Broadly speaking, you would very probably have faced persistent, casual racism, often of the sort the perpetrators would not have considered racist at all; a system that, while not explicitly set up to discriminate against Indians, nonetheless frequently disadvantaged them; a sort of ghettoisation which meant you were much more likely to associate with other Indian students than with Brits; and a largely unspoken insistence, on the part of British students, that, no matter how talented, well-educated and socially prominent you were, your treatment would always to a great extent reflect your origins and the colour of your skin.

Indian students were not uncommon at British universities before 1947, though they were concentrated in only a couple of institutions and their numbers fluctuated significantly over time. Candidates sitting the Indian Civil Service exams - the main conduit to professional and social success at home available to Indians in this period - were required, after 1876, to spend one or two years studying at either London, Oxford or Cambridge universities. Broadly, however, you were more likely to attend either Cambridge or Edinburgh than any other university - the former because its entrance exams were less dramatically biased against students from India, and the latter for its medical school, which was regarded as accessible and comparatively inexpensive when compared to London. Thus there were usually almost twice as many Indians studying at Cambridge as at Oxford, but there were also significant, but smaller, groups at Glasgow and the Manchester Institute of Technology. The relative proportions of Indian at Oxbridge were noted, one writer proclaiming that while "Oxford is still a white university, Cambridge is rapidly becoming the property of the blackman."

So the first point to make about these students was that they were never permitted to blend into the general run of undergraduates. Thus a Cambridge student magazine published in the 1870s noted the presence of two "Hindoo" gentlemen at Christ's College; an Oxford equivalent spoke of the "Oriental swarthiness" of a Balliol undergraduate, Rumsetjee Dumsetjee, and laughingly discussed his dislike of the "uncongenial" British climate. A series of lectures delivered at Christ's, intended for students preparing to sit the Indian Civil Service exams, was described as populated exclusively by "primitive" students, and so on. Probably at least in part as a result of this, Indians tended to congregate together, most obviously in the Majlis Societies established at both Oxford and Cambridge.

It is certainly true that the majority of Indian undergraduates did not shine academically, and that they were poorly prepared for the intellectual rigours of British university life; Sir Thomas Fraser, the professor of clinical medicine at Edinburgh, wrote than only a minority of Indian students remained at the university for more than a year. But then many of the tests they faced discriminated against their background, however inadvertently. Thus a change in regulations introduced for candidates for the ICS exams during the 1870s reduced the maximum age from 21 to 19, meaning that students who had barely left school in India were forced to compete against British candidates in Britain, sitting exams that had to be written in English. Unsurprisingly, only one in 10 Indian candidates succeeded in obtaining an ICS job in the next decade. And the main reason relatively few students went up to Oxford was that - until 1906 - all Oxford applicants had to sit Responsions, exams that included compulsory papers on Greek and Latin, languages that were barely taught in India. Oxford also imposed a quota system on Indian students, limiting the numbers who could attend any one college. Cambridge did not do this, with the result that Christ's became the "Indian" college in much the same way that Jesus, Oxford, was for centuries the "Welsh" college. Sometimes discrimination was more explicit. Six Indian students at Edinburgh who were barred from membership of the university hockey club promptly joined the city club (and helped it to defeat the university team). Students at London University were barred from 14 of the 15 private lodging-houses normally occupied by students in Bedford Place. And the secretary of London's Indian Student Hostel spoke of

Instances when rooms, booked in advance for well-known and distinguished Indians, became mysteriously unavailable on a "flimsy excuse" when the visitor came to install himself at the hotel.

There were examples of Indian students achieving success at British universities, but they are so self-evidently unusual as to be instructive. The renowned test batsman K.S. Ranjitsinhji represented Cambridge at cricket against Oxford in 1893, and found his sporting success significantly improved his acceptance by other students at his college, Trinity; but that it took the winning of a Blue to cement acceptance of a student who spoke faultless English, and was a prince to boot, speaks volumes in itself, of course. Another Indian was elected President of the Oxford Union (debating society) in the 1930s. And of course there was the rather special case of Ramanujan, a mathematician of genius who was "talent-spotted" by the Cambridge professor GH Hardy and brought to Britain to do graduate work in 1914-19; he became the first Indian to be elected a fellow of Trinity and the second to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. But Ramanujan benefitted substantially from Hardy's patronage and does not seem to have mingled much with ordinary students.