by JR Jayewardene (Excerpted from Men and Memories) The Ramgarh Session of the Indian National Congress, the last Session before Freedom was held in March 1940, in a small village, in Bihar Province, “sanctified by the touch of the feet of Gautama, the Buddha”, said the Reception Committee Chairman, Rajendra Prasad, later President of Free India. I attended the Session as a delegate of the Ceylon National Congress and recorded my impressions then. The little village of Ramgarh is today famous throughout the world.
For here gathered the men and women of the new India with her beauty and her chivalry, intent on freeing their motherland from foreign rule. It was a pretty countryside that we passed through on our way, for over a hundred miles to the west of Calcutta. Ramgarh itself is very similar to Diyatalawa, undulating valleys, large plains and mountain streams abounding.
It is also a countryside with a history unequaled in the world. The founders of Buddhism and Jainism both spent large portions of their lives in this province, now called Bihar. Bodh-Gaya is hardly a hundred miles away towards the north.
“Every particle of dust in this province”, said the retiring President, Rajendra Prasad to the delegates, “is sanctified by the touch of the feet of Gautama, the Buddha.” And as a tribute to India’s greatest son and to his disciple, Asoka, India’s greatest monarch, a facsimile, of one of Asoka’s pillars, over a hundred feet high, had been erected at the ent.