of generations. Later, this belief in national masculinization through science would assume a spiritual aspect: modernization would represent the rediscovery of India’s soul in all its fullness.

As a student Narendra Dutta expressed some interest in Keshub Chunder Sen’s Brahmo Samaj, but in 1881 he fell under the powerful influence of the Swami Ramakrishna Paramahamsa of the Kali temple, Calcutta, whose successor he became after the latter’s death in 1886. In 1890 he set out on a journey across India, in order to come to know his country, and it was while engaged in this quest that the name Vivekananda was bestowed upon him.

International acclaim followed his dynamic lecture on Hinduism at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. His theme, the Unity of the Divine, chimed in with and stimulated the growing interest in the West in what was now increasingly termed world religion. His many talks, speeches, and seminars given in England and America on his 1895-6 tour were significant to many in pointing a way beyond the social and cultural borderlines which colonial times had embedded.

In 1897 Vivekananda founded the Ramakrishna Mission at Belur. In 1893 he had met the industrialist Sir Jamshetji Tata, who now tried to persuade him to head the Research Institute of Science he had founded, but Vivekananda declined on religious grounds and because his tireless travel had taken a toll on his health (he suffered from diabetes and asthma). He had long predicted, accurately as it turned out, that he would die before the age of forty. His followers believed he achieved mahasamadi, conscious departure from the body at the time of death.
 

Ayub Ali made his way to London via the US, having jumped ship there in 1919. He set up the Shah Jolal Restaurant at 76 Commercial Street, in the heart of the East End. The café served as a hub for the Indian community there. In their interviews recorded in Caroline Adams’ book, the early Sylhet migrants to Britain describe Ali in glowing terms. According to them, he took care of lascars who had jumped ship and were in breach of their contract and therefore wanted by the ship companies. He gave them free food and shelter and helped them register at India House and the local police station. When they got jobs, many would go on to rent rooms in his house in Sandys Row, known locally as ‘Number Thirteen’, where they would continue to receive support from Ali in the form of letter reading and writing, and help with remittances to India. He was known by them as ‘Master’.

Ali formalized his social welfare work among lascars when he founded the Indian Seamen’s Welfare League with Shah Abdul Majid Qureshi in 1943. The organization had its office in Christian Street and its stated aim was ‘to look after the economic, social and cultural interests of Indian seamen, to provide them with recreation in Great Britain and to communicate with their relatives in India in the event of any misfortunes befalling them’ (L/PJ/12/630, p. 140). Ali was also involved with the East End branch of the India League (serving as treasurer at one point) whose meetings were frequently held in his café, and is recorded as present at the 1943 protest meeting of the Jamiat-ul-Muslimin at their dismissal from the East London Mosque by its trustees. He was also president of the UK Muslim League, reportedly mixing with Liaquat Ali Khan and Jinnah. He went on to start up a travel agency business, Orient Travels, at 13 Sandys Row, which later moved to 96 Brick Lane.

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.

Although best known for his behind-the-scenes leadership of the Swadeshi protests against the partition of Bengal (1905-8), the anti-colonialist and Hindu revivalist Ghose was a pioneering Indian poet in English in the 1890s.  After his return to India, he published a collection of lyric poems, Songs to Myrtilla (1895), written while in England, and narrative poems based on Indian legends, Urvasie (1896) and Love and Death (1899).  At the same time he embarked on a sustained critique of the reformist Indian National Congress (INC), carried out in journal articles.

The son of a medical doctor, Ghose was brought to England in 1879 and left by his parents, with his two brothers, to study. He was educated privately at St Paul’s School, and then at King’s College, Cambridge, as a classics scholar. His brother was Manmohan Ghose, an 1890s poet associated with the Rhymers' Club (known for its aestheticism), and friend to English critic Laurence Binyon. Ghose passed the Indian Civil Service examination with Distinction but was unable to take up a position as he failed to appear for the riding test. He returned to India in 1892 whereupon he took up a post at Baroda College.

Back in India, Ghose became involved in Indian politics with his brothers. From around 1902 he had contacts with 'revolutionaries' in Bengal and was involved in a number of bomb plots against the British. Ghose was also a friend to Sister Nivedita (Margaret Noble), though this contact was forged in India in the early 1900s. He became editor of Bande Mataram in 1906. In 1910, Ghose left Calcutta for Pondicherry, to flee from prosecution, and became devoted to the practice of yoga. He became a spiritual leader and built up a popular ashram in Pondicherry, retiring from public view around 1926.