Babu among the Lamas: Sarat Chandra Das and the Making of Tibet Studies in Colonial Bengal

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.

• Chapter 1. Introduction: Biography as bricolage.- Chapter 2. Across the mountain passes: Babu Autumn’s Moon on the roof of the world.- Chapter 3. Native scholarship, colonial censorship and authorship: The afterlives of Das’s travelogues and works.- Chapter 4. Picturing Tibet: Sarat Chandra Das and the visual rendering of Tibet from Darjeeling.- Chapter 5. Collaborators and contested authorship: Das’s trilingual dictionary.- Chapter 6. Tibet and a new Bengali nationalism: The multiple legacies of Sarat Chandra Das and the Buddhist Text Society of India.