Cultural Studies:Ireland and India: what can they possibly have in common? One is very small, a tiny westerly island off the coast of Europe, the other occupies most of an Asian subcontinent. The population of one is 4.2 million, the other 1.1 billion.
There are two national languages in Ireland, only one of which most of its citizens can speak fluently; there are 22 official languages in India, not to mention at least 18 other unofficial ones, each spoken by more than five million people.
Ireland and India are both republics and - ah, yes - they were both once parts of the British empire.
In fact, as we can see from this substantial volume of essays, ably edited by Tadhg Foley and Maureen O'Connor, the history of contacts, interactions and comparison between the two countries is rich and complex. Ireland and India emerged from a NUIG conference in 2004; there has just been a second conference on the same theme at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. It is neither a negligible nor a factitious subject. The inter-related colonial and post-colonial stories of Ireland and India prove to be fascinatingly comparable both in their similarities and their differences.
There were, for instance, the administrators who moved from one end of the empire to the other, such as Cornwallis, who in the 18th century served successively in America, India and Ireland; Charles Trevelyan, whose notorious period of office in Ireland during the Famine was preceded and followed by extended terms in India; or Sir Anthony McDonnell, a long-serving officer in the Indian civil service, who found himself in a quite different situation as an Irish Catholic imperialist when he became under-secretary of state for Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century. Essays by Dermot Dix, Ciara Baylor and ML Brillman tease out the implications of these men's careers for the understanding of imperial thinking. Government awareness of the links between Ireland and India and the varying problems of colonial control are revealed both in Heather Laird's interesting essay on the mid-19th-century translation of the Brehon laws, and Cóilín Parsons's study of the use of English literature in elementary education in the two countries.
The Irish were at once colonisers and colonised; they helped run the Indian empire, though they were, like the Indians, a subject people. From as early as the 1840s, as Sean Ryder demonstrates, Irish nationalists made common cause with India in the anti-imperialist rhetoric of Young Ireland. And by the end of the 19th century anti-colonial alliances gathered momentum: a whole series of essays show the connections and mutual support between Indian and Irish liberation movements in North America during the first World War and continuing contacts in the 1920s and 1930s. A few exceptional figures committed themselves completely to India. The career of Margaret Noble from Co Tyrone, aka Sister Nivedita, Hindu nun and supporter of the Bengali revolutionary movement, is the subject of two studies, by Maina Singh and Elleke Boehmer; there are essays by Selina Guinness and Joseph Lennon on the radical political theories and the post-colonial aesthetics of James Cousins, Irish Theosophist, poet and Indian activist.
The imperial connection took Irish people to India for very different reasons, as soldiers and administrators, as seekers for spiritual truth, or as missionaries, such as Thomas Gavan Duffy, whose bizarre-sounding propaganda film The Catechist of Kil-Arni is analysed by Fiona Bateman. (It seems there is a real place called Kil-Arni in south India: it's not just a spoof of Killarney.) Louis MacNeice went in 1947 to make documentaries for the BBC on India at the point of independence, and Kitt Fryatt, in her sensitive reading of his Indian poems, shows how they compare and contrast with his reactions to Ireland.
FOR SOME WRITERS, most notably Yeats, India remained a key territory of the mind, a place of the "cultural uncanny", as Malcolm Sen calls it. And if India looms large in the imagination of Yeats, even though he never visited it, Kipling, with no special connections to Ireland, chose to make the central character in his major Indian novel Irish. Why? "I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?" The anguished cry, repeated by Kipling's hero as he undergoes his recurrent crises of identity, is explored in its broadest terms by Kaori Nagai in her fine book, Empire of Analogies. Kim, the Indian street-urchin, turns out to be Irish, the legitimate son of Kimball O'Hara, drunken soldier of the Mavericks regiment, rediscovered and identified by the regimental Catholic chaplain who married Kim's parents. Reclaimed as a white sahib, Kim's gifts of chameleon-like disguise are put to use in the Great Game, the imperial network of spies. Nagai places Kim's Irishness in relation to Kipling's other uses of Irish characters in his work and his changing sense of empire.
There are many Irish voices in Kipling's early Indian stories and poems, most centrally Mulvaney, the key character of the trio whose adventures are chronicled in Soldiers Three. It is hard to know which is more likely to make Irish readers gnash their molars, Mulvaney's appalling travesty of an Irish accent, or Kipling's summation of his countrymen: "That quaint, crooked, sweet, profoundly irresponsible and profoundly loveable race that fight like fiends, argue like children, reason like women, obey like men, and jest like their own goblins of the rath through rebellion, loyalty, want, woe or war." (How's your blood pressure doing after reading that?)
Nagai, with admirable dispassionateness, shows how Mulvaney is used by Kipling to head off the threat of Irish rebelliousness - there are suggestions of Fenianism in Mulvaney's past. In an Indian context he becomes a staunch, if somewhat erratic, imperial loyalist. Nagai points out that, unlike his two English comrades, he marries and settles in India after his military term is up; for the Irishman India can become home, in part because of some sort of perceived kinship between the Irish and the Oriental.
Mulvaney is Kim's Irish forerunner, though the circumstances of his upbringing mean that we are spared another atrocious Irish accent. As with Mulvaney, "Kim's Irishness is meant to function as a powerful antidote to Irish conspiracy". However, Nagai argues that the book has to be seen in the context of South Africa, where it was written, and Kipling's new conception of empire made urgent by the Boer War, which was just ending when it was published. In Kipling's previous Indian work, written when he was actually living there in the 1880s, there is a constant sense of the need for the British to maintain their distinctive Englishness against the threat of the alien environment, the land, the atmosphere and the appalling, oppressive weather conditions. After he had left India in 1889, his vision of empire came to focus on an alliance of the white settler colonies, united across the huge gaps in space by a common imagination of themselves. So in Kim, his last major Indian book, he fantasises India as a land without hardship or difficulty, in which his Irish boy adventurer can be easily assimilated while still remaining white, a projection of Kipling's dream-work of empire.
But as Nagai tellingly shows also, the analogies between India and Ireland could be read another way, as they were by Maud Gonne in her construction of Queen Victoria as the "Famine Queen" on the occasion of the monarch's visit to Ireland in 1900.
THE IRISH FAMINE was linked to the terrible famines devastating India at the time and Victoria's idealisation as the imperial matriarch, mother to all the people of her empire, was turned into its opposite, the vicious vampire who sucked out the lifeblood of the Indian and Irish people alike.
Nagai's concluding words sum up effectively the significance of both these books: "The pairing of India and Ireland is important, because this is precisely where we find two separate dreams born out of the Empire curiously intersect: the dream of India and Ireland closely united in their unwavering loyalty to the Queen, and that of Indian and Irish nationalists, united in their goal of throwing off imperial rule to achieve their respective independences."
Nicholas Grene is professor of English literature in Trinity College, Dublin and is currently working on a book on Yeats's poetry
Ireland and India: Colonies, Culture and Empire Edited by Tadhg Foley and Maureen O'Connor, Foreword by Saurabh Kumar Irish Academic Press, 306pp. €27.50 Empire of Analogies: Kipling, India and Ireland By Kaori Nagai Cork University Press, 185pp. €39