Jairam Ramesh pens a magnificent tribute to Edwin Arnold's 'The Light of Asia' (Book Review)

New Delhi, June 7 This surely is a labour of love as economist-author-politician Jairam Ramesh painstakingly unveils the myriad nuances of Edwin Arnolds "The Light of Asia", originally published in 1879, that has done much to shape the ideas of people around the world on the life of the Buddha but also had a profound impact on Mahatma Gandhi, Jawahralal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, and even Winston Churchill, as also five Nobel laureates. It also served as the basis for one of Indias first silent films and figured in a Hollywood classic.

"The Light of Asia" has been translated into 13 European, eight North and South East Asian and 14 South Asian languages. A number of plays, dance dramas and operas were adapted from it in different countries. "In the last fifty years, it has continued to evoke academic interest and has become the subject of doctoral dissertations and scholarly publications in the UK, Canada, USA and Germany. The most recent of these came out in February 2020 and dealt with its influence on James Joyce," Ramesh writes in "The Light of Asia – the poem that defined The Buddha"

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