The Men Who Dug Up India's Past: Rea, Sewell, Burgess, Elliot and the Scholars of the Raj

India's ancient past was excavated, surveyed and written up, to a remarkable degree, by men in the service of the British Raj. The Archaeological Survey of India employed them, the great journals published them, and their books still define how the exam asks about them. Alexander Rea dug the urn burials of Adichanallur. Longhurst cleared the ruins of Hampi. Robert Sewell wrote the book that rescued Vijayanagara from oblivion. James Burgess founded the Indian Antiquary and surveyed the western caves. H.M. Elliot (with John Dowson) translated the Persian chroniclers into eight English volumes. And the colonial period also gives us two cultural landmarks the exam loves: Madanapalle, where Tagore turned Jana Gana Mana into English, and Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, whose novels gave India Vande Mataram.

Alexander Rea: the digger of Adichanallur

Alexander Rea was the Superintending Archaeologist of the Southern Circle of the Archaeological Survey of India at the turn of the twentieth century. His name is permanently attached to Adichanallur, the vast urn-burial site on the banks of the Tamiraparani river in the Tirunelveli region of Tamil Nadu. The site had been noticed in 1876 by the German explorer Fedor Jagor, but it was Rea who, between 1899 and 1905, carried out the first large-scale scientific excavation, opening trench after trench across the mound and recovering what he estimated as thousands of burials in a single acre.

Rea's finds made Adichanallur famous. The great burial urns contained skeletons placed in a squatting position, and around them lay iron swords, spears, daggers and tridents, bronze figurines of the buffalo, goat, cock, tiger and elephant, wire bangles, beads, and most strikingly, gold diadems, thin gold bands with holes at each end for tying round the forehead. Rea systematically documented everything and deposited the collection, some 9,000 artefacts, in the Government Museum at Chennai (then Madras), where it remains the core of the prehistory gallery. He also surveyed 38 sites along the Tamiraparani and published the Catalogue of the Prehistoric Antiquities from Adichanallur and Perumbair. Carbon dating of later ASI excavations (2004-05) placed the site between roughly 1000 and 600 BCE, confirming Rea's instinct that he was digging one of South India's richest proto-historic cemeteries.

A.H. Longhurst: Hampi and Mahabalipuram

A.H. Longhurst was an archaeologist of the ASI whose name belongs to two of South India's great ruin-fields: Hampi and Mahabalipuram. At Hampi, the ruined capital of Vijayanagara on the Tungabhadra in Karnataka, Longhurst carried out the early systematic work of clearance, conservation and documentation in the 1910s, and his Hampi Ruins Described and Illustrated (1917) was the first accessible scholarly guide to the site, mapping its temples, palaces, aqueducts and bazaars for the world. At Mahabalipuram (Mamallapuram) in Tamil Nadu, he worked on the Pallava monuments, including the Shore Temple complex, documenting the rock-cut rathas and reliefs that make the site the textbook of Pallava art.

Longhurst represents the ASI's conservation phase: the generation that moved from treasure-hunting to preservation, clearing vegetation, stabilising structures and writing the site reports on which all later work builds. For the exam, his name is the answer to who first systematically described Hampi, and he pairs naturally with Robert Sewell, who wrote the history, and with Colin Mackenzie, the Surveyor-General whose early-19th-century survey first brought Hampi's ruins to scholarly attention.

Robert Sewell: the man who remembered Vijayanagara

Robert Sewell was a civil servant of the Madras Presidency who became one of the great amateur historians of the Raj. His monument is A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagara (1900), the book that rescued the empire from the obscurity into which it had fallen after its destruction at Talikota in 1565. Sewell's method was documentary: he translated and published the two surviving eyewitness accounts of the empire at its height, the chronicles of the Portuguese horse-trader Domingo Paes and the merchant Fernao Nuniz, who visited Vijayanagara in the early sixteenth century and described its markets, festivals, military organisation and the Mahanavami celebrations in unmatched detail.

Around these chronicles Sewell built the first continuous narrative of Vijayanagara's history from its founding by Harihara and Bukka to its fall. The book's title was a provocation that worked: it made Vijayanagara a subject of world history and set the agenda for a century of scholarship, from Longhurst's archaeology to the modern Vijayanagara Research Project. For the exam, the chain is Sewell - A Forgotten Empire (1900) - Vijayanagara - Paes and Nuniz chronicles. When a question asks for the source of our knowledge of Vijayanagara's court and capital, Sewell's book is the answer.

