This book offers the first comprehensive study of Sarat Chandra Das (18491917), the Bengali explorer and scholar whose journeys to Tibet and scholarly contributions transformed the religious and intellectual landscape of colonial Bengal. Tracing Dass expeditions, his recovery of Sanskrit Buddhist texts, and the founding of the Buddhist Text Society of India, the book reveals how Tibet was reimagined as a sacred geographycentral to the revival of Buddhism and the construction of new nationalist histories in early twentieth-century Bengal. By centering the theme of native agency and highlighting Dass collaborations with Tibetan and Sikkimese interlocutors, the book challenges dominant narratives of colonial knowledge-making. It shows how Buddhism, textual and visual discourses, and trans-Himalayan networks were mobilized in service of both historical recovery and regional self-fashioning of Bengals past. Rich in historical detail and interpretive insight, the book significantly contributes to Buddhist studies, Tibetology, and South Asian intellectual history.
Chapter
1. Introduction: Biography as bricolage.
Chapter
2. Across the
mountain passes: Babu Autumns Moon on the roof of the world.
Chapter
3.
Native scholarship, colonial censorship and authorship: The afterlives of
Dass travelogues and works.
Chapter
4. Picturing Tibet: Sarat Chandra Das
and the visual rendering of Tibet from Darjeeling.
Chapter
5. Collaborators
and contested authorship: Dass trilingual dictionary.
Chapter
6. Tibet and
a new Bengali nationalism: The multiple legacies of Sarat Chandra Das and the
Buddhist Text Society of India.
Parjanya Sen is a historian and anthropologist working in the field of Himalayan Buddhism. He is a 2023 ACLS Early-Career Research Fellow funded by The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies, and was Postdoctoral Visiting Scholar at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford from January to October, 2024. He is presently working as Assistant Professor in English at Deshbandhu College for Girls, University of Calcutta. He has edited a book 'Death and Dying in Northeast India: Indigeneity and Afterlife' (Routledge, 2022) and has published on the theme of native agency and knowledge-production on Tibet in several international peer-reviewed journals.
