Krishnarao Shelvankar grew up in Madras, and was educated at the Theosophical School in Adyar which was founded by Annie Besant and Jiddu Krishnamurti. He was awarded a postgraduate fellowship at the University of Wisconsin in the 1920s, where he studied for an MA and a PhD. Krishnarao Shelvankar arrived in England in 1929 to study political philosophy at the London School of Economics with Harold Laski, who together with Krishna Menon had a lasting influence on his thinking. He gained notoriety with the publication of Ends are Means, a response to Aldous Huxley's Ends or Means? (1937). Krishna Menon encouraged him to write The Problem with India, a book deemed so incendiary that it was subsequently banned in India. Both books influenced many political thinkers on the Left at the time.

Shelvankar was co-editor of the the quarterly journal Indian Writing in the 1940s. He wrote for The Hindu newspaper in London from 1942-68. For two years, he worked for Nehru as his press advisor. In 1942, he was asked to work for the BBC Indian Section of the Eastern Service by George Orwell. Shevankar formed part of a wider network of South Asians working at the BBC, such as Cedric Dover, Mulk Raj Anand, and Narayana Menon. In November 1944 he became an advisor to the Federation of Indian Student Societies in Great Britain and Ireland. He spoke at the organization's weekend school, which was held at Caxton Hall in January 1945.

He later moved to Moscow, Hanoi and Oslo as ambassador to India with his Scottish wife Mary, who was also active in the independence movement. He retired in 1978 and moved back to London.

Attia Hosain was born into a wealthy landowning family in northern India. Her father was educated at Cambridge University, and her mother was the founder of an institute for women's education and welfare. Hosain attended the Isabella Thoburn College at the University of Lucknow, becoming the first woman from a landowning family to graduate in 1933. She also undertook private tuition in Urdu and Persian at home, where she was brought up according to the Muslim tradition. Influenced by the left-wing, nationalist politics of her Cambridge-educated brother and his friends, Hosain became involved with the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association, a group of socialist writers which included Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand and Sajjad Zaheer. Encouraged by the poet and political activist Sarojini Naidu, she attended the 1933 All-India Women’s Conference in Calcutta, reporting on it for Lucknow and Calcutta newspapers. In this period, she also began to write short stories.

In 1947, determined to avoid going to the newly created Pakistan, Hosain left India for Britain with her husband, Ali Bahadur Habibullah, who undertook war repatriation work. The couple had two children, and Hosain chose to remain in Britain. She continued to write and began work as a broadcaster, presenting a woman's programme for the Indian Section of the Eastern Service of the BBC from 1949. During her time at the BBC, she broadcast on a wide range of topics, from art to music to religion to cinema. As well as reading scripts, she participated in discussion programmes and acted as a roving reporter for the Weekend Review. In 1953 she published her first work of fiction, a collection of short stories titled Phoenix Fled. This was followed in 1961 by her only novel, Sunlight on a Broken Column.

Dover was born in Calcutta to Eurasian parents in 1904. Dover's mixed-race ancestry (English father, Indian mother) and his studies in biology fostered in him a strong concern with ethnic minorities and their exclusion and oppression, as well as their cultural achievements. He studied at St Joseph's College, Calcutta, and Medical College, Calcutta, before joining the Zoological Survey of India as a temporary assistant in charge of entomology, also helping with an anthropometric study of the Eurasian community of Calcutta, writing several scientific articles and editing the Eurasian magazine New Outlook. In 1929 he met Jawaharlal Nehru. After a brief time studying at the University of Edinburgh (zoology and botany) and at the Natural History Museum in London (systematic entomology), he took up various zoological posts in Malaya and India where he also applied his scientific expertise to social welfare problems. 

Dover settled in London in 1934 in order to further pursue anthropological studies on issues of race. Julian Huxley supplied Dover with an early proof copy of We Europeans. This book marked the turning point for Dover's thinking on issues of race and drove him to write Half-Caste. He travelled widely in Europe, lecturing on race and using his scientific knowledge to help dispel the eugenicist myths surrounding race and in particular mixed-race lineage. In Britain Dover also wrote several papers and books about race including Half-Caste and Hell in the Sunshine. He was a firm believer in Indian independence, describing himself as the first Eurasian to ally himself with the struggle for Indian independence. Through these nationalist sympathies he became loosely linked with Krishna Menon and the India League. 

In the 1940s he was a regular contributor to the BBC Indian Section of the Eastern Service alongside many other Britain-based South Asians such as Mulk Raj Anand, M. J. Tambimuttu and Venu Chitale. He also befriended George Orwell. During the Second World War, he worked in Civil Defence and served with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. He also found work as a lecturer for the Ministry of Information and edited Three, the journal of No. Three Army Formation College. Furthermore, Dover developed a mosquito repellent, known as 'Dover's Cream', which was widely used by soldiers serving in South and South East Asia. 

In 1947, after the war, Dover moved to the United States where he held a range of visiting academic posts in the field of anthropology and 'inter-group relations', focusing his concern on American minority communities.  His interests extended into the field of visual art, including 'Negro' arts. He was a member of the Faculty of Fisk University, as Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology. He also briefly lectured at the New School of Social Research, New York, and Howard University. During this period, Dover renewed his interest in African American culture. In the 1950s, after the Second World War and his career in the USA, he returned to London. He continued to lecture and contribute to publications on minority issues and culture until his death.