James Burgess: the surveyor of the West

James Burgess was the archaeologist who organised the survey of western India. In 1872 he founded the Indian Antiquary, the great journal of Indian antiquarian research, which for decades was the indispensable record of new inscriptions, excavations and discoveries. In 1874 he established the Archaeological Survey of Western India and led its documentation of the Buddhist cave temples of the western Deccan, the rock-cut monasteries and chaityas whose architecture is the foundation of the subject. From 1886 to 1889 he served as Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, succeeding the era of Alexander Cunningham, the ASI's founder.

Burgess matters for the exam as an institution-builder: the man who gave Indian archaeology its journal (Indian Antiquary, 1872), its western survey (1874), and a term as its Director-General. He stands in the succession Cunningham - Burgess, the founder and the consolidator, and his cave-temple reports are still cited for sites like Karle, Bhaja and Ajanta. When questions ask who founded the Indian Antiquary, Burgess is the name.

H.M. Elliot: history through its own historians

H.M. Elliot was a civil servant and historian whose ambition was to let India's medieval past speak through its own chroniclers. His project, The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians, translated extracts from the Persian chronicles of the Sultanate and Mughal periods into English. Elliot died in 1853 with the work unfinished, and it was completed and published by John Dowson in eight volumes between 1867 and 1877. The volumes made the court histories, from the Chachnama to the Ain-i-Akbari and the memoirs of Babur and Jahangir, accessible to English readers for the first time in systematic form.

Elliot's work carries the classic colonial framing: his preface presented the medieval centuries as a record of despotism and decline, a judgement that later nationalist historians spent generations answering. But as a source collection the volumes remain invaluable, and for the exam Elliot is the answer to who translated the Persian historians into English. The pair to remember is Elliot and Dowson, and the work's full title, which the exam sometimes quotes verbatim.

Madanapalle: where Tagore's song found its English voice

Madanapalle, in the Annamayya region of Andhra Pradesh (then in Madras Presidency), holds a unique place in India's national-song history. In February 1919, Rabindranath Tagore visited the Besant Theosophical College at Madanapalle as the guest of the Irish theosophist Margaret Cousins, who was then the college's vice-principal. During the visit Tagore wrote out an English translation of Jana Gana Mana, the Bengali song he had composed in 1911, under the title The Morning Song of India. Margaret Cousins, herself a musician, set the English words to music, and the song was sung at the college.

The Madanapalle translation is the authoritative English rendering of the national anthem, made by the poet himself, and the town is therefore the exam's answer to where Tagore translated Jana Gana Mana into English. Margaret Cousins, the co-creator of the moment, went on to found the All India Women's Conference in 1927, linking the Madanapalle episode to the women's movement. The chain is 1919 - Madanapalle - Besant Theosophical College - Tagore - The Morning Song of India - Margaret Cousins.

Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay: the novelist who gave India its war cry

Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838-1894) was the Bengali novelist called the Sahitya Samrat, the emperor of literature, and the founder of the serious Bengali novel. His early romances created the form: Durgeshnandini (1865), the first Bengali novel, a historical romance of Mughal-Rajput conflict; Kapalkundala (1866); Mrinalini; and Vishabriksha (The Poison Tree, 1873), a pioneering social novel about widow remarriage and domestic life. In these books Bankimchandra did for Bengali prose what his contemporaries were doing for other Indian languages: he made it capable of carrying modern thought.

His political novels made him immortal. Anandamath (1882), set against the Sannyasi rebellion of the late eighteenth century, contains the song Vande Mataram, the hymn to the motherland that became the war cry of the Swadeshi movement and was later adopted as India's national song in 1950. Devi Chaudhurani (1884) and Sitaram (1887) completed his trilogy of patriotic fiction. Bankimchandra also wrote the influential essays of Dharmatattva and edited the journal Bangadarshan, shaping the Bengali public sphere. For the exam, the fixed points are Bankimchandra - Anandamath (1882) - Vande Mataram - national song (1950) - Sahitya Samrat, with Durgeshnandini as the first Bengali novel.

