JOHN MALCOLM & MATTHEW MURRAY

John Malcolm was a friend and contemporary of Matthew Murray. 

They were both sons of hill farmers of Eskdale, Dumfriesshire, Scotland. They both 
went to India and served in the Indian Army. During Matthew Murray's years of 
service in India, he married an Indian woman, believed to have been a Rajah's 
daughter. Contetty bore Matthew 3 children. They were born in Kerala in 1792, 1794 
and 1798. After the death of his wife, Matthew Murray returned to Eskdale to the 
family land "Georgefield" at Westerkirk, near Langholm.
John Malcolm was the son of an Eskdale hill farmer. He learned Persian and made his career 
in the Indian Army also, after which Malcolm went on three missions to Iran (1800, 1806, 
1810), travelling from Bombay to Bushire and on to Shiraz and Tehran as the East India 
Company's representative to the court of Fath Ali Shah; he was popular with the Persians, 
and his Sketches are well observed and sympathetic. Malcolm enjoyed the full support of 
the East India Company in researching and writing his History of Persia, in which he wrote 
that had he not first been a traveller, he would not have become a historian. His missions 
to Iran were cut short by the arrival of rival missions sent by the London Foreign Office 
under Harford Jones Brydges and Gore Ouseley, but not before he had coordinated 
several surveys of little-known parts of Iran. 
His work is published. 
Malcolm, John, Sketches of Persia, from the Journals of a Traveller in the East, 2 vols 
(published anonymously), 1827; new edition (published as John Malcolm) 1 vol., 1845