Lord Charles Theophilus Metcalfe had a long and extensive career in colonial administration both in India and Canada. At the time that of writing this letter, he was Resident at Delhi.
The Academy was founded in 1825 when Count István Széchenyi offered one year's income of his estate for the purposes of a Learned Society at a district session of the Diet in Pressburg (Pozsony, present Bratislava, seat of the Hungarian Parliament at the time), and his example was followed by other delegates. Its task was specified as the development of the Hungarian language and the study and propagation of the sciences and the arts in Hungarian. It received its current name in 1845.
Alexander Csoma de Koros was a Hungarian philologist who wrote the first Tibetan-English dictionary. He studied oriental languages in Gottingen and lived from 1819 to his death in 1842 in the Indian sub-continent studying the languages and the people.