Translating the Buddha: Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia and Its Indian Publics

Douglas Ober

doi:10.3390/h10010003

Abstract

In this article, I examine the popular Victorian poem The Light of Asia (1879) and its reception and adaptation in late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial India. Authored by the popular writer, Sir Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia is typically regarded as one of the foundational texts of modern Buddhism in the western world. Yet significantly less has been said about its influence in Asia and especially in India, where it has as an equally rich and varied history. While most scholarship has focused on its connections to the Sinhalese Buddhist leader Anagarika Dharmapala and his popular campaigns to ‘liberate’ the MahaBodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya, the singular focus on Dharmapala has obscured the poem’s much more expansive and enduring impact on a wide array of colonial Indian publics, regardless of caste, region, religion, ethnicity or language. The article explores the early history of its numerous adaptations, dramatizations, and translations in various regional languages. In providing an analysis of the poem’s Indian publics, the article shows how regional, political, and cultural idioms formed in multilingual contexts enable different readings and how literary and performative cultures interacted with colonial conceptions of religion, nation, and caste.

Highlights

Kosambi had yet to develop his international reputation as a Pali scholar of the finest rank—later becoming one of the first South Asians to earn a PhD from Harvard—he had already attained a national standing in India, known as much for his language skills as he was for the many years he spent traveling Ceylon and Burma as a Buddhist bhikkhu
In providing an analysis of the poem’s Indian publics, its reception history and adaptations, I aim to show how regional, political and cultural idioms formed in multilingual contexts enable different readings and how literary and performative cultures interacted with colonial conceptions of religion, nation, and caste
Until The Light of Asia appeared in 1879, Edwin Arnold (1832–1904) was better known for his role as the editor of London’s Daily Telegraph than he was for the nearly dozen books he had already published on topics as diverse as education in India, the grammar of the Turkish language, and original translations of Greek poetry

Summary

Arnold in India and The Light of Asia in the West

Until The Light of Asia appeared in 1879, Edwin Arnold (1832–1904) was better known for his role as the editor of London’s Daily Telegraph than he was for the nearly dozen books he had already published on topics as diverse as education in India, the grammar of the Turkish language, and original translations of Greek poetry. Some mixed the professional with the personal, such as William Cleaver Wilkinson, a Christian professor of poetry at the University of Michigan, who in 1884 published Edwin Arnold as Poetizer and As Paganizer (Wilkinson 1884), a two-hundred page plus work scrutinizing Arnold’s literary talents as well as ability to interpret Buddhism. It appears that for Arnold, all publicity was good publicity and despite the condemnations, The Light of Asia’s appeal to a broader Euro-American world of liberal. Light of Asia became seen as a great Buddhist work, a marker of India’s cultural prestige, and symbol of its simultaneous modernity and antiquity

Buddhist Publics and The Light of Asia in India

Performing the Buddha

Social Reform and Anti-Caste Publics

Conclusions