Frederick William Thomas was born in Staffordshire in 1867. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1885, graduating with a first class degree in both classics and Indian languages and being awarded a Browne medal in both 1888 and 1889. Thomas was a librarian at the India Office Library (now subsumed into the British Library) between 1898 and 1927. Simultaneously he was lecturer in comparative philology at University College, London, from 1908 to 1935, Reader in Tibetan at London University from 1909 to 1937, and the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University between 1927 and 1937, in which capacity he became a fellow of Balliol College. He studied and catalogued many Tibetan texts. Thomas died on 6 May 1956.
Thomas Hardwicke joined the British East India Company army with the Bengal Artillery in November 1778. He was posted in southern India from 1781 to 1785. He was wounded at Satyamangalam on 13 September 1790 and was posted as a Company Orderly at Bangalore, before moving to Bengal in 1793 to become Adjutant and Quartermaster of Artillery. Hardwicke rose to become Major-General in 1819. He resigned from the command of the Bengal Artillery in 1823 to return to England and died at The Lodge, Lambeth, on 3 March 1835.
During his military career in India, Hardwicke travelled extensively over the subcontinent. He collected zoological specimens and amassed a large collection of paintings of animals which he employed local artists to make. The Indian artists employed by Hardwicke are unknown, except for one, Goordial, but they were trained and their style was adapted to the demands of technical illustration using watercolours. The collection was bequeathed to the British Museum in 1835 which was later partly moved to the Natural History Museum. The collection consists of 4500 illustrations.
Hardwicke was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1813 and Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1804. He also held positions of Vice-President to the Asiatic Society of Bengal and was an honorary member of the Royal Dublin Society. Hardwicke was not married but had three illegitimate daughters and two sons apart from two daughters born to an Indian mistress (named as Fyzbuhsh in his Will).
Thomas Hervey Baber was born in Slingsby, Yorkshire, in 1777. His father was a solicitor. His family moved to Lincolnshire in 1780 and then to London in 1782. After early schooling Thomas went to Haileybury College and in 1796 he petitioned to join the East India Company, sailing to India in August of that year. He was first in Mumbai, where he was an assistant to the Secretary in the Public Department. He married in 1798 to Helen, a recent widow, but only 18 years old and they both moved to Calicut. Their first son was born in 1802 at Tellicherry.
Thomas, though employed by the East Indian Company, became an advocate for the abolition of slavery in Malabar area after discovering of its existence when approached to buy two children. He bought them and then cared for them in his household. He became the sub-collector for Tellicherry in 1805, and later, the English magistrate in the region. Baber, aided by his deputy, Kalpally Karunakara Menon, was instrumental in the removal from power of Pazhassi Raja in 1805. He was also approached in 1809 by the Rajahs of Travancore and Cochin who had been ousted from power, by an official supported by the East India Company. This official had them begun to persecute many of the inhabitants of Cochin and the surrounding districts. They somehow learned that Thomas Baber was an EIC official who was sympathetic to the plight of the Indians and an appeal was made for his help. He organised an expedition to remove the official from power.
In 1813, after witnessing a local famine, he became interested in finding alternative cash and food crops for the region, including silk production. In 1824, Thomas Baber was moved away from Tellichery and into the South Mahratta Country to Dharwar where he became Principal Collector and Political Agent. Here he found himself responsible for the running of a large prison containing several hundred Mahratta prisoners. He instituted prison reform including teaching the prisoners a trade. He created looms after asking his brother, Henry Baber, Keeper of the Printed Books at the British Museum, to send 1/5th scale models of the most efficient looms available in Britain at the time.
Baber's experience as a planter and an agriculturist made him acutely aware of the tremendous negative impact of colonial policies in India. After his return to England in 1838, he emerged as a pioneer in reform movements focused on India, associated with launching the first of such organisations, the British India Society, in London a few months later, in July 1839.