England's Appreciation of the Bhagavad-Gita---Sir Edwin Arnold's "Song Celestial"

England first brought India's spiritual treasures to the attention of Europeans in the eighteenth century with the founding of the Asiatic Society.

Sir Wilkins' translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, and his authoritative Sanskrit grammar (1787) became the basis for all later work. The destiny of India's radiantly pure sacred texts was to make the miracle of India real to the West.

In the nineteenth century, Sir Edwin Arnold (1832-1904) was mysteriously drawn to India's philosophy through his attraction for the English translations of Indian literature. In 1885, exactly one hundred years after Sir Wilkins' English translation of the Bhagavad Gita was published, Sir Arnold's blank verse translation of the sacred scripture appeared as The Song Celestial. Sir Arnold published a portion of The Song Celestial in the International Review and dedicated it to the American people "with all gratitude and attachment." (Carl T. Jackson, The Oriental Religions and American Thought: Nineteenth-Century Explorations, (Westport, CT & London, England: Greenwood Press, 1981), pp. 151, 152 [Hereafter Oriental Religions] It enjoyed wide circulation and many scholars of the Gita acknowledged its influence on readers.

Mahatma Gandhi esteemed the Song Celestial as the best translation of his beloved Gita and laid bare that it inspired his lifelong devotion to its study in his search for truth. In The Story of My Experiments with Truth Gandhi revealed his thoughts on this matter:

Towards the end of my second year in England I came across two Theosophists---brothers and both unmarried. They talked to me about the Gita. They were reading Sir Edwin Arnold's translation---The Song Celestial---and they invited me to read the original with them. I felt ashamed, as I had read the divine poem neither in Sanskrit nor in Gujarati [Gandhi's mother tongue]. I was constrained to tell them that I had not read the Gita, but that I would gladly read it with them, and that though my knowledge of Sanskrit was meagre, still I hoped to be able to understand the original to the extent of telling where the translation failed to bring out the meaning. I began reading the Gita with them. The verses in the second chapter,

"If one
Ponders on objects of the sense, there springs
Attraction: from attraction grows desire,

Desire flames to fierce passion, passion breeds
Recklessness; then the memory--all betrayed--
Lets noble purpose go, and saps the mind,
Till purpose, mind, and man are all undone."

made a deep impression on my mind, and they still ring in my ears. The book struck me as one of priceless worth. The impression has ever since been growing on me with the result that I regard it today as the book par excellence for the knowledge of Truth. It has afforded me invaluable help in my moments of gloom. I have read almost all the English translations of it, and I regard Sir Edwin Arnold's as the best. He has been faithful to the text, and yet it does not read like a translation. Though I read the Gita with these friends, I cannot pretend to have studied it then. It was only after some years that it became a book of daily reading. (Mahatma Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments with Truth: (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1948) Part I, XX:90.

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