Travelogues from colonial and pre-colonial times inevitably have great value as source material for historians. Unfortunately, very few such publications exist on Tibet. The first mention of the 'forbidden country' in the annals of politics and diplomacy outside of Asia can be found early on: in the travel diaries of Megasthenes, a Greek geographer, diplomat and traveller who visited India and other neighbouring areas in 290 BC. But the next study of the high plateau came some 2200 years later, when the British, driven by colonial ambition, undertook to explore Tibet.
During the late 1860s, the colonial authorities commissioned a team of Indians to explore the often treacherous terrain of Tibet, an expedition that resulted in rare documentation on the region's statecraft and ethnography. Part of the group was Sarat Chandra Das, who in 1879 penned the first detailed travel records on the area in his Narrative of a Journey to Tashi-Lhunpo, followed by Narrative of a Journey to Lhasa in 1881-82. These two were published in 1885 and 1902, respectively, and comprised the first modern source material to trace the politico-ethnographic history of Tibet. In 1901, the Royal Geographical Society of India published the two travelogues together under a single title, Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet.
My Himalayan Journeys, a selected compilation from these two travelogues, is timely in view of the renewed global interest in the question of Tibetan sovereignty, both in theory and practice. Even a less immediately interested reader, however, will be amazed by the brave struggle of the 'pundit', as Das was called, in his quest for knowledge. Given the energy that pours off the page on a re-reading, it is a pity that Das's work has been discredited by some historians due to the belief that he was in Tibet on a British espionage mission. Such subjective evaluation of the rare content in his travel notes has inhibited academic inquiry.
In truth, Das's contribution to the study of Tibet is unquestionable. The mere fact that he brought back with him several hundred volumes of manuscripts and block prints from the great libraries in Tibet (many of them in Sanskrit, texts that had remained untraceable for centuries) must win him praise. Then again, with the Colonial Education Department archives themselves describing Das's assignment as "almost exclusively employed on political duties in the direction of Tibet", his enduring reputation as a spy is understandable.
That was perhaps unavoidable in 19th-century Bengal, though, when nationalist ideas were yet to gain momentum. With the Indian National Congress itself born only in 1885, Das may well have been forced to accept certain conditions before he was allowed to be part of the expedition. Alternately, one can say that the explorer may have functioned in the grey zone between scholarship and espionage, at a time when it was impossible to distinguish between the two. Either way, the emphasis on the 'exotica' of espionage has put Das's scholarly contributions in the shadow for too long.