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.

Ayana Angadi came to Britain in 1924. His original intention was to prepare for the ICS examination but instead he became involved in political activism, writing, and lecturing about imperialism and India. As well as contributing to a range of journals in Britain, he wrote several political pamphlets under the pseudonym Raj Hansa. A committed Trotskyist, he joined the Labour Party and worked as a lecturer for the Central Advisory Council for Adult Education in HM Forces and then for the Imperial Institute, travelling to schools and colleges around the country to speak about Indian matters. He also travelled to Scandinavia to lecture and was there suspected of being a Cominform agent (L/PJ/12/518, p. 48).

Arguably, Angadi's most significant achievement while in Britain was the establishment with his wife Patricia Fell-Clarke of the Asian Music Circle in 1946. This organization introduced Indian music, dance and yoga to the British public, paving the way for musicians such as Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan.

Jawaharlal Nehru was president of the Indian National Congress (INC) 1929-30, 1936-7 and 1946; independent India’s first Prime Minister, and the author of some of its most definitive, form giving national texts (An Autobiography (1936); The Discovery of India (1946)). Nehru’s father Motilal sent him to England for his further education. Here he spent seven largely undistinguished, if privileged years, as described in the Autobiography: 1905-7 at Harrow, the public school; 1907-10 at Trinity College, Cambridge (Natural sciences tripos, 2^nd class), and then ‘hovering about’ London studying for his Bar examinations (p. 25). He was called to the Bar in 1912 and returned to India where he eventually embarked on a successful political career through Congress.

Nehru traces the reverse path to M. K. Gandhi, who came into contact with Theosophy in Britain.  Nehru was a young Theosophist, due to the influence of his teacher F.T. Brooks (and was inducted by Annie Besant), but in England abandoned this in favour of a Pater-esque aestheticism, and then the binding involvement of nationalist politics. At Harrow he met the son of the Gaekwad of Baroda and Paramjit Singh. Nehru read the sexologists of the time, including Havelock Ellis and Kraft-Ebbing. At Harrow he met Edwin Montagu, and heard the guest speakers, B.C. Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai and Gokhale during his student days.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Nehru’s time in Britain is the extent to which his experiences as a student, an Indian student in particular, empowered him even if silently as a political thinker, and how his clubbing together with other Indian students fostered and sharpened his sense of India (although he was not particularly active in the Cambridge Majlis). Nehru returned to Britain a number of times after his student days, whether for political negotiations with the Government or to escort his daughter, Indira, for her education in the 1930s.

Aubrey Menen was a writer, essayist, broadcaster, journalist, drama critic and activist. His work explored the question of nationalism and the cultural contrast between his own Irish-Indian ancestry and his traditional British upbringing. He was born to an Irish mother and an Indian father in 1912 and was brought up in Islington, later moving to Forest Hill, south London. He studied philosophy at University College London (UCL), where he formed his own drama group, and befriended the artist Duncan Grant who introduced him to many members of the Bloomsbury Group, including John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf. He persuaded H. G. Wells to allow him to adapt The Shape of Things to Come, even though Wells had already sold the rights to Alexander Korda. Korda agreed to three closed performances, which caused a sensation. At UCL he was rejected for the Rosa Morrison Bursary by the then Jewish Master of the college on the grounds that he was not of 'pure' English descent.

After graduating in 1932, Menen became the drama critic for The Bookman from 1933 to 1934. He also became involved with Krishna Menon's India League and toured the regions as a speaker. So that he would not be confused with Menon, a friend of his father's, he anglicized his name to Menen. In 1934, Menen, together with the actor Andre van Gysegham, founded the Experimental Theatre, which sought to create a politically engaging theatre in alternative performance spaces. His radical plays regularly ran into difficulties with the Lord Chamberlain and he was sued for blasphemy and obscenity for his 1934 play Genesis II. From 1937 to 1939 he worked as director of the Personalities Press Service. In April 1939 he moved to Bombay, finding work at All-India Radio. During the Second World War, he worked as a script writer and editor for propaganda broadcasts for the Government of India. He also broadcast regularly on the radio and became a leading radio personality in India. He subsequently worked for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson's film department. In the late 1940s, after the war, he became a full-time writer. He briefly returned to Britain in the autumn 1947 to oversee the publication of The Prevalence of Witches. In 1948 he moved to Italy, to live in what he described as a space midway between India and England. He lived there until 1980. He spent his final years living in Kerala, where he died in 1989.

