Derek Davis was born on 3 May 1945 and educated at Clifton College, a school renowned for its excellence in classical and modern language teaching
By 1962 he had a Russian A level, had visited Russia and, armed with Hindi-Russian dictionaries and conversational phrasebook, was at Scindia School, Gwalior, where he taught Shakespeare, Dickens and Gerald Durrell to 13-year-olds who would go on to become public servants, generals, admirals, businessmen and academics. He then went up to Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Greats.
During the Oxford long vacation of 1965, he embarked on an overland trek to India via Erzurum and back with his Balliol friend, Christopher Bayly. An unexpected consequence was that the latter changed his proposed research subject from Russian and Eastern European history to work instead (with Professor Sarvepalli Gopal) on South Asia.
His career in the civil service left little time for Pushkin, but on his retirement, he continued to work on his translations of the History of Pugachev and the Journey to Arzrum which was published by the Royal Asiatic Society as a supplement to their Journal in 2022. He also served on the Society's Council and its Finance and Investment Committee.
He died on 8 July 2023.
Annemarie von Gabain (7 April 1901—15 January 1993) was a German scholar who dealt with Turkic studies, both as a linguist and as an art historian. She was born in Morhang and received primary and secondary education in Mainz and Brandenburg. She went to Berlin for university education. She took courses on mathematics, sciences, Sinology and Turcology, completing her dissertation in Sinology. Von Gabain then studied Turcology with Johann Wilhelm Bang Kaup who was the founder of the Berlin school of Turkic studies. Later, she began to work on the Old Turkic materials kept at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin.
Von Gabain was particularly interested in the question of the extent to which the religious ideas of the Central Asian peoples had been influenced by Zoroastrianism or other Iranian beliefs, and this perspective is reflected in several of her publications but she was also interested in more general Turkic-Iranian contacts and interactions.
Karl Jettmar (August 8, 1918 - March 28 , 2002 ) was an Austrian ethnologist, religious scholar and archaeologist. he was the son of the Viennese painter Rudolf Jettmar and studied at the University of Vienna from 1936, first in German and history, then in ethnology, folklore and prehistory. He received his doctorate in 1941 After his military service, he initially couldn't find a job as a scientist, but had to earn his living as a salesman. In 1953/54 he was a visiting scientist at the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt am Main, then until 1958 he was an assistant at the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna.
In 1961 he accepted an appointment as a full professor of ethnology at the University of Mainz. From 1964 until his retirement in 1986, he was professor of ethnology at the University of Heidelberg, director of the South Asia Institute and from 1969 he was a full member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.
Jettmar retired in 1983 abut continued to publish works on the indigenous religions, art and prehistory of Central Asia. In 1999 he became honorary member of the German association of anthropologists (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde, DGV).
Gordon Calver, had been a member of the British Institute since 1967 and a member of the council from 1977. His life-long interest in Iran and the Arab world grew from his work for the Imperial Bank of Iran for his entire working life. He was until 1985 a member of the advisory committee of HSBC.
Peter R. Phelan, born Richard Phelan in 1934 In Kilmacow, Kilkenny County in Ireland, became Brother Peter in the La Salle Order in 1950 and came to Sabah in 1963. A teacher in various schools throughout his career in Sabah, and principal of St Martin's Secondary School in Tambunan during 1978-87, he has many sustained interests in the indigenous cultures of this fascinating slate of Malaysia once known as British North Borneo. He is one of Sabah's resident authorities on a number of cultural subjects. He is also a keen observer of the system of native law found in Sabah Author of a number of articles on various aspects of Sabah's cultures and a book entitled Traditional Stone and Wood Monuments of Sabah Centre for Borneo Studies, 1997), he was given the 1980 Barwis-Holliday Award for Far Eastern Studies by the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland for his essay on the Bobohizan priesthood system in Sabah. He spent some 15 years at Tanjung Aru near Kota Kinabalu. then lived about 10 years in Tambunan and lived in the Nabawan area since 1990. He died in 2010.
Reinhold F.G. Müller was an historian of medicine in Germany who worked in the field of the Indian history of medicine from the 1920s to the 1960s. He influenced German, American and Indian researchers. Müller studied a wide range of topics including the history of Indian gynaecology, psychiatry, immunology and general practice and his subsequent articles were published in the principal contemporary magazines.
J.M. Gullick was born in Bristol in 1916. He attended Taunton School and won a scholarship to study Classics at Christ's College, Cambridge, from where he graduated with a Double First, and served as captain of college boats. After graduating, Gullick entered the Colonial Administrative Service and was sent to Entebbe as the Second World War was breaking out in 1939. After serving as aide-de-camp to Sir Philip Mitchell for a short period, he went to Teso District as third assistant district commissioner. In 1940, Gullick joined the King's African Rifles and participated in the Abyssinian Campaign. At the end of the campaign he held various roles in the military administrations in Cairo, Madagascar and Malaya, where he served for six months in the British Military Administration in the state of Negeri Sembilan.
When civilian government was restored in Malaya in 1946, Gullick was transferred to the Malayan Civil Service and served as state secretary for Negeri Sembilan. When the Federation of Malaya was formed in 1948, he joined the secretariat in Kuala Lumpur. He held various positions in the Defense and Internal Security Department, Rural and Industrial Development Authority and the Malayanisation Committee, on which he worked closely with Onn Jaafar and Tunku Abdul Rahman.
In 1956, Gullick returned to England and took up a position as company secretary with The Guthrie Group, a company with concerns in rubber plantations in Malaysia. He left Guthries in 1962 and embarked on a legal career as a solicitor He joined the firm of E.F. Turner & Sons in 1963 and by 1974 had risen to senior partner. After making partner, he left the firm to lecture on company law, publishing what became the standard work on the subject for students preparing for examinations, entitled Company Law.
J.M. Gullick, while in Malaysia, combined his official career with academic study of the history and culture of Malaysia. He was a prolific writer and continued to publish into his old age. In addition to the scholarly monographs, such as Indigenous Political Systems of Western Malaya (1958) and numerous specialist articles in journals, he also published introductions to Malaysian history intended for a general audience.
Christopher Shackle was educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College, before reading Persian and Turkish at Merton College, Oxford, graduating in 1963. He then went on to study Social Anthropology as a postgraduate at St Antony's College. He joined the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, in1966, becoming a Professor in 1985, Head of Department from 1983-1987 and Pro-Director of SOAS from1997-2003.
He is expert in the Saraiki language and has written several books on Saraiki literature.