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The Irish Passport

Ireland and India: Assassins of Empire

The Irish Passport

The Irish Passport

Society & Culture

4.8652 Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2021

⏱️ 68 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Anarchist clubs, public assassinations, and secret rebel meetings in a notorious vegetarian restaurant – all these feature in this fascinating episode on the historical links between Ireland and India at the beginning of the 20th century. UCD’s Conor Mulvagh explains why Ireland and India were so symbolically important to the survival of the British Empire, and why the independence movements in both countries were often deeply intertwined. We hear how Indian law students in Dublin joined rebel militias, forged friendships with leaders of the Easter Rising, and later took inspiration from Irish nationalism to challenge the British Raj. Vikrant Sharma, founder of the international relations website The Global Telescope, tells us about the many parallels between Ireland and India’s history of British rule, and how both should perhaps be considered in a larger framework of colonial strategy and nationalist resistance. The books mentioned in this episode are: Conor Mulvagh, Irish Days and Indian Memories: V. V. Giri and Indian Law Students at University College Dublin, 1913-1916. Published in 2016 by the Irish Academic Press. Shereen F. Ilahi. Imperial Violence and the Path to Independence: India, Ireland and the Crisis of Empire. Published in 2016 by I.B. Tauris and Co. You can find Vikrant Sharma’s website, The Global Telescope, here: linktr.ee/TheGlobalTelescope Follow us on Facebook and Twitter at @PassportIrish. If you enjoyed this episode, do give us a good review in your podcast app and share it with your friends. Bonus episodes are published for our supporters over at www.patreon.com/theirishpassport

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello, welcome to Irish Passport.

0:02.3

Let's do it.

0:03.1

Welcome to the Irish Passport.

0:04.8

I'm Tim McInerney.

0:06.0

I'm Naomi O'Leary.

0:07.0

We're friends.

0:07.7

Can you both to Naomi?

0:08.5

Anwar Fat, Tim.

0:09.9

This is your passport to Irish culture, history and politics.

0:13.2

Uh-huh.

0:13.5

I'm recording.

0:14.2

One, two, two, three.

0:16.6

Okay.

0:16.7

Okay. Hello everyone.

0:31.6

Hi, welcome back to the Irish Passport podcast.

0:34.6

And today we'll be looking at some of the fascinating parallels

0:37.8

between the history of anti-colonial struggle in Ireland and in India. We'll be hearing how

0:44.3

Indian and Irish revolutionaries took inspiration from one another in the early 20th century,

0:49.9

forged relationships and alliances with each other, and even attempted to represent each other's cause in Parliament.

0:57.0

We'll look at the experience of Indian students in Dublin in 1916, where they played a significant role in nationalist politics and ended up getting swept up into the political chaos of the Easter Rising.

1:08.0

And we'll also hear how Irish people at the same time often formed

1:11.8

an integral part of the colonial apparatus in India, demonstrating how Ireland often played the

...

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