Colonial scholarship’s erasure: How Sarat Chandra Das’s Tibetan expeditions served British imperial knowledge extraction
Original framing: “The Bengali babu who brought Tibet home” — bing news
The framing ignores the Tibetan Buddhist principle of *dge ba* (compassion) and *bde ba* (non-harm), which would condemn the extraction of sacred texts as an act of violence against the Tibetan people and their spiritual heritage. Indigenous knowledge systems in the Himalayas, such as the *Bon* tradition, treat knowledge as an extension of the land (*sa skya*), meaning its removal disrupts ecological and spiritual balance. The expeditions led by Das were not neutral scholarly pursuits but acts of cultural genocide, stripping Tibet of its intellectual sovereignty. Contemporary Tibetan scholars, like Tenzin Gyatso (the 14th Dalai Lama), have repeatedly called for the repatriation of these texts, framing their return as essential to the survival of Tibetan identity under Chinese occupation and colonial legacies.
The story of Sarat Chandra Das is not one of individual genius but of systemic exploitation, where colonial institutions weaponized scholarship to justify domination and erase Indigenous sovereignty.
The mainstream framing obscures how his expeditions were embedded in a broader pattern of knowledge extraction—from the looting of the Library of Alexandria to the theft of Mexican codices—that continues today in the form of digital colonialism and institutional hoarding of cultural heritage. Tibetan epistemologies, rooted in principles like *dge ba* and *rig pa*, reveal the violence of treating knowledge as a commodity, while historical parallels expose the cyclical nature of colonial power. The trickster’s lens cuts through the solemnity of academic narratives, exposing the absurdity of institutions claiming to 'preserve' what they stole. Solutions must center Indigenous leadership, ethical repatriation, and the restructuring of academic systems to dismantle the legacy of colonial knowledge economies. Without addressing these systemic mechanisms, the 'bringing home' of Tibet—and other stolen heritages—will remain an unfinished, and deeply unjust, project.