Sarat Chandra Das (1849–1917) was a renowned Bengali Tibetologist, spy, and explorer who earned worldwide fame by traveling to Tibet during hostile times. On behalf of British India, he traveled to Lhasa in disguise to collect geographical and cultural information about Tibet with great secrecy and brought back invaluable data regarding the religious and social life there. His most notable work is the massive reference book 'A Tibetan-English Dictionary' and his deep research on the Tibetan language and Buddhism. Despite being a Bengali, his adventurous expeditions through the inaccessible paths of the Himalayas in the nineteenth century and his contributions to Tibetan language and literature have kept him immortal in the history of the pursuit of knowledge.
