Ramesh points at yet another possibility.
Author Jairam Ramesh (Pradeep Gaur/Mint)Īn extensive body of research exists on the spark that led Arnold to write this poem. Thus, the Englishman mostly remembered for the infamous division of Bengal division along communal lines came to support the first translator of the Mahabharata. When Balfour refused, Arnold approached another friend, Viceroy Lord Curzon, who granted Ganguli a yearly pension of ₹600. Arnold wrote to Arthur Balfour, the First Lord of the Treasury in the British Cabinet, and sought help for his friend. Kisari Mohan Ganguli, the first person to translate the Mahabharata in its entirety into English, was in need of money. Here’s a gem among the anecdotes that Ramesh has unearthed from the archives. His painstaking research has included even Arnold’s great grandchildren. In between, he also illuminates the life of its author. Jairam Ramesh charts the poem’s magnificent journey as it reached different shores, came to be translated into over 30 languages, became a topic of extensive research and courted criticisms. “Although Arnold had not discredited Christ in any way,” writes Ramesh, the missionaries thought that “the Englishman had a diabolical design to bring disrepute to Christianity”. Not surprisingly, soon after its publication, American missionaries believed it was “detrimental to Christianity”. Here was a book about a personage who predated Christ by several centuries, preached and demonstrated love and compassion, and led to the birth of a major religion that, without making a stringent demand on rituals, had a sound philosophical base in terms of metaphysics and epistemology. It was published in the late nineteenth century when organised Christianity was facing questions. That the Buddha was eventually assimilated as the ninth avatar of Vishnu and that the Constitution under Article 25 included Buddhism within the Hindu fold, a Constitution that was drafted under the watch of a great scholar who abandoned Hinduism and embraced Buddhism, are remarkable comments on Indian civilization.īut what accounted for its enormous impact in the West where it influenced a range of writers including Georges Luis Borges, TS Eliot and James Joyce? Besides its literary merit, there were some historical forces at play. Gautam Buddha received wisdom in Gaya but chose to travel over 250 km to deliver his first sermon at Kashi’s doorstep in Sarnath. Notably, for several centuries Buddhism posed perhaps the greatest philosophical challenge to Hinduism. Sanskrit scholar PV Kane mentioned it in his monumental work History of Dharmashastra.
Dharmanand Kosambi became a Buddhist monk after reading the poem in 1899, and went on to become the first modern Indian scholar of Pali.
The great physicist CV Raman was greatly influenced by three books, two were on science and one was The Light of Asia. It was among the works Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi recommended Jawaharlal Nehru frequently referred to its verses in his writings over several decades. Vivekananda carried a copy with him to Chicago in 1893. It influenced Leo Tolstoy as well as his compatriot Dmitri Mendeleev, the inventor of the periodic table of elements. This is among the many delightful anecdotes Ramesh recounts about the poem which soon after its publication revived the focus on the Buddha both in the West and the East. Though Carnegie, who became ‘the world’s richest man in 1901’, was in his forties and not exactly in his ‘youth’ when he began courting the much younger Whitefield, the poem remained the nucleus of their love. Ramesh tells us that while the epic poem on Gautam Buddha inspired a range of personalities, it also led to a romance between Louise Whitefield and Andrew Carnegie in 1880 that culminated in marriage seven years later. Jairam Ramesh’s new book The Light of Asia: The Poem That Defined Buddha showed me that Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia (1879), perhaps the most influential poem on an Indian icon by a British author, managed to do just that. Ever since I read Orhan Pamuk’s The Red Haired Woman, I have been searching for a book that did what these lines describe: “the greatest happiness in life was to marry the girl you’d spent your youth reading books with in the passionate pursuit of a shared ideal”.
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