By Rohana R. Wasala

This article is dedicated to the memory of Sri Lankan patriot, humanitarian, and friend of fellow global Buddhists, Hon. Lakshman Kadirgamar, who was instrumental in winning official recognition for Vesak as an international holiday at the United Nations in September 1999, on the eve of the 3rd Millennium

Jairam Ramesh quotes the following short quatrain from Sir Edwin Arnold, the author of The Light of Asia, writing in 1893:

Praise me or asperse,

Deck me or deride,

In my veil of verse,

Safe from you I hide.

Edwin Arnold addressed these words to his hypothetical biographer. His denial of his overt presence in the poem amounts to more than stating an obvious fact, which is that he is assuming a persona for the purpose of his artistic expression of his central theme. It is also a gentle invitation to the reader to catch, if possible, a whiff of his own authentic spiritual discovery, as  reflected in the quality of his absorption in his subject: presenting the life and teachings of Buddha Gautama in the form of fictionalised fact for easy understanding at a time when little or nothing was known in the West about the great Indian sage. In his book about Edwin Arnold’s poem Jairam Ramesh offers a brief description of the life and times of the poet, and narrates the story of how the poem came to be composed and how it was received at home and abroad, and how it later evolved to be a global phenomenon in the last quarter of the 19th century and beyond.

Before proceeding, I would like to introduce Jairam Ramesh to the reader. Seventy-one year old Jairam Ramesh (b. 1954) is an Indian economist and politician with a diverse academic background. He can also be described as a dabbler in literary matters who adopts a maverick approach. At present, he is a Member of Parliament elected from the Indian National Congress Party (INCP), representing the Karnataka State in the Rajya Sabha, the Indian parliament. Jairam obtained a B.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1975, and a Master of Science degree in Public Policy and Public Management from the Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. Although he enrolled for a doctoral program with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA in 1977, he quit it after some initial preparation. 

Jairam served as the Union Minister of Rural Development under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from July 2011 to May 2014, and has been active in various official capacities in the public sphere during INCP governments, sometimes receiving controversial attention. He has been dispensing his varied expertise as university lecturer, international scholar, economic consultant, and journalist, among other things. He has authored a number of books dealing with subjects related to economics and policy management. ‘THE LIGHT OF ASIA: the poem that defined the Buddha’ reveals an exception to his normal secular academic interests. But it doesn’t surprise us, considering the fact that he shows a deep commitment to spiritual values. According to the Wikipedia that quotes from a 2012 feature in Hindustan Times, Jairam Ramesh considers himself a practising Hindu ‘ingrained with Buddhism’, and calls himself ‘Hind-Budh’.

(This article is based on an Amazon Kindle version of Jairam’s work (as a Penguin book), which I acquired in 2021, in which year it was first published in India. Though I wanted to find the printed edition, I failed to get a copy here in Australia at that time. The Kindle form has the look of an uncorrected manuscript, but I was able to grasp its main points.  It being the Covid-19 lockdown time then, I found this Kindle edition of Jairam’s thesis a helpful companion for me to revisit the print version of Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia that I already had with me.)

His Holiness the Dalai Lama in his Foreword (dated 3 October 2020) to Jairam’s book writes:

‘I believe what Sir Edwin’s poems showed was that the message of the Buddha is timeless, eternal and relevant. I am sure the readers will find this reflected in Mr Ramesh’s book, too’.

Jairam divides the text into four Sections. Section I is devoted to an account of ‘the man (Arnold the poet), the milieu and the moment (that) would come together in 1879 and The Light of Asia would blaze forth….’, as he writes at the end of that part of the book.

But to begin at the beginning, in his introduction to the book (‘A First Word’), Jairam remarks how The Light of Asia led to ‘an epidemic of exuberance’ as he calls it, when it was originally published in London in July 1879. The book created great enthusiasm in England, which soon spread to America and Europe and to other parts of the world, and the trend would continue for a few decades. 

