C. E. M. Joad was an English philosopher and popular educator. He was educated at Oxford and, after serving as a civil servant, was appointed Head of Philosophy at Birkbeck College (University of London) in 1930. A prolific writer and conservationist, he shot to fame as a broadcasting star when he joined the BBC radio programme ‘The Brain Trust’ in 1942. He was convicted of fare-dodging and was sacked by the BBC in 1948.

As an undergraduate at Oxford, Joad became an admirer of George Bernard Shaw; he turned to socialism and was a committed pacifist throughout his life. He was a member of the Fabian Society but was expelled in 1925 due to his philandering (he rejoined in 1943). In 1931, he became Director of Propaganda for the New Party, but soon left the party along with John Strachey when its leader Oswald Mosley turned to fascism. In 1932 he founded with H. G. Wells and others the Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals.

Joad looked to eastern philosophy as an antidote to western modernity. He attended a number of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s lectures and wrote on his philosophy (Counter Attack from the East, 1933). He also wrote a book on Indian civilization (1936) assisted by Girija Mookerjee, and was a regular contributor to the Anglo-Indian Theosophist periodical Aryan Path. Joad was an admirer of Gandhi, and contributed to a collection of essays (edited by S. Radhakrishnan) on Gandhi to celebrate his 70th birthday.

Mulk Raj Anand, in Conversations in Bloomsbury, records a long talk he had with Joad about God and philosophy. Anand and Joad both attended Professor Dawes Hicks’s seminar at University College London, and it appears that this is how they got to know each other. Joad also met through Anand his fellow student Nikhil Sen and his girlfriend Edna Thomson.

Una Marson was born and grew up in Jamaica. After her work on the editorial staff of the Jamaica Critic in 1926, she founded her own magazine The Cosmopolitan, which she also edited. Having established herself in Jamaica, Marson moved to London in 1932 to experience life outside Jamaica and to find a wider audience for her literary work. She lodged with Harold Arundel Moody, and became involved with the League of Coloured Peoples. She worked for the League as its unpaid Assistant Secretary, organising student activities, receptions, meetings, trips and concerts. During her stay in England from Marson continued to publish on feminist issues, as she had in Jamaica. She also became increasingly interested in discussions about race, eugenics and the colour-bar, focussing on the most pressing issues faced by black migrants living in Britain.

During her first stay in Britain, Marson organized, staged and compered an evening of entertainment at the Indian Students Hostel. The line-up included the American singer John Payne, the pianist Bruce Wendell and the Guyanese clarinettist Rudolph Dunbar. By 1937 she was editor of the League’s journal and its spokesperson, working closely with Moody. Marson was also a member of the International Alliance of Women for Equal Suffrage and Citizenship and the British Commonwealth League (BCL). At the latter she met Myra Steadman, daughter of the suffragette Myra Sadd Brown. The All India Women’s congress was affiliated with the BCL. During the period she also became involved with the Left Book Club and encountered the writings of Rabindranath Tagore.

After two years in Jamaica, Marson returned to Britain in 1938. In 1939 Marson was offered work by the BBC as a freelancer for the magazine programme 'Picture Page' to arrange interviews with visitors from the Empire. She also drafted three-minute scripts for the programme. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Marson lectured occasionally at the Imperial Institute and worked as a talks and script writer for the BBC. In 1941 she was appointed full-time programme assistant to the BBC Empire Service, where she hosted and coordinated the broadcasts under the title 'Calling the West Indies'.

In November 1942 George Orwell asked her to contribute to the six-part poetry magazine 'Voice', broadcast on the Indian Section of the BBC’s Eastern Service, with Marson taking part in the fourth programme dedicated to American poetry, which also featured William Empson. She read her poem ‘Banjo Boy’. In the December edition of the programme she appeared alongside M. J. Tambimuttu, T. S. Eliot, Mulk Raj Anand, Narayana Menon and William Empson. This led Una to devise a similar programme for the West Indies, titled 'Caribbean Voices', which in later years under the direction of Henry Swanzy would introduce authors such as George Lamming, Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul and Edward Kamau Braithwaite to a wider audience. The programme ran for fifteen years until 1958. She returned to Jamaica in 1945 and died in 1965 from a heart attack.

