In the opening article in the very first volume of the Journal of the Buddhist Text Society of India, “Indian Pandits in Tibet,” Sarat Chandra Das reconstructs the lives of the Tantric Buddhist masters who were key agents behind the dissemination of Buddhism to Tibet from India. Das focuses specially on the figures from Bengal, such as Atiśa, Kamalaśīla and Śāntarakṣita. Das translated and compiled these lives from the fourteenth-century Tibetan chos ’byung (narrative about the emergence of the Dharma) by the Sakya master Butön Rinchen Drub/ Bu-ston-rin-chen-grub (1290-1364). The article in the JBTSI would be expanded by Das into a book Indian Pandits in the Land of Snow (1893), edited by his brother, Nobin Chandra, and brought out by the Baptist Mission Press later, in the same year.
This biography of Atiśa by Das, translated from Butön’s chos ’byung would be featured within a new regional history of Bengal by another prominent Bengali intellectual of the time, Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay/Banerjee (1885-1930), Haraprasad Shastri’s student and intellectual successor. One of the foremost Indian archaeologists of his time, Banerjee would inaugurate the idea of a new national and regional history, the first initiative of its kind, through his two-volume Bāngalār Itihās/ History of Bengal (first volume published in 1914; second volume in 1917). He was particularly invested in Bengal’s Buddhist past and pieced...