Born in Istanbul, Atiya Fyzee was the daughter of Hasanally Feyzhyder, an Indian merchant attached to the Ottoman Court, and his first wife, Amirunissa. Belonging to the prominent Tyabji clan of Bombay, Atiya was one of the first elite Indian Muslim women to receive a modern education, appear in public unveiled and participate in women’s organizations. In her youth, she made important contributions to reformist journals for women in Urdu, including Tahzib un-niswan (Lahore) and Khatun (Aligarh).

While studying at a teachers’ training college in London in 1906-7, she also kept a travel diary that was first serialized in a monthly journal then published as Zamana-i-tahsil ('A Time of Education', 1921). Along with her sisters, Zehra (1866-1940) and Nazli Begum of Janjira (1874-1968), she patronized celebrated Muslim intellectuals such as Maulana Shibli Nomani and Mohammad Iqbal. Their published correspondence, Khutut-i Shibli ba-nam-i muhtarma Zahra Begum sahiba Faizi va ‘Atiya Begum sahiba Faizi (ed. Muhammad Amin Zuberi, 1930) and Iqbal (1947), attests to the close friendships that brought Atiya notoriety in literary and social circles.

Following her marriage to the artist and writer Samuel Rahamin, in 1912, Atiya pursued a variety of cultural activities on the international stage. Among their collaborations was an authoritative book in English on classical Indian music that ultimately went into three editions: Indian Music (1914), The Music of India (1925) and Sangt of India (1942). In this work, Atiya’s impressionistic and colourful prose was used to explicate Samuel’s illustrations of Indian melodies (ragmalas). Atiya also arranged music and choreography for two of her husband’s plays, Daughter of Ind and Invented Gods, when they were staged in London in the 1930s. While abroad, she gave lectures on Indian women, like ‘Epic Women of India’ (1919), which were published in international journals.

At partition, Atiya and Samuel migrated to Karachi with Nazli where they continued to bring together artistes in their private salon at their home, Aiwan-e-Rifat, modelled on their famous Bombay residence. After being evicted in the 1950s, they lived in reduced circumstances, suffering great hardship in their final years.

Barbara Castle spent her formative years in Bradford before attending the University of Oxford where she read philosophy, politics and economics. In 1937, after working for her local Labour Party in Hyde and as a columnist for the left-wing paper Tribune, she became a Labour Party councillor for the borough of St Pancras, where she worked alongside Krishna Menon.

Castle was elected as Labour MP for Blackburn in the 1945 General Election, becoming the youngest woman in the Commons and holding her seat for the next thirty-five years. In the 1960s, she held several ministerial offices, including Minister of Overseas Development, Minister of Transport, Secretary of State, and Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity.

A Parsee from a privileged background, Bhicoo Batlivala was the daughter of Sorabji Batlivala who owned a woollen mill in Bombay then became manager of Empress Mills in Nagpur. Through her paternal aunt, she was related to Navroji Saklatvala, Managing Director of Tatas. Her sister Siloo worked for Tatas, and her brother Homi is described as ‘the adopted son of the late Sir Navroji Saklatvala’ (L/PJ/12/631, p. 21). Batlivala moved to Britain as a child and was educated at Cheltenham Ladies College before entering higher education and being called to the Bar. After her education, she returned to India for some years where she worked in the judicial and educational departments in Baroda. It is said she left her post as Inspector of Schools in Baroda because of ‘a scandal involving her moral character’ (ibid.).

In June 1938, Batlivala accompanied Nehru to Europe and then to London as his personal secretary, apparently breaking off her engagement to an Englishman to do so and causing considerable scandal in the process. Subsequently, Nehru was advised to avoid her company for fear that the association would bring his name into disrepute.

Eventually married to an Englishman, Guy Mansell, Batlivala was evidently a very active member of the India League and one of the most visible women in this organization; her attendance and participation is recorded at a number of meetings, both in London and in other cities, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and she played a leading role in campaigning for the release of Nehru from prison. Clearly a highly articulate and charismatic speaker, in one government surveillance report she is described as one of the few Indians beyond Krishna Menon who had any influence on the policy of the India League (L/PJ/12/453, p. 125). In 1939 and 1940, she gave lecture tours ‘of an anti-British nature’ in the US, making a considerable impact on her audiences, with one newspaper report declaring that ‘no other speaker who has appeared at the Washington Athletic Club has carried the enchantment, the fascination, the brilliance and stimulation that 28-year-old Bhicco Batlivala does’ (L/PJ/12/631, p. 21, p. 68).

Evidence suggests Batlivala was also a talented sportswoman, playing on the first woman’s polo team in England and excelling at hunting, flying, tennis, squash and golf (ibid., pp. 68–9).

Dhanvanthi Rama Rau was born into a Kashmiri Brahmin family in the south-west of India. She attended Presidency College in Madras, graduating in 1917 with an honours degree and the Griggs Gold Medal in English, and progressing to an Assistant Professorship at Queen Mary’s College, Madras. She first arrived in England in 1929, when her husband Benegal Rama Rau, Financial Advisor to the Simon Commission, was asked to travel to England with the other members of the Commission for the writing of their report. Their daughters, Premila and Santha, then aged 9 and 6, travelled with them and became the first Indians to attend the Hall School in Weybridge. Initially the family lived at Oatlands Park Hotel in Weybridge, before moving to a flat in London when their daughters started to board at school. In her memoirs, Rama Rau describes the racism she experienced in 1930s England, and their struggles to secure a flat for this reason. The family were, however, in part protected by their social status and wealth which allowed them to travel throughout Europe when based in Britain.

In her memoirs, Rama Rau describes her work for organizations campaigning for Indian independence, which took her throughout Britain, as well as for a variety of women’s organizations. In 1932, with a group of Indian women based in London at the time, including Sarojini Naidu, she attended the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship in Berlin, leading the Indian delegation at the behest of Naidu. She continued to work for the Alliance and writes in her memoirs that the meetings gave her her ‘first experience of dealing with international work for women’s rights’ (p. 180). She also founded the Women’s Indian Association, an organization that aimed to provide links between Indian women in Britain and British women interested in India with Indian women in India. She was awarded the Kaisir-i-Hind gold medal by the British Government for her work with women’s associations.

In 1938, Rama Rau’s husband, by then Deputy High Commissioner for India, was called to South Africa by the High Commission. She followed him there, leaving her daughters in the care of a Jewish lodger, Lilian Ulanowsky. War broke out while all of the family were in South Africa the following year, and it was this that triggered their return to India.

Finally settled in Bombay in 1941, Rama Rau immersed herself again in social welfare activities, joining several women’s organizations, including the All-India Women’s Conference of which she was elected President in 1946. The squalid conditions of the Bombay slums led Rama Rau to establish the Family Planning Association of India of which she became President. She also served as President of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

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.