Lawrence John Lumley Dundas, second Marquess of Zetland, was an administrator in India, politician, and author. Zetland was educated at Harrow School and at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1900, he became aide-de camp to Lord Curzon, who was viceroy of India at the time. While in India, Zetland travelled widely through Asia. His experiences would later become the inspiration for a number of fictional and non-fictional works. From 1917 to 1922 he was appointed Governor of Bengal. He held the post at one of the most critical times, having to deal with the fall-out from the partition (1905) and re-unification (1911) of Bengal and rising political activism and unrest in the province. While his appointment initially provoked protests from Bengali nationalists because of his close association with Curzon, by the end of his governorship, he was widely respected even among initially critical nationalist politicians.

Zetland returned to Britain in 1922 and changed careers to become a writer. He was an active member of the Royal Central Asian, the India, and the Royal Asiatic societies. He was elected President of the Royal Geographical Society in 1922. He published a travel book, Lands of the Thunderbolt: Sikhim, Chumbi and Bhutan (1923), followed by The Heart of Aryavarta (1925), for which he was elected to the British Academy in 1929. In the book Zetland explores Indian religion and philosophy, which he saw as closely connected to an understanding of Indian nationalism. Zetland admired many of Gandhi's ideas, but differed with him on the point of his rejection of Western civilization and British rule. In 1928 Zetland published the three-volume official biography of Lord Curzon to critical acclaim. 

During the 1930s, Zetland played an important role in the ongoing constitutional reform process of the Government of India. He was present at the Round Table conferences in the early 1930s and also served on the joint select committees of the House of Lords and House of Commons. Prime Minister Baldwin invited him to join his government in 1935 as Secretary of State for India, to help guide the 1935 Government of India Act through parliament. With his political skills he was able to by-pass conservative opposition and implement further steps towards future dominion status for India and a devolution of power, by granting complete provincial responsibility which he saw part of a new conceptualization of ‘cooperative imperialism’.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Zetland had to deal with the fall-out from the constitutional crisis triggered by Linlithgow’s unilateral declaration of war, without consulting Indian representatives. This led to Congress’s non-cooperation in the war effort. In March 1940, Zetland survived Udham Singh’s assassination of Michael O’Dwyer at Caxton Hall. Zetland was present at the lecture, when Singh shot at the podium from close range. Zetland was only grazed by a bullet, receiving bruises to his ribs. After Neville Chamberlain’s resignation as Prime Minister, Zetland also resigned from office, conscious that his approach to Indian affairs differed markedly with Winston Churchill, who succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister.

After leaving office, Zetland pursued his other interests. He was made a Knight of the Order of the Garter. He served as Lord Lieutenant of the North Riding, devoted more time to his long-standing role as provincial grand master of the freemasons of the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire and was Governor of the Bank of Scotland.

Ikbal Ali Shah was the Son of the Nawab of Sardhana, and great grandson of the Afghan statesman Jan Fishan Khan. He came to Britain before the First World War and studied at Oxford and Edinburgh University, where he met his wife, the Scottish author Morag Murray. They had three children, the Sufi writers and translators Amina Shah (1918), Omar Ali-Shah (1922-2005) and Idries Shah (1924-96), with whom Doris Lessing later studied Sufism. He wrote collections of tales and adventure, like The Golden Caravan, as well as non-fiction like The Spirit of the East. He later taught Sufi "classes" in England, which were the precursors to the Sufi school established by his son, Idries Shah. Ikbal Ali Shah also wrote biographies, including on President Kemal Attaturk whom he claims to have known personally.

Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah was a prolific writer of articles, and books relating to South Asia, Sufism and the Muslim World. He published in The Bookman and other journals, but struggled to live by his writing. In 1939 he contacted the India Office for work as a writer in the Information Department, for whom he wrote articles useful for Muslim papers in India and he provided the Ministry with a regular service of news along these lines. In a letter dated 19 January 1939, A. H. Joyce (Secretary Political, External Department) stated that the India Office had known Ikbal Ali Shah ‘as a contributor of articles, principally to the provincial newspapers in this country, on matters affecting the Muslim world and particularly those affecting India and Afghanistan. He is also the author of quite a number of books of a popular type covering a similar field’ (L/I/1/1509). He was also a prolific speaker and addressed the Oxford Majlis in 1941 on the topic ‘Incompatibility of Islamic and Fascist Philosophies’, and lascars in the East End on ‘English, Their Country and Their Ways’. He also wrote a paper ‘Little Arabia in Britain', on Cardiff’s Muslim community.