Colin Mackenzie: the surveyor who found Hampi first

Colin Mackenzie, the first Surveyor-General of India (appointed 1815), is the man who brought Hampi's ruins to scholarly attention a century before Longhurst conserved them. In 1800, while surveying the Deccan, Mackenzie visited the Vijayanagara ruins and had his Indian assistants, the Kavali brothers among them, collect local histories, inscriptions and the famous Mackenzie manuscripts, thousands of texts in Indian languages that became one of the great archives of South Indian history. Mackenzie's survey method, combining mapping with the systematic collection of local tradition, invented the historical geography of South India.

Mackenzie's importance is methodological: he showed that India's past could be recovered from Indian sources, inscriptions, temple records and local chronicles, rather than only from Persian court histories or European accounts. His collections, now divided between Chennai, London and Kolkata, remain a working archive. For the exam, Mackenzie is the answer to who first surveyed Hampi (1800) and who was the first Surveyor-General of India, and he forms a trio with Sewell (who wrote Vijayanagara's history) and Longhurst (who conserved its stones).

Robert Bruce Foote: the father of Indian prehistory

If Rea is the excavator of Adichanallur, Robert Bruce Foote is the founder of Indian prehistory itself. A geologist with the Geological Survey of India, Foote discovered India's first Palaeolithic stone tools at Pallavaram near Chennai in 1863, proving that humans had lived in India in the deep Stone Age. He went on to map the Stone Age cultures of the subcontinent, identifying the great Palaeolithic industries and the sites of the Madras region, and his collections formed the nucleus of the Government Museum, Chennai's prehistory gallery.

Foote's work gives the exam its Stone Age vocabulary: Palaeolithic (handaxes, cleavers), Mesolithic (microliths), Neolithic (polished tools, farming), the sequence he helped establish for India. He is the answer to who is called the father of Indian prehistory and who discovered the Pallavaram handaxe in 1863. Pair him with Rea: Foote found the Stone Age, Rea dug the Iron Age burials, and together they built the prehistoric half of the ASI's story.

The ASI itself: Cunningham's founding vision

The Archaeological Survey of India was founded in 1861 by Alexander Cunningham, a military engineer turned archaeologist who had served under the British in the Punjab. Cunningham's founding memorandum proposed a systematic survey of the entire subcontinent's antiquities, and his method was brilliantly simple: he took the travel accounts of the Chinese pilgrims Fa-Hien and Hiuen Tsang and used them as guidebooks, identifying Sarnath, Sravasti, Kaushambi, Sankisa and other Buddhist sites by matching the pilgrims' descriptions to mounds on the ground. The ASI's early decades were the age of identification, putting names to ruins.

Cunningham served as the first Director-General (1871-85), and his successors, James Burgess (1886-89), John Marshall (1902-28, the excavator of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro and the preserver of Sanchi and Taxila), and Mortimer Wheeler (1944-48, who brought modern stratigraphic method to India), each represent an era. The ASI's founding date, 1861, and its founder, Cunningham, are among the most repeated facts in the archaeology section of the paper, and the Cunningham-to-Marshall succession is the standard timeline question.

James Fergusson: the historian of Indian architecture

James Fergusson, a Scottish businessman turned architectural historian, wrote the books that taught the world to see Indian buildings as architecture rather than curiosities. His History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (1876, revised 1910) classified the temples, stupas, mosques and palaces of the subcontinent into styles and periods, and his earlier works on rock-cut temples prepared the ground for Burgess's surveys. Fergusson's classification of the Nagara, Dravida and Vesara temple styles, however refined by later scholars, is the ancestor of the vocabulary every UPSC candidate uses for temple architecture.

Fergusson also wrote the first serious history of Indian architecture's Islamic phase and advised on the preservation of monuments. For the exam, he is the answer to who wrote the History of Indian and Eastern Architecture and the source of the Nagara-Dravida-Vesara classification's first systematic form. He completes the colonial-scholar set: Cunningham founded the survey, Burgess journalised it, Foote gave it prehistory, Rea and Longhurst dug and conserved, Sewell narrated, Elliot translated, and Fergusson classified the buildings.

The national song and the national anthem: 24 January 1950

Bankimchandra's Vande Mataram and Tagore's Jana Gana Mana meet in a single constitutional moment. On 24 January 1950, the Constituent Assembly adopted Jana Gana Mana as the national anthem and gave Vande Mataram, in the words of President Rajendra Prasad's statement, equal honour as the national song. The distinction matters and the exam tests it: the anthem is played on formal state occasions with a prescribed 52-second rendition; the song holds equal status in honour but is not the anthem. The Assembly's decision closed a debate that had run since the 1930s, when the Congress had weighed both songs' claims.

