[1] He was the son of Srihari Kumar Mallik, an East India Railway employee, born at Jamalpur in Bihar on 27 May 1879.
[3] After attending the Meherpur high school, Basanta Kumar Mallik went to the General Assembly's Institution in 1896.
But Chandra Shumsher was able to arrange for his admission to Exeter College, Oxford through Lord Curzon, to read law.
[18] Mallik was involved in the Oxford Majlis, a student group, and had contact with the literary circle around Robert Bridges at Boar's Hill.
[22] A smaller group of followers closely interested in Mallik's thought gathered round him: Thomas Wilfrid "Sam" Harries of Balliol College with Communist inclinations, Sydney Lewis of Exeter College who died shortly after leaving Oxford, the Serbian Alexander Vidaković who went on to be a journalist with Politika.
According to an notice in the Amrita Bazar Patrika, it was founded by the Merton College classicist Robert Levens (1901–1976), as an informal group.
[29] Subsequently, Mallik brought some of his followers, including Sam Harries, to Graves's home in Islip, to talk.
[32] Jean Moorcroft Wilson considers that the five poetry collections published by Graves 1923–1925 show Mallik's influence.
[3] Graves dedicated The Marmosite's Miscellany (1925), a long pseudonymous poetical satire for the Hogarth Press published under the name John Doyle, to Mallik in India.
[16] He found lodgings in Raja Nava Kissen Street, Calcutta, through the Sen family for whom he had worked as a tutor.
He was also engaged once more in Nepal, as adviser, at a time when Juddha Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana was faced with some serious family issues.
In 1933 Mallik encountered numerous problems, with the finances of Palashi, with the death in the family of a brother involved with the Congress Party and independence politics, and an uncomfortable exit from Kathmandu via a journey on foot before he could find adequate transport to Raxaul on the Indian border.
[38] At a low point, Mallik was contacted by Lilian Huss, a Swedish slight acquaintance from his early years in Oxford.
In 1936 he voyaged from Kidderpore on the DDG Hansa line cargo steamer SS Neuenfels to Hamburg, where Lilian Huss met him.
[39] Mallik returned to Oxford in February 1937, with the support of Lilian Huss in Stockholm, on what was intended to be a visit.
[40] Robert Graves was living on Majorca, but arrived in London in the summer of 1937, escaping the Spanish Civil War with Laura Riding.
[43] Graves concluded that under the influence of philosophy, an interest that came with his friendship with Mallik, he had written bad poetry.
[44] In the first edition of Good-Bye to All That, he expressed the thought that the intense discussions he had had with Mallik and Sam Harries, in particular, had almost led to metaphysics for him driving out poetry.
[52] From 1942 Mallik lived in a household at 16 Polstead Road, in north Oxford, with supporters including Winifred Lewis, Nora Bolton and Hilda Alden;[53] M. N. Srinivas described meeting Franz Baermann Steiner there, at the "residence of four or five middle-aged English women and an elderly Indian philosopher".
[62][63] Kersnowski suggests that Graves may have tried to impose on Mallik's work dramatic conventions of Symbolist theatre from a generation earlier.