Julius Silverman was a Labour politician and MP. He had a long-standing association with Indian organizations in Britain. He was chairman for the Birmingham branch of Krishna Menon's India League and also attended meetings of the Committee of Indian Congressmen. As a Birmingham councillor, Silverman took up the causes of the South Asian community in his ward and lobbied on their behalf. He was good friends with Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Nehru. Julius Silverman became President of the India League in 1947 and its Chairman in 1974.

Solomon Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike, the fourth prime minister of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), spent six years in England. He studied between 1919 and 1925 at Christ Church College, Oxford. During his time there, he lived with a working class family as a shortage of rooms in the College had forced Christ Church to find lodgings elsewhere. Bandaranaike was struck by the hierarchical structure and social conventions that excluded him from the student fraternity.

During his first year at Oxford, his father moved to London for a year together with his sister who was presented as a debutante at Buckingham Palace in 1920. Bandaranaike tried hard to fit in and found it difficult to deal with his fellow students’ rejection, especially considering his own family’s preoccupation with status and power. In 1920 he was allotted a room in Christ Church College, sharing a corridor with Anthony Eden. After passing his classics exams with a second class degree, he switched to law.

In his third year at Oxford he became actively involved in the Oxford Union, delivering speeches on democracy, policies on India, and the British government’s policies in Egypt. He established himself as a regular speaker at the Union and his performance was praised in the Oxford Magazine for its ‘vigorous thinking and his animated, insistent delivery’ (4 May 1922) . In June 1923, he became Secretary of the Oxford Union and in March 1924 was elected Junior Treasurer. His exposure to Indian Nationalism at Oxford had a profound impact on his world view. It led him to conclude that his father’s political support for the British and the feudal system in Ceylon were anachronistic.

Bandaranaike returned to Ceylon in 1925 and became actively involved in the island’s politics and independence movement. He was elected to the Colombo Municipal Council in 1926 and joined the United National Party. He was a member of the State Legislature from 1931 onwards. He became Ceylon’s fourth prime minister in 1956 and was assassinated in 1959.

Asha Bhattacharya ran education classes with Mrs J. Handoo and Indian students for the India League's East End Branch. These took place at Ayub Ali's cafe, the Shah Jolal Restaurant.

Mrs J. Handoo, wife of Dr H. K. Handoo, was an active member of the India League. Together with Asha Bhattacharya she ran education classes under the auspices of the India League's East End branch at the Shah Jolal Restaurant. She was a member of the India League's Central Committee and its women's committee. She was instrumental in fundraising for the India League, and organized a scheme of annual subscription from affluent Indians living in Britain.

Choudhary Rahmat Ali was born in  Balachaur, Punjab, India. After taking his anglo-vernacular middle school certificate from the Municipal Board Middle School of Rahon in 1910, he moved to the Saindas Anglo-Sanskrit High School, Jullundher, where he passed his finals in 1912. In 1918, he received his BA degree from Islamia College, Lahore. He moved to England in November 1930.

On 18 November he joined one of the Inns of Court, Middle Temple, but due to complications he was not called to the Bar until 26 January 1943. On 26 January 1931, he was admitted to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he passed the Law Tripos examination in June 1932, received his BB degree on 29 April 1933 and his MA degree on 18 October 1940.

Although Rahmat Ali had already voiced his idea for an independent Muslim state on the subcontinent before he moved to Britain, it was here that he would publish his pamphlet Now or Never: Are We to Live or Perish for Ever? (1933). In this pamphlet, issued on 28 January 1933, he made an appeal 'on behalf of the thirty million Muslims of PAKSTAN, who live in the five Northern Units of India - Punjab, N. W. F. P. (Afghan Province), Kashmir, Sindh and Baluchistan, embodying their inexorable demand for the recognition of their separate national status, as distinct from the rest of India, by the grant of a separate Federal Constitution on social, religious, political and historical grounds'. According to one source, Rahmat Ali had already coined the word in late 1932, while travelling on top of a bus (route 11) in London (see Aziz, Rahmat Ali, p. 89).

Rahmat Ali was dissatisfied with the outcome of the Round Table Conferences (1930-32) and felt that the nation was being sacrificed. His declaration was co-signed by Khan Muhammad Aslam Khan Khattak, Sahibzada Sheikh Muhammad Sadiq and Khan Inayat Ullah Khan in order to make it more representative. Given that he was just a student, his declaration was dismissed by politicians on all sides, Muslim, Hindu and British. In order to gain more political weight, he founded the Pakistan National Movement in 1933. The Movement fought against 'Indianism', and from his Cambridge address Rahmat Ali published a series of pamphlets over the next years.

In 1942, he published the pamphlet 'The Millat and the Mission: Seve Commandments of Destiny for the "Seventh" Continent of Dinia', in which he called for two further independent Muslim states, Bangistan (an abbreviation of Bang-i-Islamistan) and Osmanistan. This grandiose scheme represented Rahmat Ali's utmost dedication to the creation of a new Muslim Asia with seven Muslim strongholds surrounded by Hindu regions.

Rahmat Ali's declaration was too radical for the Jinnah-led All-India Muslim League, which had seized upon the possibility of an independent Muslim state and garnered public support in the 1940s. When Jinnah and the Muslim League accepted the British plan in June of 1947, Rahmat Ali was furious. The concessions made by the League prompted Rahmat Ali to publish a leaflet entitled 'The Greatest Betrayal: How to Redeem the Millat?' (1947) and later that year the book Pakistan: The Fatherland of the Pak Nation.

In the summer of 1948 he made a trip to his home town, which was now part of India, and returned to England in October 1948. Upon return to Cambridge his health started to deteriorate. He fell ill in late January 1951 and was admitted to the Evelyn Nursing Home where he died on 3 February 1951.

Chuni Lal Katial was a doctor and politician. He moved to England in 1927 after graduating with a medical degree from Lahore University and working for five years with the Indian Medical Service in Iraq. He resigned his position to continue his training in public health. He studied in Liverpool and gained a diploma in tropical medicine. He later became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine. On moving to London Katial established his own practice, first in Canning Town and later in Finsbury, attending mainly to working-class patients. He was a member of the Indian Social Club and the Indian Medical Association, and was involved with the Hindu Association of Europe.

He became heavily involved with the India League and was a supporter of Krishna Menon. During the second Round Table Conference in Autumn 1931, he put himself at the disposal of Gandhi, arranging meetings and effectively becoming his chauffeur. The meeting between Charlie Chaplin and Gandhi took place at his house.

He won a seat for Labour on Finsbury Borough Council in 1934 and served as Deputy Mayor from 1936 to 1938. He became the first South Asian mayor in 1938, a position he held until 1939. In 1946, he was elected to the London County Council to represent the borough. His work as Chairman of Finsbury’s public health committee had the most wide-reaching impact, with Katial being a driving force for the creation of a health centre for the borough, which opened in 1938. It concentrated under one roof a number of services and health provisions for the borough’s population, such as doctors’ surgeries, a TB clinic, a dentist and a women’s clinic. It was a trailblazer for similar provisions which formed an integral part of the National Heath Service, created in 1948.

During the Second World War, Katial worked as a civil defence medical officer and chaired the air raid precautions medical service and food control committee. He also provided training in first aid for the St John’s Ambulance Brigade. For his services to the borough he was made a freeman of Finsbury in 1948. The same year he returned to India and worked as Director-General of the Employees’ State Insurance Corporation of India until 1953. He returned to London in the 1970s and died in Putney in 1978.

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.