The two songs' histories explain their pairing. Jana Gana Mana, composed by Tagore in 1911 and first sung at the Calcutta Congress session of that year, translated by the poet himself at Madanapalle in 1919; Vande Mataram, published in Anandamath in 1882, carried by the Swadeshi movement after 1905. One is a prayer for the country's guidance, the other a hymn to the motherland; the republic honours both. For revision, the constitutional frame is 24 January 1950 - Jana Gana Mana (anthem) - Vande Mataram (national song, equal honour) - Rajendra Prasad's statement.

Tagore beyond Madanapalle: Shantiniketan and the Nobel

The Madanapalle visit was one episode in the vast public life of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), and the exam tests the whole. In 1901 he founded the school at Shantiniketan in Bengal's Birbhum district, which grew into Visva-Bharati (1921), his university of world culture, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site (inscribed 2023) and a central university. In 1913 he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, for Gitanjali, the English renderings of his Bengali songs that he had carried to London. He composed the national anthems of two countries: Jana Gana Mana for India and Amar Shonar Bangla for Bangladesh.

Tagore's political voice matters as much as his poetry. He renounced his knighthood in 1919 after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the same year as the Madanapalle visit, in a letter to the Viceroy that remains the classic Indian statement of moral protest. His novels Gora and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) anatomised nationalism itself, and his critique of narrow nationalism in the lectures of Nationalism (1917) is a staple of essay quotations. The Tagore package for the exam is Shantiniketan/Visva-Bharati - Nobel 1913 (Gitanjali) - two national anthems - knighthood renounced 1919 - Madanapalle translation.

John Marshall: the man who found the Indus cities

John Marshall, Director-General of the ASI from 1902 to 1928, presided over the single most dramatic discovery in Indian archaeology: the Indus Valley Civilization. In 1921-22, his officers R.D. Banerji at Mohenjo-daro and D.R. Sahni at Harappa excavated the first Bronze Age cities, and Marshall announced to the world in 1924 that India possessed a civilization as old as Mesopotamia's. The discovery pushed India's urban history back 2,500 years and remains the ASI's greatest achievement.

Marshall was also the great conservator: he systematised the ASI's preservation work, restored monuments from Sanchi to Taxila, excavated Taxila himself over decades, and trained the first generation of Indian archaeologists. His tenure is the ASI's golden age, and for the exam he is the answer to who announced the Indus discovery (1924) and who was Director-General 1902-28. The succession Cunningham - Burgess - Marshall - Wheeler is the timeline of the ASI itself, and Marshall sits at its centre.

Mortimer Wheeler: stratigraphy comes to India

Mortimer Wheeler, Director-General from 1944 to 1948, brought scientific method to Indian archaeology. A British general-turned-archaeologist, Wheeler introduced rigorous stratigraphic excavation, the grid system and the discipline of reading soil layers, to sites like Arikamedu (the Roman trading port near Puducherry), Brahmagiri in Karnataka and Taxila. His most famous Indian judgement was also his most debated: he argued that the end of Mohenjo-daro showed signs of a violent destruction consistent with the Rig Vedic account of Indra destroying the forts of the Dasas, a theory later archaeology largely abandoned.

Wheeler's institutional legacy outlasted his theories. He founded the journal Ancient India, trained Indian archaeologists in modern method, and his students, A. Ghosh and others, carried stratigraphy into independent India's ASI. For the exam, Wheeler is the 1944-48 Director-General who brought stratigraphy to India, excavated Arikamedu, and proposed the Aryan-invasion reading of Mohenjo-daro's end. He is the last British Director-General, the bridge between colonial and independent archaeology.

The Chinese witnesses: Fa-Hien and Hiuen Tsang

The colonial scholars' sources included two ancient foreigners whose accounts are themselves exam staples. Fa-Hien (Faxian), the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim who travelled India 399-414 CE during the reign of Chandragupta II Vikramaditya, left the Foguoji, the first detailed foreign account of Gupta India: its Buddhism, its cities, its hospitals and its moral order. His silence on the grandeur of Pataliputra's palace is itself a debated datum.