Ikbal Ali Shah was linked to the controversy surrounding the 1967 publication of a new translation of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, by his son Omar Ali-Shah and the English poet Robert Graves. The translation was based on an annotated "crib", supposedly derived from an old manuscript said to have been in the Shah family's possession for 800 years. L. P. Elwell-Sutton, an Orientalist at Edinburgh University, and others who reviewed the book, expressed their conviction that the story of the ancient family manuscript was false. Graves had been led to believe that Ikbal Ali Shah had access to the disputed manuscript. Shah was about to produce it at the time of his death from a car accident, to allay the growing controversy surrounding the translation. He and his wife are buried in the Muslim section of the cemetery at Brookwood, Woking, Surrey.

Thomas Arnold was an Orientalist scholar and administrator. From 1888 to 1898, Arnold taught philosophy at the Muhammad Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh. His contemporaries were Theodore Morison (chair of the report into scholarships for Indians to study technical subjects in the UK in 1913) and Theodore Beck, the Principal of MAO college.

In 1898, Arnold joined the Indian Educational Service and taught philosophy at Government College, Lahore, where he had a profound influence upon the poet-philosopher Mohammad Iqbal. Arnold returned to London in 1904. He worked as assistant librarian at the India Office, and taught Arabic at University College, London.

In 1892, Arnold married the niece of Theodore Beck. Theodore Beck's sister, Emma Josephine Beck, was Honorary Secretary of the National Indian Association from 1905 to 1932. In 1910, when the NIA's offices were housed in 21 Cromwell Road, so were the offices of the Bureau of Information for Indian Students for whom Arnold acted as educational advisor to Indian students (1909-12). Arnold was also involved in the formation of the India Society in 1910. In 1920, he retired from the India Office and was appointed as the first holder of the School of Oriental Studies' (founded in 1917) chair of Arabic and Islamic studies. 

After an education at Marlborough College (1863-4) and Sandhurst (1865-6), Wyllie entered the Durham Light Infantry and arrived in India in 1867. After serving briefly with the 2^nd Gurkha regiment, Wyllie undertook civil and political employment including positions such as Cantonment Magistrate of Nasirabad, Assistant Commissioner in Ajmer-Merwara, and Assistant to the Governor-General's Agent in Baluchistan. Wyllie took part in the Afghan campaign of 1878-80 and was mentioned in the viceroy’s dispatches (Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton, Earl of Lytton). In 1886 he became a Major of the British Army, and in 1892 a Lieutenant-Colonel. During the 1880s and 1890s Wyllie held a number of assistant resident positions throughout India, and in 1898 gained the appointment of agent to the governor-general in central India. In May 1900 he was transferred in the same capacity to Rajputana where he remained until 1901; notable during this last position was his organization of relief efforts to overcome the famine of 1899-1900. 

Upon his return to London he was selected to work as political Aide-de-Camp for Lord George Hamilton, Secretary of State for India; Wyllie retained the position with Hamilton’s two successors. Wyllie was heavily involved in arrangements for the reception of Indian princes in Britain, especially with regards the coronation of Edward VII in 1902. Wyllie also worked with charities and associations related to India. At a reception given by one such association – the National Indian Association – in 1909, Wyllie was shot by Madan Lal Dhingra, an Indian student. A Parsee physician, Dr Cawas Lalcaca, who sought to protect Wyllie, was also killed. Dhingra and his family were known to Wyllie from his time in India, and Dhingra’s family had maintained a correspondence with Wyllie. Dhingra had himself ignored letters from Wyllie suggesting a meeting at India House. Some argue that Dhingra’s preferred target was either the former Secretary of State Lord Morley or the former Viceroy Lord Curzon, given their greater prestige and connection with the construction of repressive policies against revolutionaries in India; Dhingra was known to have been following both men. Wyllie’s presence at events with Indian students, however, made him an easier target. 

The assassination was met with outrage at home and abroad, with public offices closed in Rajputana upon reception of the news. Wyllie’s widow, Lady Katherine Georgina Wyllie (daughter of a member of the Indian Civil Service), was granted a pension by Viscount Morley, then secretary of state. Memorial tablets to Wyllie were established in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, in Rajputana and central India.