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The Oriental Translation Fund was established in 1828 by a committee of the Royal Asiatic Society under the Chairmanship of Sir Gore Ouseley. Its purpose was to translate and publish such "interesting and valuable works on eastern History, Science, and Belles-Lettres as are still in MS... The object proposed is, to publish, free of expense to the authors, translations of the whole or parts of such works...generally to be accompanied by the original texts printed separately." King George IV became patron of the Fund. In its early years the fund was financed by subscriptions and the list of subscribers included: Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the Prime Minister (Wellington), the Archbishop of Canterbury and one of the founders of the Royal Asiatic Society, Henry Colebrooke.

The Oriental Translation Committee who controlled the Fund was independent to the Society and an annual subsidy of 100 guineas was received from the East India Company. Various works were published throughout this period and these formed Series One of the publications (1828-1879). However, operations were suspended in 1860 due to a lack of funds and the Committee disposed of most of its stock.

The Royal Asiatic Society Council considered reviving the fund in 1888 due mainly to the efforts of the British Orientalist, Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot. He led the management of the Fund and donated finances. He was also supported by the former Viceroy of India, Lord Northbrook, and a prominent Sanskrit Scholar, E.T. Sturdy. This led to the Series Two publications. The Fund is still operational today.

Henry Alexander Ormsby served in the Indian Navy. According to Charles Rathbone Low in his "A History of the Indian Navy (1613-1863)", Ormsby absconded from the Navy at the age of 19, between 1826-1830 and for three years went to live with some Arabs in their tents. For this he was struck off the navy list but because of his services to geographical science and surveying he was reinstated and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1839 his vessel made the quickest passage from Bombay to Suez yet recorded. He served in the China war, 1840-1842. He married Anne Jane Lye in 1843. He retired from the navy in 1848. The National Archives hold a copy of his will dating to 1857.

H.S. Osbourne joined the Bombay Infantry in 1788. By 1837 he had become a Major-General and in 1854 became a General.

Johannes Gerhard Frederik van Overmeer Fischer began as a clerk at Dejima, the Dutch station in Japan, and he was later promoted to warehouse master. During the span of his stay in Japan, Fischer's access to Japanese culture was limited but he amassed a considerable collection of objects. This material was taken back to the Netherlands in 1829. In 1833, he published Bijdrage tot de kennis van het Japansche rijk (Contribution to the knowledge of the Japanese Empire).

Alexandre Anastasius Pallis was born on 20 October 1883 in Mumbai. He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, and subsequently worked for the Egyptian Civil Service. He became a Greek citizen and was both Governor of Corfu and Salonika. During World War II he was attached to the Greek government in exile. He died in Athens, Greece, on 26 June 1975.

William Claxton Peppé was born in India in 1852, his father being an estate manager in Northern India. He was educated in Aberdeen but returned to Birdpur, India, to assist his father in 1873, becoming the manager in the early 1880s. In the spring of 1897, Peppé began to excavate a mound near the village of Piprahwa on the Birdpur estate. After weeks spent clearing away soil and dense scrub that covered the mound preliminary excavations exposed a solid mass of red fired brickwork that after further digging revealed itself to be a large dome roof roughly 130 feet in diameter. Peppé contacted Vincent Smith, an authority on ancient Indian history and archaeology, who decided that it was an unusually early example of an ancient Buddhist stupa probably dating from the era of Ashoka the Great.

Excavations continued in 1898 and after digging through eighteen feet of brickwork he found a huge slab of stone, the cover of an enormous stone coffer. Within the coffer were five vessels, none more than seven inches in height, containing quantities of stars in silver and gold, discs of gold leaf embossed with Buddhist symbols, numerous pearls of many sizes, drilled beads, stars and flowers cut in red or white cornelian, amethyst, topaz, garnet, coral and crystal. Also found inside the vessels were small pieces of bone and ash and on the side of one of them, in an ancient Pali character was an inscription that read:

"This shrine for relics of the Buddha, the August One, is that of the Sakya's, the brethren of the Distinguished One, in association with their sisters, and with their children and their wives."

William Peppé had seemingly unearthed one of the original eight stupas that were said to contain the ashes and bone fragments of the Buddha that werewas shared out after his cremation.

Within a week of the discovery a Siamese Buddhist monk, Jinavaravansa who was the grandson of King Rama III of Siam, arrived to ask that the relics go to his country. Peppé had already placed the relics at the disposal of the Government but he sent the request to the Commissioner of Gorakhpur. The British authorities agreed that some should be sent to Siam, other portions also went to the Museum in Kolkata, and to Colombo, Sri Lanka. Peppé was apportioned about one sixth of the jewels.

Peppé retired from his post in 1903 returning to England, but returnrd to India from 1920-1926, before finally retiring. He died in 1936.

Reverend William Pettigrew was born on 5th January, 1869 at Edinburgh, Scotland. He was an Educationist and Scottish-British Christian Missionary. William Pettigrew was bought up in a deeply religious Anglican family, he attended Bible camp every week and it was at Bible camp where he found his passion for Missionary work. It was at Livingstone College Leytone, England where he received his medical missionary education and also underwent training at the Ardington Aborigines Training School.

During the First World War William Pettigrew served in the Army as a Captain. Due to his work for the advancement of public interest in India the British Monarch honoured him with the medal 'Kaiser-I-Hind', which translates to 'Emperor of India'.

In 1890 William Pettigrew arrived in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, working under the Ardington Missionary. He was accompanied by three other Missionaries and a Doctor, they were received by Reverend and Mrs Dalmasna and together they worked among the Bengalis. During his work among the Bengalis William Pettigrew started to gain better understanding of the Christian religious denominations and converted to Baptist Protestant denomination. It was Reverend Wright Hayna who baptised William Pettigrew into the Baptist Faith.

The Manipur Massacre happened in 1891, at the time William Pettigrew was working with the Baptist Missionary in Dacca. However after hearing about the massacre he prayed fervently to go and work in Manipur, this was made impossible by the Manipur Political Agent at the time. As he was so inspired to work in Manipur, William Pettigrew travelled to Silchar in 1892 to learn the Manipuri Language and was fortunately permitted to carry out his Missionary work in Manipur on 6th February, 1894. The first course of action William Pettigrew took was to open a Primary School in Chingama and enrol 50 students, he also began working under the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society.

However upon his arrival in the plain region of Manipur (Imphal), William Pettigrew was not permitted to preach Christianity. This resulted in William Pettigrew spending two years learning and writing Meitei Primers, Grammar, Basic Arithmetic and English-Benglai-Manipur Dictionary. Thereafter in the Singjamei Colony, William Pettigrew set up his second Primary School, which is now known as Pettigrew Junior Higher Secondary School.

Amongst many of William Pettigrew's achievements the most outstanding is his translation of the New Testament in Tangkhul dialect of Ukhrul, which was published in 1926 making it the only Holy Bible published in tribal language of Manipur. For his extensive work in scripture translations, William Pettigrew was honoured as a member of the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1928 and then elected as a member of The Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1930. His other literary achievements include 'Manipuri (Mitei) Grammar with Illustrative Sentences' and 'Tangkhul Naga Grammar and Dictionary (Ukhrul Dialect) with Illustrative Sentences'.

It was on March 1933 William Pettigrew completed his Missionary work in Manipur and returned back to England and ten years later on 10th April 1943 he passed away.

Terence A. Phelps was an independent British researcher who became interested in the controversy concerning excavations in Northern India. He died in February 2018.