Menen's output was prolific and covered a variety of genres. Starting his career as a dramatist and critic, he moved to radio journalism. He authored nine novels, several travel books, autobiographical works, essays and reviews. He also published a version of The Ramayana, Rama Retold, which was banned in India but, despite its radical implications, performed in London amidst some controversy. His fiction is driven by a caustic satire and his essays reveal a passionate desire to break down the falsity of racial myths of 'Aryan' superiority, whether in India amongst Nairs or in Nazi Germany; a similar perspective is evident in relation to the hypocrisy of racial stereotyping in Britain. Menen expresses in his non-fiction the advantage of dual vision: born to Indian and Irish parents, brought up as a brown Englishman in Britain, and in India always a foreigner. This liminality takes on sexual dimensions throughout his autobiographical essays which reflect, despite his conversion to Catholicism, a radical homosexuality.

Mulk Raj Anand was a distinguished writer, critic, editor, journalist and political activist. Born into the Kshatriya (warrior) caste in the Punjabi city of Peshawar, he was educated at cantonment schools before completing a degree at the University of Punjab, Amritsar, where his involvement in the 1921 Civil Disobedience campaign against the British resulted in a short period of imprisonment. He was just nineteen years old when he left India for England on a scholarship to mark the silver wedding of George V and Queen Mary. On his arrival he registered at University College London to study for a doctorate in philosophy which he was awarded in 1929.

In England, Anand quickly became involved in left wing politics as well as the Indian independence movement. He was vocal in his support of the coal miners’ strike in 1926 and of the General Strike that followed, and soon afterwards joined a Marxist study circle at the home of the trade unionist Alan Hutt. In the 1930s and 1940s, he spoke regularly at meetings of Krishna Menon’s India League, where he came into contact with a number of British intellectuals and activists including Bertrand Russell, H. N. Brailsford and Michael Foot, and in 1937 he left Britain for three months to join the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Drawing also on his talents as a writer in the struggle for socialism, Anand wrote numerous essays on Marxism, Fascism, the Spanish Civil War, Indian independence and other political movements, events and issues of the day. He turned down the offer of a post at Cambridge University. Instead, he lectured in literature and philosophy at the London County Council Adult Educational Schools and the Workers' Educational Association, from 1939 to 1942. Anand’s belief in an international socialism, evident in the range of his political activities, was matched by his conviction of the inextricability of politics and literature. This is reflected in many of his novels which depict the lives of the poorest members of Indian society. The first of these, Untouchable, was published by the left-leaning British firm Wishart in 1935. It can also be seen in his role in the founding of the Progressive Writers’ Association in London in 1935, along with fellow Indian writers Sajjad Zaheer and Ahmed Ali.

Anand immersed himself in London’s literary scene in the inter-war years, associating and in some cases forming friendships with eminent British writers including George Orwell, T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender and Bonamy Dobree. He was a regular reviewer for a range of national newspapers and magazines, including the New Statesman and Life and Letters Today. He also worked as an editor for Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, and for T. S. Eliot at Criterion. It was at Criterion where Anand met E. M. Forster whose endorsement of his first novel helped to secure the publishing deal with Wishart – and so his establishment as a novelist. Prior to this, he had already seen success as an art and literary critic, publishing his first book, on Persian painting, in 1930. Untouchable was followed by a string of novels which were, on the whole, reviewed favourably, as well as several essay collections on subjects ranging from art to cookery to India’s struggle for freedom. During the Second World War, Anand researched, scripted and broadcast numerous radio programmes for the BBC Eastern Service, working alongside George Orwell and the Caribbean poet Una Marson, in particular. In 1938, he married the Communist and would-be actor Kathleen Van Gelder, with whom he had a daughter, Rajani. The marriage did not last.

Soon after his return to India in 1945, Anand founded the art magazine Marg. He taught at various universities, including the University of the Punjab where he was appointed Tagore Professor of Literature and Fine Art. From 1965 to 1970, he was fine art chairman at Lalit Kala Akademi (National Academy of Arts). He continued to write fiction and criticism, and to support a range of national and international cultural associations such as the World Peace Council, the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association, the National Book Trust, and the UNESCO Dialogues of East and West. He died in Pune on 28 September 2004.