G. V. Desani was born in Nairobi, Kenya, where his parents were working as wood merchants. The family returned to Karachi in 1914, where Desani was educated. He arrived in Britain at the age of 17, to escape from an arranged marriage. When he arrived in England in 1926, he was befriended by George Lansbury, who helped him acquire a reader's pass to the British Museum Reading Room. During this period he also found work as an actor in films. Furthermore, he worked as a foreign corespondent for a number of Indian newspapers and news agencies, such as the Associated Press, Reuters and The Times of India. He returned to India in 1928, touring Rajasthan, on which he subsequently lectured extensively for the Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway Company.

Desani returned to Britain in the summer of 1939, only weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War.  He continued to work as a writer, journalist, and broadcaster for the Indian Section of the BBC Eastern Service and the Home Division. Desani broadcast both in Hindustani and in English and was praised for his wit, humour and ability as a script-writer. He also acted in radio plays. Furthermore, Desani lectured for the Ministry of Information and the Imperial Institute, regularly touring the regions and speaking to soldiers, schools and university colleges. These lectures featured as one of his Talks Programmes in Hindustani, titled 'My Lecture Tours' (broadcast 8 May 1943). They were widely praised and drew large audiences.

During this period, he wrote his best known work of fiction, the experimental novel All About Mr. Hatterr (later republished and revised as All About H. Hatterr). On publication the book was very well received by critics. For example, T. S. Eliot praised it as a remarkably original book: 'It is amazing that anyone should be able to sustain a piece of work in this style and tempo and at such length'. The critic C. E. M. Joad compared the book to 'Joyce and Miller with a difference: the difference being due to a dash of Munchhausen and the Arabian Nights'.  With its inventive use of language and its endorsement of hybridity, the work is a trailblazer for the fiction of Salman Rushdie, who has acknowledged its influence.

While in England, Desani also published his ‘poetic play’ Hali, as well as short fiction, sketches and essays. Shortly after the publication of Hali, Desani left Britain and returned to India. He was offered a position as cultural ambassador for Jawaharlal Nehru, however he did not take this up. In 1959 he travelled to Burma to study Buddhist and Hindu culture. During the 1950s and 1960 he wrote a regular column, 'Very High, Very Low', as well as articles for The Times of India and Illustrated Weekly of India. In 1967 he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, a position he held until his retirement in 1978. He spent the final years of his life in Dallas.

Dylan Thomas was born in 1914 in Swansea, Wales, to David John Thomas and Florence Hannah. He left school at the age of 16 and went to work for the local evening newspaper while he developed his poetry.

T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender took notice of Thomas when he published some of his poems in the BBC journal The Listener in 1934. While he became known in literary circles in London, he remained a relatively obscure figure to the public. He toured the bars of Fitzrovia where he met Mulk Raj Anand, among others. In a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson, dated 6 August 1937, Thomas wrote:

Last week, a man called Mulk Raj Anand made a big curry for everybody about. The first course was beans, little ones. I ate two and couldn’t speak. A little man called Wallace B. Nichols, who has made small fortune out of writing epic poems on people like Cromwell and Nelson and Mrs Elsie Guddy, took a whole mouthful and was assisted out. He writes for the Cornhill. After the main dish, which was so unbelievably hot that everyone, except the Indian, was crying like Shirley Temple, a woman, Mrs Henderson, looked down onto her plate and saw, lying at one corner of it, a curious rubbery thing that looked like a red, discarded French letter. In interest, she picked it up and found it was the entire skin from her tongue. (Collected Letters, p. 296)

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihair, Bihar to Richard Walmsley Blair, an official in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, and Ida Mabel Limouzin. His mother moved with her children to England and settled in Henley-on-Thames in 1904. Orwell was educated at St Cyprian’s School and Eton where he was briefly taught French by Aldous Huxley.

Instead of opting to study at Cambridge or Oxford, which would have been a logical step for an Eton-educated man, Orwell applied for a colonial job in Burma, where a large number of his mother’s family, including his grandmother, still lived. He joined the Indian Imperial Police Force in 1922. As part of his training he learnt Burmese and Hindustani. Orwell resigned his position after five years and returned to England to become a full-time writer. He drew on his experiences of imperialism for Burmese Days, ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ which unmasks how much he loathed the colonial administrative system of which he had become a part. Victor Gollancz turned down Burmese Days for fear of libel action and it was published in the USA in 1934.

After his return, Orwell started to build his reputation as left-wing writer. He was well-known for his social reportage in books like Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) or Homage to Catalonia (1938), based on his experiences during the Spanish Civil War. Since the early 1930s Orwell reviewed and wrote poems and sketches for the Journal Adelphi.

