A CURIOUS TRANSLATION

British poet journalist, Sir Edwin Arnold (1832-1904) is credited for his book The Light of Asia that is seen as the first serious introduction of Buddhism to the Western world. Jairam Ramesh whose scholarly book The Light of Asia: The Poem That Defined The Buddha was published by Penguin last month has one chapter dedicated to Arnold’s translation of a set of Vakhs of Lalla Ded into English

- Jairam Ramesh

In 2002, there appeared in New Delhi a slim thirty-five-page monograph with a long and forbidding title: A Monograph of The Announcement of Discovery of 47 Newly Found Vakhs of Lal Ded and Sir Edwin Arnold’s English Translation, so far Unpublished of 120 Vakhs, Embodied In The Manuscript of Pandit Amarnath’s Lallesvari Vakyani With Shiv Nath Hundoo, With A Brief Note By S N Pandita.

I had never heard of it; neither would have most. Had it not come up in a search of ‘Sir Edwin Arnold’ in the catalogue of the British Library, I would have missed this story. It is difficult to believe but it is worth telling.

Lallesvari was a fourteenth-century saint and princess revered even today by Hindus and Muslims in the Kashmir Valley. Her verse-sayings are called Lalla-Vakhs, the earliest compilation of which has come down to us from the early part of the eighteenth century.