Edwin Arnold

Edwin Arnold was born in Kent in 1832 and educated at King’s College London and University College, Oxford, where he won a prize for poetry. In his twenties he went to India as principal of the Deccan College at Poona, where he learned Sanskrit and the languages of the region. He returned to England in 1861 and spent most of his working life as a leader-writer and then editor at the Daily Telegraph.

His long poem The Light of Asia (1879), a life of the Buddha told in blank verse, was one of the most widely read poems of its time in Britain and America, and for many readers it was their first sympathetic account of Buddhism. He later took up the cause of the Mahābodhi temple at Bodh Gayā, urging that the place of the Buddha’s awakening be returned to Buddhist care.

From Sanskrit he made verse versions of episodes from the Mahābhārata, and The Song Celestial (1885), his Bhagavad Gītā. It did for the Gītā what The Light of Asia had done for the Buddha: it was in Arnold’s verse that the young Gandhi, a law student in London, first read the poem. Arnold was knighted in 1888, travelled and lived for a time in Japan, and died in London in 1904.