Jairam goes on to mention the names of five persons in subcontinental India, and Sri Lanka who were fascinated and inspired by Arnold’s epic poem. They later reached iconic stature through their contributions to the multifaceted (political, social, cultural,  and economic) upliftment of their peoples: The young Indian Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda (b. 1863), and  the Buddhist renunciate and missionary Anagarika Dharmapala (b. 1864) from Colombo, Sri Lanka, were deeply motivated by the poem. The aspiring lawyer of Indian origin in London who was later to become  Mahatma Gandhi (b. 1869), and his teenage followers Jawaharlal Nehru (b,1889) who would become India’s first prime minister in 1947, and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (b. 1891), later to become  the chief architect of the Indian Constitution and the first Minister of Law and Justice of Independent India, similarly found Edwin Arnold’s epic to be a source of profound inspiration and succumbed to its strong positive impact.

Apart from this, The Light of Asia had a marked influence on at least eleven famous literary figures from across the world according to Jairam. Five of them were to become Nobel Laureates, namely, Rudyard Kipling (1907), Rabindranath Tagore (1913), W.B. Yeats (1923), Ivan Bunin (1933), and T.S. Eliot (1948). The other six were to become equally famous in the world of literature: Herman Melville, Leo Tolstoy, Lafcadio Hearn, D.H. Lawrence, John Masefield, and Jorge Luis Borges. 

The Arnold classic’s influence spread into other fields of human intellectual engagement, including the world of science and industry. Around the beginning of the 20th century, it exercised its charm on the life of C.V. Raman, the young student of science in Madras, who would be honoured in 1930 with the Nobel Prize for Physics, becoming the first Indian Nobel Laureate in that subject area. The Russian chemist and the formulator of the periodic law and the creator of one version of the periodic table of elements Dmitri Mendeleyeev, and the Scottish-American industrialist-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie felt a special attraction towards Edwin Arnold’s poem about the Buddha. Despite his extremely controversial reputation in the military, colonial administrator Field Marshal Herbert KItchener (1850-1916) was regarded as a hero of his time. He used to carry a copy of The Light of Asia in his pocket wherever he went.

Jairam shows how, in the decades that followed its publication, the Arnoldian magnum opus was  translated into many foreign languages including thirteen European, eight North and South-East Asian, and fourteen South Asian, languages; it was adapted in a number of plays, dance   dramas, and operas. In the last half a century, it has continued to engage academic interest. It has formed the subject of scholarly publications and even doctoral dissertations in the UK, Canada, USA and Germany. Jairam found that the latest example of this trend was a February 2020 study of the influence of The Light of Asia on James Joyce (b.1882), a pioneer of the modernist avant garde movement in literature and the famed author of such monumental ‘stream of consciousness’ novels as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. 

The first of two events that revived his interest in the Arnold classic that he had read in his mid teens, Jairam says, was his discovery of a letter that the late Jawaharlal Nehru had received from his British counterpart Winston Churchill bearing the date February 21, 1955. Churchill wrote:

I hope you will think of the phrase ‘The Light of Asia’. It seems to me that you might be able to do what no other human being could in giving India the lead, at least in the realm of thought, throughout Asia, with the freedom and dignity of the individual as the ideal rather than the Communist Party drill book.’ 

Another letter from Churchill to Nehru ended thus: ‘….Yours is indeed a heavy burden and responsibility, shaping the destiny of your many millions of countrymen and playing your outstanding part in world affairs. I wish you well in your task. Remember The Light of Asia.’

(Jairam’s italics)

Nehru was going through his first, and Churchill his second, term as prime minister. They were facing life and sharing individual burdens as kindred spirits, while giving leadership to two nations which were opposed to each other as the coloniser and the colonised. Between 1921 and 1945 Nehru had spent a total of ten years in prison during the oppressive British colonial rule, three of which (1942-45) were when Churchill was prime minister for the first time, during which he led his country to victory over the NAZI (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) forces under Adolf Hitler. The friendship that Nehru and Churchill mutually sustained between them defied external circumstances. Both shared morale boosting memories associated with their having been engaged with the meaning of The Light of Asia in their youth. Churchill’s friendly admonition to Nehru to provide leadership to India with ‘the freedom and dignity of the individual as the ideal’ at heart was prompted by the British leader’s memory of the particular Buddhist insight he had gained by reading The Light of Asia in the formative years of his youth.

To be concluded