Hiuen Tsang (Xuanzang), who travelled 629-645 CE in Harsha's reign, left the great Si-yu-ki (Records of the Western World), the single richest foreign account of ancient India: Nalanda's university, Harsha's assemblies at Kannauj and Prayag, the condition of Buddhism and the description of dozens of kingdoms. It was Hiuen Tsang's itineraries that Cunningham used as a guidebook to rediscover Buddhist sites, which closes the circle: the colonial archaeology of this article was built on the medieval Chinese pilgrims' geography. For the exam, the pair is Fa-Hien (Gupta age, 399-414) - Hiuen Tsang (Harsha's age, 629-645, Nalanda, Si-yu-ki).

The women of the story: Cousins, Devi and Dutta

The colonial-scholar narrative is overwhelmingly male, but the cultural landmarks of this article were made by women. Margaret Cousins, the Irish theosophist who set Tagore's Morning Song of India to music at Madanapalle, went on to found the All India Women's Conference in 1927, the first national women's organisation, and campaigned for women's suffrage and education. Without her musicianship, the Madanapalle morning might have left no tune behind.

In Mithila, the Madhubani tradition this article's companion piece celebrates was carried into the world by women: Sita Devi, who took the wall art of her village to national exhibitions and international museums; Jagdamba Devi, among the first National Award winners for the art; Godavari Dutta and Mahasundari Devi, who sustained the bharni and kachni styles across generations. The exam increasingly asks about such figures, and the pattern is worth stating as a principle: where the colonial scholars of this article recovered India's past, it was very often Indian women who had kept the living traditions alive for them to find.

The preservation ethic: Curzon and the 1904 Act

The scholars of this article worked inside a legal revolution: the moment the colonial state decided that monuments were worth preserving rather than quarrying. The turning point was Lord Curzon's viceroyalty (1899-1905), the same years Rea was digging Adichanallur. Curzon, appalled at the decay and vandalism of Indian monuments, pushed through the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1904, which gave the government power to protect monuments of national importance, and he restored the ASI as a central department under John Marshall in 1902. The Taj Mahal's gardens, the monuments of Delhi and Agra, and hundreds of lesser sites owe their survival to the Curzon-Marshall settlement.

The 1904 Act is the ancestor of the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act of 1958 (AMASR Act), independent India's heritage law, which protects more than 3,600 monuments through the ASI. For the exam, the preservation timeline is 1904 Act (Curzon) - Marshall's ASI (1902) - 1958 AMASR Act. It is also a useful mains point: the colonial state that excavated India also invented the legal idea that the state is the custodian of the past, an idea the republic inherited without question.

Bankimchandra's Bengal: the literary renaissance around him

Bankimchandra did not write alone; he led a literary renaissance that made nineteenth-century Bengal the laboratory of modern Indian literature. Michael Madhusudan Dutt had already broken the ground with Meghnad Badh Kavya (1861), the epic that gave Bengali its blank verse and its first modern hero in the demon prince Meghnad. Dinabandhu Mitra's play Nil Darpan (1860) exposed the oppression of the indigo planters and became the drama of the Indigo Revolt; its English translation was published by the missionary James Long, who was jailed for it. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, the reformer, had simplified Bengali prose itself, making the novel possible.

Bankimchandra's journal Bangadarshan (1872) was the renaissance's engine room, publishing fiction, essays and criticism that set the standard for the new prose. The line from this ferment to the exam is direct: Nil Darpan is the answer to the indigo-revolt literature question, Meghnad Badh Kavya to the first Bengali epic question, and Anandamath to the national-song question, all products of the same two decades. The Bengal renaissance package is Vidyasagar (prose) - Madhusudan Dutt (epic) - Dinabandhu Mitra (Nil Darpan) - Bankimchandra (novel, Vande Mataram), and it shows how literature, reform and nationalism grew as one movement.

Reading Elliot against the grain: the nationalist answer

Elliot's preface did not go unanswered. The nationalist historians of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, R.C. Dutt, Jadunath Sarkar, R.C. Majumdar, and later Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra and Irfan Habib, re-read the very Persian chronicles Elliot had translated and found in them not a uniform record of despotism but a complex administrative and economic history: the revenue systems of the Sultanate, the agrarian order of the Mughals, the urban growth of the medieval centuries. The Aligarh school's work on the Mughal agrarian system, built from the Ain-i-Akbari that Elliot's volumes had made accessible, is the supreme example of using the colonial archive against the colonial conclusion.

