The Listener was a weekly magazine, established in 1929 under the chairmanship of Lord Reith. It was designed to complement the BBC’s educational output and covered a wide range of topics. It drew extensively from the BBC’s broadcasting output, often reprinting talks programmes or supplementing them with further illustrations and information. The magazine was a controversial move by the BBC. Other magazine proprietors criticised the corporation for encroaching on territory beyond its remit. As a compromise, the magazine was only allowed to commission ten per cent original content and could only feature a limited amount of advertisements.

The magazine built its reputation on its intellectual and artistic output with its focus on broadcasting matters, the arts, intellectual life and politics. By 1948 it attracted a readership of 153,000. It featured contributions from a wide range of artists scientists and intellectuals, such as E. M. Forster, George Orwell, Laurence Binyon, Herbert Read, William Rothenstein and Mulk Raj Anand. In the 1940s it published many items originally broadcast to India by the BBC's Indian Section of the Eastern Service. It featured reviews of Indian authors and also provided comprehensive survey pieces on Indian art, history, and religion.

The magazine covered extensively the constitutional crises from the Round Table Conference to Indian independence with a view of providing a balanced overview of the issues. Politicians and activists from all sides were given a voice, either as part of round table discussions or articles. During the Second World War, the magazine became a useful propaganda tool, reporting extensively on the Indian contribution to the war effort.

After heavy losses the BBC decided to close down the publication in January 1991.

This organization, founded by the wealthy Indian Kundan Lal Jalie in 1937, aimed to cater to the needs of Indians in east London, especially former lascars, by offering them low-cost lodging, as well as food and clothing, and helping them to secure employment. Further, Indian doctors volunteered at the centre, providing free medical advice to their working-class compatriots, and English classes were offered, both to workers and to children. The HCH was also a social centre, providing a gramophone and records to enable East End South Asians to listen to Indian music, as well as facilities for games and sport. The HCH was made possible by donations from wealthy Britons, including, reportedly, Edith Ramsay, as well as a Cambridge undergraduate named Thomas Tufton who donated £22,000 after hearing Jalie lecture on the plight of Indians in Britain. The centre was razed in the blitz, and its residents taken first to Tilbury and then to Coventry to find work.

Although ostensibly a social organization, the HCH also had political links. A government surveillance report from 1939 remarks on the Communist and anti-British propaganda being carried out among Indian seamen and pedlars at the organization, and suggests that Jalie encouraged this. Surveillance reports on Jalie also remark on his links with the India League and the Indian Seamen’s Welfare League. 

The Oriental Press Service was established in 1926 by Pulin Behari Seal, a journalist and radical political activist. He was assisted in this venture by M. G. Desai and Gurdit Singh Dara, both of whom had, like Seal, Communist connections. In 1928, there were plans to amalgamate the Service with a similar news service run by Vishnu R. Karandikar, but this did not appear to have come to fruition. The Service’s stated purpose was to supply Indian news to the British, and British news to Indians. However, surveillance reports claim that Seal set up the business mainly for political ends, securing interviews with Indians on official business in London then proceeding to critique them in radical newspapers in both Britain and India. According to reports, the office on the premises of the Oriental Press Service was used mainly for the meetings of Indian ‘extremists’. It was not a lucrative business and was eventually liquidated in 1938.

Like the Hindustan Community House, the main purpose of the Hindustani Social Club was to do social and educational work among seamen and pedlars in the East End. A key figure in the HSC was Surat Alley, a political activist whose main concern and area of activism was the working conditions of Indian seamen. The Club also served as a social centre for Indians in the East End. In 1939, Alley organized a charity performance by the Indian dancer Ram Gopal and his troupe for the entertainment of the Club’s members (L/PJ/12/630, p. 60).

The Club also functioned as a political meeting place and as a forum where Indian activists could educate and mobilize working-class Indians against British colonial rule. Alley issued to its members news bulletins in Urdu and Bengali on the British Government’s oppression of Indian workers and peasants, and in 1942 the Club hosted an ‘Indian Independence Day’ meeting, attended by Mulk Raj Anand as well as numerous well-known activists (L/PJ/12/454, pp. 13-16). Further, with Surat Alley as its Honorary Secretary, it inevitably had links with the Colonial Seamen’s Association as well as with other organizations for lascars, and, according to a government surveillance report, in 1939 it served as a meeting place for striking lascars (L/PJ/12/630, p. 25). In the eyes of the Government, Surat Alley’s association with the Club made it particularly suspect; in 1940, its premises (also Alley’s home at the time) were searched because of Alley’s links with Udham Singh (ibid., p. 81). 

The Indian Section of the Eastern Service began broadcasting in May 1940. Initially it was on the air for ten minutes daily, broadcasting news in Hindustani, but the service expanded rapidly. Programmes in English, Bengali, Marathi, Sinhalese and Tamil were quickly added and its broadcasting time increased. The Service's brief was to provide a window into Britain and to present the western world through eastern eyes by employing Indian broadcasters living in Britain, such as Narayana Menon, M. J. Tambimuttu, I. B. Sarin, Venu Chitale and Indira Devi of Kapurthala. In the early 1940s the programmes were organized by George Orwell and Z. A. Bokhari. The Indian Section of the BBC Eastern Service broadcast news (in English, Bengali, Marathi and Gujarati), current affairs programmes, reviews, round-table discussions, poetry readings, plays and music. These were aimed at India’s opinion-forming intelligentsia and students in the hope of maintaining the conditional allegiance of the nationalists in the fraught context of the Quit India Movement of the early 1940s. The Indian Section also broadcast regular messages from Indians resident in the UK and Indian soldiers stationed in England. Morale-boosting programmes for the Indian troops stationed in the Middle and Far East, fighting for Britain in the Second World War, were also a regular part of the Section's output. The Service also became an important tool in countering the Axis propaganda offensive launched by Subhas Chandra Bose’s Radio Azad Hind (Free India), broadcasting from Berlin. Among the many series of programmes were 'Through Eastern Eyes' and 'Open Letters', which featured regular broadcasts from Mulk Raj Anand, Cedric Dover and G. V. Desani, as well as T. S. Eliot, George Orwell and E. M. Forster. The BBC proved to be a dynamic contact zone for South Asian and British journalists, writers and intellectuals and the broadcasts showed the wide range of topics with which they engaged. The Service was later integrated into the BBC World Service.