This paper is based on an ethnographic study on Indian social scientists building an academic career in the United Kingdom. It articulates in-depth interviews and the analysis of texts by those intellectuals in order to access narratives on trajectories, sentiments of belonging to spaces, history and networks, as well as personal views on the scientific field in which they are engaged. Noteworthy is the recurrent idea that leaving for the UK is an unexpected, unplanned, event in their trajectories. Moreover, many of them affirm that first arriving in the UK is accompanied by a sentiment of “familiarity” with the country, such was its influence on their intellectual education. Those narratives evoke a rich imaginary informed by a shared intellectual history of India and the British Empire that still today shapes academic trajectories and coin meanings assigned to the intellectual circulations between both the countries. Even ideas such as cosmopolitanism and global citizenship invariably refer to leaving for the UK or the USA, suggesting that such transnational space is simultaneously familiar and global. For this paper, I suggest to explore notions of cosmopolitanism and locality expressed in such narratives, as well as its articulations with colonization and globalization. This analysis bears in mind intersections of class, caste, origin and gender in order to understand what are the arrangements that forge those complex intellectual projects, as well as the role played by those scholars in the contemporary scenario of globalization of social sciences.