The spotlight was on India-Ireland links over three centuries at a Bengal Club show

The association between W.B. Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore, or Annie Besant’s stewardship of the Indian National Congress as its first woman president in 1917, or Sister Nivedita’s dedication to Swami Vivekananda and women’s education in Bengal might be part of our history textbooks. But Ireland and India were much thicker than such affinities of individuals. Shared histories of migration and cultural exchange between the two countries that bear stripes of identical colours on their flags were showcased at an exhibition on the lawns of The Bengal Club recently.

Presented by Epic, the Irish Emigration Museum, organised by the embassy of Ireland and hosted by its honorary consulate in the city, Looking East was a multimedia show exploring three centuries of connection between the first and the biggest colonies of the Raj.

“The museum in Dublin showcases the whole story about the Irish diaspora abroad. Even though we’re a very small country of only five million people, in America, there are 40 million people who describe themselves as Irish. Joe Biden is Irish, Ronald Reagan was Irish, the Kennedys were Irish. This exhibition is focusing just on India. That’s why they call it Looking East. The museum curated it in Dublin, and then it was our idea, the embassy’s, to bring it to India. It’s a traveling exhibition. We had a launch in Delhi, and now this is the event in Calcutta,” said ambassador of Ireland, Kevin Kelly.

“We have had a very successful commemoration of the 75th anniversary of our diplomatic relations, although, as you’ll see in the exhibition, our history goes back much longer than that,” he added.

The ambassador brought up connections between the revolutionaries of the two nations. Referring to the Chittagong armoury raid by Surya Sen and his followers, he pointed out that the 1930 Chittagong proclamation of a free republic by “a band of Bengali freedom-fighters from the branch of the Indian Republican Army” was “almost word for word as the Irish proclamation of independence in 1916” after the Easter Rising in Dublin. Eamon de Valera, the Irish freedom fighter, was “very good friends with Subhas Chandra Bose and (Jawaharlal) Nehru” and was supporting the cause of Indian freedom. “So when India got its Independence, he was invited as a guest of honour at the celebration event in 1950 in Birmingham,” Kelly pointed out.

That the Indian revolutionaries were inspired by their Irish counterparts is also evident from a poster on an exhibited panel commemorating Jatindranth Das, who died in 1929 after 63 days of hunger strike at the Lahore Central Jail. The half-tone illustration, printed in Lahore, has him lying in the lap of Bharat Mata at the centre, over which fairies, showering petals, carry him upwards on a throne. At the bottom, there are two more portraits — one in uniform as a soldier and another during his arrest. The poster describes him in Hindi as “Bharat ka (Terence) MacSwiney”, referring to the Sinn Fein leader who died in captivity after 74 days of hunger strike.

Ambassaor Kelly, like the exhibition he inaugurated, was brutally candid in holding up a mirror to both the sweet and the unsavoury parts of the shared history. History, he admitted, is never easy. “As much as there were some Irish men fighting against the Empire, there were some notorious ones who were part of it. So you look at General Michael O’Dwyer, who was the governor in Punjab. He’s the one who oversaw the massacre in Amritsar, which is a big stain in the history of the British Empire. He was an Irish man,” he said. More than 50 Irish soldiers also received the Victoria Cross for their role in suppressing the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857.

The exhibition, too, according to a booklet distributed among visitors, told “stories of Empire building and brutality, as also stories of solidarity and resistance”. “Irish soldiers had a long and often violent record of service in India while Irish civil servants played an important role in governance. By the late 19th century, Irishmen ran seven of the eight provinces of British India,” it said.

At the centre of the club lawn, the figure of Danu, an Irish fertility Goddess, towered at a height of 15ft. The installation had been created for display at the Durga puja pandal of Behala Nutan Dal. “The most fulfilling moment of my time in India so far was the Durga puja collaboration,” the ambassador said. “It was hugely ambitious to think that you could do something at that scale, to bring artists over (from Ireland), find the right people here, live with the wonderful people from Behala Nutan Dal for three months, and to work under the creative genius of the Bengali artist, Sanjib Saha,” he said.

A documentary film on the Durga puja collaboration was screened and a discussion took place on the connections between the two countries. The evening ended with a rendition in chorus of the popular Irish folk song Molly Malone and serving of Irish whisky.