Orwell’s network of Indian friends expanded when he joined the BBC Indian Section of the Eastern Service  as Talks Assistant in 1941. Orwell was deemed a suitable candidate because of his Anglo-Indian background, his service in Burma, his frank honesty and his proficiency in Burmese and Hindustani. Orwell had already broadcast on the BBC Home Service. After Z. A. Bokhari had produced a number of talks by Orwell for the Eastern Service, he recommended him for a full position with the Indian section, which Orwell took up on 16 August 1941. He attended training courses together with William Empson who had also just started working for the BBC in London. Orwell worked as part of the BBC’s efforts to counter the German propaganda machine and to communicate to India the importance of its support for Britain in the war effort. Orwell was instrumental in arranging a diverse schedule of programmes on arts, culture and politics, such as the literary magazine programme ‘Voice’, which brought together a wide range of South Asian, British and Caribbean writers. It would provide the template for Una Marson’s ‘Caribbean Voices’. Orwell and Mulk Raj Anand became good friends while working at the BBC. Anand would cook Indian meals for Orwell. Both had shared similar experiences while fighting with Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell commissioned Anand to write a talk on the event, however it did not pass the censor. He also befriended the Eurasian writer Cedric Dover, commissioning him to write talks for the Indian section, recommending him to publishers and editors and supporting him for a grant at the Royal Literary Fund.

Orwell became increasingly frustrated with the threat of censorship and questioned the effectiveness of the Service’s broadcasts. He also resented being challenged by Bokhari for his published journalism in newspapers such as the Observer and New Statesman. He resigned his position in September 1943. After leaving the BBC, Orwell began work on his most famous works Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His time at the BBC provided rich material for the latter novel. He continued to publish journalism and became the literary editor of Tribune. Orwell died of Tuberculosis in 1950.

David Gascoyne was an English poet, writer and translator. In 1933, he visited Paris and became acquainted with Surrealist artists such as Max Ernst, Paul Éluard and Salvador Dalí. Gascoyne played a significant role in promoting the Surrealist movement in Britain; he wrote A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935), and organized the London International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 with Herbert Read and Roland Penrose. He also translated some key Surrealist works into English, such as André Breton's What is Surrealism? In 1936, he travelled to Barcelona to help the Propaganda Bureau of the Catalonian Government during the Spanish Civil War. In the 1940s and 1950s, he worked at the BBC, presenting programmes on poetry.

Gascoyne started his career as a poet in his teens, publishing his first collection of poems in 1932 when he was only 16. He gained critical recognition when his Poems, 1937-1942, illustrated by Graham Sutherland, was published in 1943 as a volume of Tambimuttu’s Editions Poetry London. His poems were also collected in Tambimuttu’s Poetry in Wartime (1942), and he was a contributor to Tambimuttu’s literary periodical journal Poetry London.

Gascoyne kept journals in the late 1930s, Paris Journal 1937-1939 (published in 1978) and Journal 1936-37 (published in 1980). These are important documents, not only of Gascoyne’s spiritual journey but also of the intellectual milieu of the period; they record his friendship with Dylan Thomas, Kathleen Raine, Roger Roughton, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, and others.

Edward Morgan Forster was brought up by his mother, Alice Clara (Lily) Whichelo, after his architect father died in 1880. Despite his father’s premature death, he was raised in relative affluence, attending Tonbridge School and later King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied classics and history and began to write fiction. After a period of travelling in Europe, in 1904 he settled with his mother in Weybridge where all of his six novels, including Howards End (1910), were completed. In 1906 he began to tutor the young Syed Ross Masood in Latin in preparation for the latter’s Oxford degree. Forster fell in love with Masood; while his feelings were unreciprocated, the two developed a close friendship, and Forster claimed it was through Masood that he developed a lifelong and passionate interest in India, particularly Muslim India. It was also through Masood that he met several other young Indians studying in Britain in the early twentieth century – many of whom went on to assume important professional including governmental positions in India.

Between October 1912 and April 1913, Forster travelled through India, staying initially with Masood and his family in Aligarh before visiting Delhi, Lahore, the Kyber Pass, Simla, Allahabad, Benares and Bankipore, among other places. This trip bore the seeds of his novel A Passage to India which he began to write on his return to Weybridge. From 1915 to 1919, during the First World War, he was based in Alexandria where he served as a Red Cross searcher and continued to write stories and essays. In 1921, Forster returned to India for a short period to take up the position of Private Secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas. Back in London, he continued work on A Passage to India. By this time, he enjoyed a considerable literary reputation, reviewing for several magazines and associating with members of the Bloomsbury Group and other renowned writers of the day.

