What do Ireland and India have in common?
At first glance, it can be difficult to find two more dissimilar countries. Ireland is an island nation of just over five million people, a little less than the population of Ahmedabad. It enjoys one of the highest median incomes in the world, on par with Finland and South Korea.
Yet, behind such dissimilarities is a remarkable shared history. From the mid-19th century onward, Irish and Indian nationalists forged strong personal and associational connections, recognising how both societies suffered under British imperialism. Famines, impoverishment, racism, political disenfranchisement, and a drain of wealth: Indians and Irish had a lot to talk about.
Jane Ohlmeyer, a professor of history at Trinity College Dublin, details Ireland’s complex relationship with India and the rest of the British Empire in her book Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World. In this episode of Past Imperfect, she discusses how the Irish – both colonial subjects and partners in empire – left a distinct stamp upon the subcontinent. Some Irish, like Annie Besant, were towering figures within the Indian nationalist movement. Others, such as Michael O’Dwyer, the governor of Punjab during the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, formed the advanced guard of British imperial dominance.
Ohlmeyer’s scholarship, furthermore, demonstrates how the Irish-Indian connection stretches much further back in time, in some often-unexpected ways. Take, for example, the city of Mumbai.
Much of the city’s ethos – its business-mindedness and its religious and cultural plurality – can be traced to the policies of the second English governor of colonial Bombay, Gerald Aungier, in power between 1669 and 1677. Aungier, however, was not actually English: he was an Irish Protestant, the grandson of the archbishop of Dublin. Ohlmeyer shows how this Irish heritage deeply influenced the ways in which Aungier turned Bombay, then a sleepy ex-Portuguese collection of islands, into the future commercial entrepot of western India.
“Bombay,” Ohlmeyer states, “was the Indian equivalent to the city of Derry.” As the first theatre of English imperialism, Ireland was subject to policies and programmes which would be implemented in colonial India only a short while later. Derry, on the northern fringes of the island, was turned over to a London-based corporation with a mandate to make the city a profitable center of English power. The corporation was modeled on the East India Company. In a similar manner, Aungier drew upon the English colonial experience in Ireland to mold Bombay. He implemented English law, promoted use of the English language, and even divided Bombay’s tropical landscape into “shires” for administrative and legal purposes. The fortifications of Bombay and Derry had similar designs.
Through Aungier, Bombay and India left their own impressions upon Ireland. Aungier shipped specimens of India’s rich textiles to his native land; he even sent mangoes to Dublin in 1675, which somehow survived the months-long ordeal aboard a 17th-century barque. And Indian capital flowed back to the Emerald Isle, some of it used to fund Dublin’s first suburb, Aungier Street, today a busy thoroughfare in Ireland’s capital. In these ways, Ohlmeyer states, Gerald Aungier became “Ireland’s first nabob”, one of a long line of Britons and Irish who profited handsomely from their Indian connections.
Mumbai today has some faint reminders of a longer Irish connection: Clare Road (named after a colonial governor, the Earl of Clare), Kennedy Bridge and Kennedy Sea Face (dedicated to an engineer and bureaucrat), and even an Ulster Road in Byculla. In this episode, Ohlmeyer speculates about a more deeply personal connection. Colonial Bombay saw thousands of Irish soldiers streaming in and out of the city. As in other parts of the empire, many of them would have fathered children with local women. There is a strong likelihood that Irish blood flows in the veins of many modern-day Mumbaikars.
Empire therefore drew together two very different societies – both through politics and ties of blood. By the late 19th century, Irish and Indian nationalists were actively collaborating on a common anti-imperialist agenda. In the 20th century, Jawaharlal Nehru enjoyed an especially strong rapport with Éamon de Valera, leader of the now independent Republic of Ireland.
Today, however, Ireland and India have chosen to remember their connection with the British Empire in very different ways. In India, which has politicised history to a greater extent than almost any other society in the world, the imperial legacy remains a lightning rod – and a mighty arrow in a quiver of vote-getting cultural grievances exploited by politicians. The Irish, in contrast, seem to have jettisoned their post-imperial hangover. “Many in Ireland have,” Ohlmeyer writes, “either conveniently forgotten our imperial past or are simply oblivious to it.”
Empire, which facilitated so many Irish-Indian connections from the 1600s onward, has provided one final note of profound divergence between the two countries.
Dinyar Patel is an assistant professor of history at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Researchin Mumbai. His award-winning biography of Dadabhai Naoroji, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, was published by Harvard University Press in May 2020.
Past Imperfect is sponsored and produced by the Centre for Wisdom and Leadership at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research.
