Fondo RASM - Royal Asiatic Society Medal

The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland was founded by the eminent Sanskrit scholar Sir Henry Thomas Colebrooke on the 15th March 1823. It received its Royal Charter from King George IV on the 11th August 1824 'for the investigation of subjects connected with and for the encouragement of science, literature and the arts in relation to Asia'. It continues as a forum for those who are interested in the languages, cultures and history of Asia to meet and exchange ideas.

Danuta Solowiej-Wedderburn is a Polish-born (1962) sculptor residing in the United Kingdom. She immigrated to the UK in 1987, where she began engraving plaquettes and medals. In 2006, Solowiej-Wedderburn was commissioned for an engraving for the reverse side of a British five pound coin commemorating the 80th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II. In 2010, she engraved the reverse of a five pound coin of Alderney that commemorated the life of John Lennon, one of The Beatles.

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.

Bosworth was born in Sheffield. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in modern history from St John's College, Oxford,and both MA in Middle Eastern studies and PhD degrees from the University of Edinburgh. He held permanent posts at the University of St Andrews, the University of Manchester and the Center for the Humanities at Princeton University. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Exeter. Bosworth was a historian and Orientalist, specialising in Arabic and Iranian studies.

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.

Bayly was from Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, where he attended The Skinners School. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree. He then remained at the University of Oxford and undertook post-graduate study at St Antony's College, Oxford, completing his Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree in 1970. Baylyl continued his academic career and was the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge from 1992 to 2013. He was also a trustee of the British Museum.

In 2007, he succeeded Sir John Baker as President of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. Bayly also became the Director of Cambridge's Centre of South Asian Studies. In the same year in the Queen's Birthday Honours, it was announced that he had been appointed a Knight Bachelor 'for services to History'. He was co-editor of The New Cambridge History of India and sat on the editorial board of various academic journals. He also served on the inaugural Social Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2009. He died in Hyde Park, Chicago, where he was in his second and last year as the Vivekananda Visiting Professor.

Bridget Allchin FSA (10 February 1927 – 27 June 2017) was an archaeologist who specialised in South Asian archaeology. She was born Bridget Gordon in Oxford but was raised on a farm in Galloway, Scotland. Bridget started a degree in History and Ancient History at University College London but, at the end of her first year, left for South Africa when her parents decided to emigrate. Interested in the culture of neighbouring Basutoland, Bridget persuaded her parents to let her leave the farm and recommence her studies. Enrolling at the University of Cape Town she read African Studies, which included anthropology, archaeology and African language. While there, she learnt to speak Sesotho and took up flying lessons.

Taught by Professor Isaac Shapira and Dr A. J. H. Goodwin, Bridget developed a specialism in the South African Stone Age but decided to return to England and in 1950 she began a PhD at the Institute of Archaeology studying under Professor Frederick Zeuner. Whilst studying, in 1950 Bridget met fellow PhD student Raymond Allchin and married in March 1951. Travelling to India for the first time with Raymond in 1951, Bridget began to establish herself as a prominent South Asian Prehistorian in the UK and a pioneering female field-archaeologist in South Asia at a time when there were none. Her research interests and publications stretched across South Asia from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka. At first Bridget's academic and organisational skills were dedicated to supporting Raymond's fieldwork but, despite not holding a full-time academic post, she successfully raised funds and established a number of innovative field projects. This included directing fieldwork in the Great Thar Desert with Professor K. T. M. Hegde of the M.S. University of Baroda and Professor Andrew Goudie of the University of Oxford. Bridget subsequently developed links with the Pakistan Geological Survey and played a critical role in initiating collaborations which resulted in a survey of the Potwar Plateau directed by Professor Robin Dennell of the University of Sheffield and Professor Helen Rendell of the University of Sussex to search for Palaeolithic industries during the second phase of the British Archaeological Mission to Pakistan with the support of the Leverhulme Trust.

An independent author and researcher in her own right, she published The Stone-Tipped Arrow: a Study of Late Stone Age Cultures of the Tropical Regions of the Old World (1966) and The Prehistory and Palaeography of the Great Indian Desert (with Andrew Goudie and K. T. M. Hegde: 1978) and Living Traditions: Studies in the Ethnoarchaeology of South Asia (1994).

Away from the field, Bridget held the role of founding Editor of the Journal of South Asian Studies for over a decade and was Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (FSA) and a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. She was a founding trustee of the Ancient India and Iran Trust and was its Secretary and chairman, as well as founding member and Secretary General of the European Association of South Asian Archaeologists, editing a number of its proceedings. 

She died in Norwich on 27 June 2017 at the age of 90.

Carole Hillenbrand CBE FBA is a British Islamic scholar who is Emerita Professor in Islamic History at the University of Edinburgh and Professor of Islamic History at the University of St Andrews. She studied modern languages at Girton College, Cambridge (starting 1962), and Arabic and Turkish at Somerville College, Oxford, She earned her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 1979.

Hillenbrand specialises in classical Islamic history, especially the period of the Seljuqs and the Crusades and has produced major publications and articles within this field.

Robert Hillenbrand FBA is a British art historian who specialises in Persian and Islamic art. He is an Honorary Professorial Fellow of the universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge for 2008–09 and has held various visiting fellowships. He has also served on the Councils of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem , British Research in the Levant , and the British Institute of Persian Studies (Vice-President).

In 2018 during the conference of the Association of Iranian Studies at the University of California, Irvine, the Lifetime Achievement Award was awarded to Hillenbrand. In the same year he appeared in the documentary film Taq Kasra: Wonder of Architecture as a scholar of Sassanid Persia.

Robert Irwin was born in 1946. He read modern history at Oxford and taught medieval history at the University of St. Andrews. He has held teaching appointments in Arabic and Middle Eastern history at Oxford and Cambridge. He is a scholar of Arabic history and author of novels, translations and literary studies willing to provide an argument against prevailing orthodoxies.

Adrian David Hugh Bivar, FRAS (1926 - 2015) was a British numismatist and archaeologist, who was Emeritus Professor of Iranian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He specialized in Sasanian seals and rock reliefs, Kushano-Sasanian coins and chronology, Mithraic iconography, Arsacid history and pre-Islamic folklore.