It was arguably with the publication of A Passage to India in 1924 that he can be said to have achieved fame, becoming a commentator and broadcaster, as well as a reviewer and essayist, a spokesperson and figurehead for individual freedoms, liberalism and tolerance, and a critic of the inequalities of race and empire. In 1935 he attended the Paris Congress of International Writers for the Defence of Culture, where his talk, titled ‘Liberty in England’, highlighted the partiality of this notion and the failure to apply it to India. Mulk Raj Anand and Sajjad Zaheer were also present at the Congress, and many of the speeches there were said to be seminal to their subsequent foundation of the Progressive Writers’ Association. In 1945, Forster returned to India to attend the All-India PEN Conference in Jaipur where Sarojini Naidu, Nehru and Radhakrishnan all spoke.

Forster developed friendships with numerous Indian writers, often facilitating their entry into the British literary world by recommending writers to publishers, offering advice to them, writing prefaces to their work, or reviewing it favourably. For example, he praised Iqbal’s Secrets of Self, Tagore’s Chitra and Tambimuttu’s Poetry in Wartime in reviews, and wrote introductions to G. V. Desani’s Hali and – most famously – Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchable, which was rejected nineteen times before Wishart accepted the manuscript with Forster’s endorsement. In the 1930s and 1940s, he gave several BBC radio broadcasts, including to Indian audiences in the series ‘We Talk to India: Some Books’. Whether broadcasting to the British or to Indians, he frequently discussed fiction by Indian writers of the time, thereby further legitimizing this work. Forster also agreed to the Indian playwright Santha Rama Rau adapting A Passage to India for the theatre in 1960. He maintained many of these connections through correspondence for much of his life, and several Indian writers marked their appreciation to Forster by contributing to K. Natwar-Singh’s volume of essays in honour of the writer.

On his mother’s death in 1945, Forster moved from their home in Surrey to rooms in King’s College, which granted him an honorary fellowship. He based himself at King’s until his death in 1970, continuing his interest in the Indian subcontinent and his friendship for its people throughout.

Maharajkumari Indira Devi was born on 26 February 1912 to Maharaja Paramjit Singh and Maharani Brinda of Kapurthala. She left India for Britain in 1935 at the age of twenty-three. Only her sisters Princesses Sushila and Ourmilla knew of her intentions. In England she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London with a view to becoming a movie star. While she did not fulfil this ambition, she managed to work briefly with Alexander Korda at London Films, who wanted to launch her as his next big star after Merle Oberon. However the difficulties of the film industry in the late 1930s meant she did not get her big break in the movie business.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, Indira Devi successfully passed the St John Ambulance examination and drove motor ambulances during air raids. She also worked for a while as a postal censor. She joined the BBC in 1942 and became known as the ‘Radio Princess’. She hosted a half-hour radio programme in Hindustani for Indian forces stationed in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. She broadcast the programme 'The Debate continues', a weekly report to India on the proceedings in the House of Commons, where she was the only woman in the Press Gallery. She broadcast many talks series for the Indian Section of the Eastern Service Division. She also broadcast on the Home Service. She was offered a permanent contract with the Overseas Service Division in 1943. She continued to work for the BBC until 1968. Princess Indira died in Ibiza, Spain in September 1979.

Venu Chitale was a talks broadcaster and assistant to George Orwell at the BBC’s Indian Section of the Eastern Service. She arrived in Britain in the mid-1930s. She had come to Britain with her teacher in Poona, Winnie Duplex, to study at University College, London.

She joined the BBC in 1940 when the service expanded to broadcast different Indian languages including Marathi, her mother tongue. From 1941, Chitale assisted George Orwell in his work as a talks programme assistant for the BBC Indian section of the Eastern Service from 1941-43. She broadcast on his series of talks ‘Through Eastern Eyes’ as well as his 1942 magazine programme 'Voice'. She also broadcast as part of the series of talks ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’, which focused on the role of women in the war effort. Like Indira Devi of Kapurthala, she also broadcast on the Home Service, where she served as a newsreader at the height of the war. She contributed to programmes such as ‘Indian Recipes’ and the ‘Kitchen Front’ series, which was produced by Jean Rowntree. Orwell was particularly impressed by Chitale and she was often complimented for her speaking voice. She became a full-time member of staff as the Marathi Programme Assistant in 1942.

While in London, Chitale also became involved with the India League and forged a close relationship with Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister. She returned to India in 1950 and married Prof T. G. Khare. She published several novels and died in 1995.