Excerpt From Parjanya Sen's ‘A Babu Among The Lamas'

The Crucial Role of Sarat Chandra Das

A Babu Among the Lamas (Palgrave Macmillan) sets out to evaluate the biography and career of Sarat Chandra Das and examine his crucial role and agency in inaugurating the field of Tibet studies during the late 19th and early 20th centuries from the borderland regions of British Bengal. It follows the trajectory of Das’s explorations, his recovery of Sanskrit Buddhist texts from Tibet, the protracted process of colonial censorship and eventual publication of his travelogue, the diverse genres of visual material on Tibet that he produced, sponsored, and circulated, the process of production of his trilingual Tibetan-Sanskrit-English dictionary, and the contribution of the first society of its kind that he founded in 1892—the Buddhist Text Society of India (renamed in 1897 as the Buddhist Text and Anthropological Society). The book also foregrounds the figures of Das’s several Tibetan and Sikkimese collaborators and assesses, in turn, their inputs within the making of an early body of knowledge on Tibet…

It pitches the biography of Sarat Chandra Das as a form of bricolage in two distinct ways. Firstly, it attempts to weave together, from a diverse array of sources—archival, textual, and visual—the story of Das’s life, his two expeditions to Tibet, his chequered career, his scholarship and writing, and his role and contribution to a newly emerging field of Tibet studies. Secondly, and more importantly, it frames the life-writing of Das as a bricolage with heterogeneous implications—as a text scrutinizing Das’s role as Bengal’s first Tibetologist, as a thesis on discourse production on Tibet through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the Bengal Presidency, as a study of the politics, ethics, and contours of colonial gate keeping and Buddhist authorship, as an evaluation of native voices and agencies, and as a means for the formulation of a new historical imagination of Bengal’s past, envisaging Tibet as a sacred site for its recovery.

Further, the life-writing also purports to dislodge the predominantly Western and Eurocentric thrust of discourse production on Tibet through a shift of the locus of study to the Himalayan regions of Northern Bengal, and a detailed investigation of the processes via which such discourse was concomitant on native networks of exchange and collaboration. Also, by foregrounding Das, the book highlights the importance of Bengal and the Himalayan borderlands of Bengal as a transnational region from where Tibet entered a new scholarly and cognitive domain through the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Das’s ‘self’ as colonial subject became enunciated through its relationality with other subjects, namely that of his Tibetan and Sikkimese associates and collaborators. Even as the ‘babu’ identity became etched onto Das’s own subjectivity, locked as it was in a subordinate correlation with his white colonial over lords, such an identity and subjectivity sought to often recuperate and redefine itself by laying claim to alternative models of a nationalist and regionalist modernity, one that construed Tibet as an ideational and sacred locus for framing new kinds of historiography of the Bengal region. This book then reassesses these several relational contours through which Das’s subjectivity articulated and positioned itself, beyond his white colonial overlords’ attempts to inscribe and affix it, within a centred and subordinated locus…

Additionally, this postcolonial life-writing of modern Bengal’s first Tibetologist also emphasizes the relational nature of knowledge that Das generated with regard to Tibet. Apropos of this, the book makes several interventions—firstly, it questions the predominantly Eurocentric locus of discourse production vis-à-vis Tibet. A large body of work exists on the theme of Tibet and the British Indian empire, by Western scholars like Alex McKay, Donald S. Lopez Jr., Clare E. Harris, Kate Teltscher, Emma Martin, and Toni Huber. Important though it is, this scholarship on Tibet and its varied interactions with the British empire in India has tended to not examine in any depth Tibet’s historical ties with Bengal, or the ways in which Bengal, through the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, served as a crucial site for new forms of recovery and discourse production, with regard to Tibet.

This was made possible, as this book examines, primarily through the figure of Sarat Chandra Das and the networks of travel, collecting, archiving, translation, and textual and visual production that he facilitated and orchestrated. The book decentres and reorients the locus of knowledge-making on Tibet to British Bengal. Secondly, it attempts to show how this knowledge produced on Tibet was polyvalent, pluralistic, and multi-layered, relying on various kinds of colonial excisions and omissions, censorship and thwarting. Even as the power of production was heavily tilted towards the West, the discourse itself was a result of an asymmetrical adumbration of several layers of autochthonous knowledges, of many local Tibetan and Sikkimese agents—collaborators of Das—all of whose voices and agencies were eventually relegated to the archival margins…

(The book) advances this life-writing of Das as a speculative tool of interrogation of colonial discursive methods and pedagogical, linguistic, and textual productions on Tibet. Whereas Das was the central native figure around whom this new discourse of Tibetology revolved through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Das’s own knowledge was continuously enabled by and mediated through those of his collaborators. This study of Das’s life begins to then unpack the processes of production of knowledge as well as the roles of several others who were agential within its making.

(Parjanya Sen is Assistant Professor in English at Deshbandhu College for Girls, University of Calcutta. He was a 2024 postdoctoral visiting scholar at the University of Oxford and an early-career research fellow funded for this monograph project by the American Council of Learned Societies and The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies.)