Frank Hugh O’Donnell was an Irish politician and journalist, known as a fierce opponent of British imperialism and the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. He was born Francis Hugh MacDonald at a barracks in Devon to a sergeant in the British Army. He was educated in Galway at a Jesuit high school and then at Queen’s College, where he rapidly earned a reputation as an orator and controversialist.

In 1874 he was elected Member of Parliament for Galway but, in a judgment probably influenced by political bias, was convicted of electoral malpractice and removed from office. Undeterred, he returned to the Commons three years later as Member for Dungarvan, Co. Waterford, and held that seat until its abolition in 1885. A provocative and popular figure within the Home Rule League, he served the party with champion filibustering and in 1888 he launched the historic libel action against The Times which led to C. S. Parnell’s exoneration from conspiracy in the Phoenix Park Murders.

In Parliament he often spoke on British imperialism in India in analogy with Irish matters. He received a schooling in Indian nationalism from his friend G. M. Tagore, with whom he, J.C. Meenakshya and four other Irish MPs joined in 1875 to form the Constitutional Society of India. Further information was gleaned from his brother Charles J. O’Donnell, an civil servant in Bihar who earned the nickname ‘the enfant terrible of the ICS’ for his public criticism and exposure of government policy. In 1882 he told Parliament that the Irish Party were ‘the natural representatives and spokesmen for the unrepresented nationalities of the empire’ and in 1883 he threw his weight behind a premature campaign to have Dadabhai Naoroji elected to Parliament. In 1905 he sent a message of support to Shyamji Krishnavarma upon his inauguration of India House.

Defeated by Parnell in his bid for the party leadership, O'Donnell abandoned parliamentary politics and, after joining the Irish Republican Brotherhood (Fenians), pursued a chequered career of furious pamphleteering. During the Boer War he secured funds from the Transvaal Government to militate against Irish enlistment, but he was later accused of pocketing the money and condemned by the United Irishman. He spent much of his later career campaigning for secular and mixed education in a series of determined sallies against the political might of the Catholic clergy. He died unmarried at London, and is buried at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.

Maud Gonne was an Irish nationalist who made various links with the Indian independence movement. She had an extremely close relationship with W. B. Yeats throughout her life, was the mother of Iseult Gonne and knew Rabindranath Tagore, but also had a separate public political life. Although she was born in England to English parents, Gonne became a vocal and passionate Irish nationalist. Her father, a Cavalry Major, had been posted to Ireland and Maud Gonne lived there for a number of years in her childhood. When her father was posted to India in 1879, the children moved to the South of France.

Gonne moved between socialist and right-wing sympathies, but was always commited to Irish nationalism. As the Irish and Indian independence movements began to find many areas of common ground, Maud Gonne developed links with Indian nationalists. She became friends with the India House organization, and was featured in Krishnavarma's Indian Sociologist. When Savarkar was imprisoned at Brixton in 1910, Gonne helped David Garnett and Irish radicals co-ordinate a failed attempt to help Savarkar escape. Gonne liaised with other Indian nationalists such as Vithalbhai Patel, and in 1932 put together the Indian-Irish Independence League (IIIL) with Indulal Yajnik. Her son, Seán MacBride held various posts in the IRA and became Chief of Staff in 1936, although he left the Association soon after. Gonne shared a house with her son and his family in Dublin, where she died in 1953.

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).