The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland was founded by the eminent Sanskrit scholar, 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‘.
Many distinguished scholars have been members of the Society, including Sir Richard Burton (1821-90), the noted explorer and translator of One Thousand and One Nights and the Kama Sutra; Sir Aurel Stein (1862-1943), the renowned archaeologist of the ‘Silk Road’ and Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the famous Bengali writer and poet.