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Edward Byles Cowell was born in Ipswich in 1826, and became interested in oriental languages at the age of 15, when he found copies of William Jones' work in his local library. Self-taught he starting translating and publishing Sanskrit works. On the death of his father in 1842 he took over the family business, but continued to read voraciously. He married in 1845, and in 1850 entered Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied for the next six years and catalogued Persian manuscripts for the Bodleian library. He resided in Calcutta from 1856 to 1867, as professor of English history at Presidency College, and from 1858 also as principal of Sanskrit College. In this year he discovered a manuscript of the quatrains (robāʿiyāt) of ʿOmar Ḵayyām in the Asiatic Society's library and sent a copy to London for his friend and Persian student, Edward Fitzgerald.

Having studied Hindustani, Bengali, and Sanskrit with native scholars, he returned to England to take up an appointment as the first professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge. He remained in Cambridge until his death in 1903.

Edward William West was born in 1824 and was educated at Kings College, London. He was a scholar of Zoroastrianism and translator of Pahlavi texts. He worked in India from 1844 for twenty years, as a civil engineer. In this time he became interested in the study of the Zoroastrian religion and undertook study to be able to understand its languages. He prepared five volumes of Pahlavi texts (the Marvels of Zoroastrianism) for Professor Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East series, published from the years 1880 to 1897. He was made an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Munchen.

Muir was born in Glasgow in 1819. His father died in 1820, when his mother moved the family to Kilmarnock. He attended Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities but before graduating his uncle secured a writership for Muir with the East India Company. He attended Haileybury before departing for India in 1837. Muir was stationed in the North West Provinces where he met and married his wife, Elizabeth, in 1840. By 1847 he was secretary to board of revenue of the North West Provinces based in Agra. In 1852 he became secretary to the Lt. Governor, James Thompson. He developed an interest in Islam Studies. He also learnt Persian and Arabic, and it was for this that he received the Gold Medal in 1903.

In 1867 he was created a Knight Commander of the Star of India, and in 1868 he became lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces. Muir himself founded Muir Central College in 1873. In 1887, this became the University of Allahabad. Muir served from 1874 until 1876 as financial member of the Governor-General's Council. He retired in 1876, when he became a member of the Council of India in London.

In 1885 he was elected principal of Edinburgh University. In 1884, Muir was elected President of the Royal Asiatic Society, also serving as Vice-President from 1885-1886, and 1894-1897.

His chief books are A Life of Mahomet and History of Islam to the Era of the Hegira; Annals of the Early Caliphate; The Caliphate: Its rise, decline and fall, an abridgment and continuation of the Annals, which brings the record down to the fall of the caliphate on the onset of the Mongols; The Koran: its Composition and Teaching; and The Mohammedan Controversy, a reprint of five essays published at intervals between 1885 and 1887.

George Uglow Pope was born in Canada in 1820. He returned with this family to England in 1826 and trained as a missionary leaving for southern India in 1839. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1841. He left for England in 1849 but returned to Tanjore in 1851. He was much involved in education. He finally left India in 1881 and settled in Oxford where he made a mark as a lecturer in Tamil and Telugu (1884). He received an honorary MA in 1886 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1906. He died in Oxford in 1908.

George Abraham Grierson was born in 1851 in County Dublin. He was educated at Trinity College Dublin, as a mathematics student, but where he also first developed an interest for oriental languages. He studied Sanskrit and Hindustani before leaving for the Bombay Presidency in 1873. He was appointed Superintendent of the newly formed Linguistic Survey of India in 1898, which took 30 years to complete. Grierson was a prodigious author writing many publications on India and its languages. He died in Camberley, Surrey, in 1941.