This is the historiographical lesson the exam loves: sources are not conclusions. Elliot gave the sources; the framing was his, and later historians reframed them. A mains answer on colonial historiography should therefore praise Elliot's industry, quote his preface's bias, and show the nationalist and Marxist re-readings as the discipline's coming of age. The chain is Elliot translates - nationalists re-read - Aligarh quantifies - the medieval centuries are rehabilitated as history rather than decline. It is the final vindication of the scholars' labour: the archive outlived the empire that built it.

The museums: where the finds live

The scholars of this article did not only dig and write; they filled museums, and the museums are themselves exam geography. The Indian Museum, Kolkata, founded in 1814 by the Asiatic Society of Bengal, is India's oldest museum; its galleries hold the Bharhut stupa railing, Ashokan relics and the great sculpture collections. The Government Museum, Chennai (Egmore), founded in 1851, holds Rea's Adichanallur collection and Foote's prehistoric tools, the two assemblages at the heart of this article. The Sarnath Museum holds the lion capital; the National Museum, New Delhi (1949) holds the Harappan treasures including the Dancing Girl and the Priest King.

The museum map completes the article's circle: discovery (Foote, Rea, Marshall) - documentation (Burgess, Fergusson, Sewell) - translation (Elliot) - preservation (Curzon, Marshall) - display (the museums). For the exam, the museum facts most often asked are the oldest (Indian Museum, Kolkata, 1814, Asiatic Society) and the most specific (Bharhut railing at Kolkata, Adichanallur at Chennai, lion capital at Sarnath). A question that asks where the Bharhut railing is kept is testing whether the candidate followed the finds home.

Key Terms

• Alexander Rea: Alexander Rea is the ASI Superintending Archaeologist of the Southern Circle who excavated the urn-burial site of Adichanallur in Tamil Nadu between 1899 and 1905, recovering gold diadems, bronze figurines and iron weapons now in the Chennai Government Museum.
• Adichanallur: Adichanallur is the great urn-burial site on the Tamiraparani river in Tamil Nadu, first noticed by Fedor Jagor in 1876 and excavated by Alexander Rea, with burials carbon-dated to roughly 1000-600 BCE.
• A.H. Longhurst: A.H. Longhurst is the ASI archaeologist who carried out the first systematic description and conservation of Hampi's ruins and worked on the Pallava monuments of Mahabalipuram; his Hampi Ruins Described and Illustrated appeared in 1917.
• Robert Sewell: Robert Sewell is the Madras civil servant and historian whose A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagara (1900) rebuilt the empire's history from the Portuguese chronicles of Domingo Paes and Fernao Nuniz.
• Domingo Paes and Fernao Nuniz: Domingo Paes and Fernao Nuniz are the two Portuguese visitors whose early-sixteenth-century chronicles of Vijayanagara, translated by Robert Sewell, are the principal eyewitness sources for the empire at its height.
• James Burgess: James Burgess is the archaeologist who founded the Indian Antiquary in 1872, established the Archaeological Survey of Western India in 1874, and served as Director-General of the ASI from 1886 to 1889.
• Indian Antiquary: The Indian Antiquary is the journal of Indian antiquarian research founded by James Burgess in 1872, for decades the central record of inscriptions and discoveries.
• Alexander Cunningham: Alexander Cunningham is the founder of the Archaeological Survey of India (1861), the first Director-General, in whose succession James Burgess later served.
• H.M. Elliot: H.M. Elliot is the historian whose project The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians translated the Persian chroniclers of the Sultanate and Mughal periods into English.
• John Dowson: John Dowson is the scholar who completed and published Elliot's History of India as Told by Its Own Historians in eight volumes between 1867 and 1877 after Elliot's death in 1853.
• Madanapalle: Madanapalle is the Andhra town where Rabindranath Tagore, visiting the Besant Theosophical College in February 1919, translated Jana Gana Mana into English as The Morning Song of India.
• Margaret Cousins: Margaret Cousins is the Irish theosophist and musician who set Tagore's Madanapalle English translation of Jana Gana Mana to music and later founded the All India Women's Conference in 1927.
• Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay is the Bengali novelist called Sahitya Samrat, author of Durgeshnandini (1865), the first Bengali novel, and Anandamath (1882), which contains Vande Mataram.
• Anandamath: Anandamath is Bankimchandra's 1882 novel set in the Sannyasi rebellion, containing the song Vande Mataram, adopted as India's national song in 1950.
• Vande Mataram: Vande Mataram is the hymn to the motherland from Bankimchandra's Anandamath, the war cry of the Swadeshi movement and India's national song since 1950.