THUBTEN SAMPHEL

Director, Tibet Policy Institute, Dharamshala

In Kim, Rudyard Kipling’s classic account of the Great Game played out between an expanding Tsarist Russian empire and the British Raj, Sarat Chandra Das makes a cameo appearance as Hurree Chunder Mukherjee, a spy for the British Raj. His mission was to gather intelligence about the isolated kingdom located beyond the Himalayas. Sarat Chandra Das’s reports of his two clandestine journeys to Tibet in 1879 and 1881-1882 was published in 1902 as Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet. It has now been re-published by Speaking Tiger as Journey to Lhasa: The Diary of a Spy which provides for those interested in Tibet a detailed and fascinating account of a lost world and a way of life. Sarat Chandra Das was more than a spy. He was a linguist, scholar and traveller. His espionage work in Tibet for the British Raj led to his scholarship on the country. He became a spy who fell in love with his prey. His two for-your-eyes-only reports on Tibet informed the diplomacy behind the British invasion of Tibet in 1903. His mastery of the Tibetan language and scholarship on Tibet threw up one of the great Tibetan-English dictionaries that paved the way for new generations of Tibet scholars a helpful entry into the world of Tibetan Buddhism and culture. A little known aspect of Sarat Chandra Das was his friendship with another great traveler, Ekai Kawaguchi, a Japanese Zen monk who became Das’s student in Tibetan language and Buddhism. The Diary of a Spy comes as a breath of fresh air and I recommend it to all who are interested in travel, travel writing and adventure.