Classic Irish Passport: Ireland and India’s shared history, as Varadkar and Sunak lead the Irish and British governments

This is a repeat of an Irish Passport classic episode, “Ireland and India: Assassins of Empire”, originally published on June 21 2021.

Today, Leo Varadkar takes over as Taoiseach. This means that both Britain and Ireland have governments led by people of Indian heritage, as in London Rishi Sunak took over as prime minister in October. The coincidence has provoked renewed curiosity in these leaders, their backgrounds, and the complex shared history between Ireland and India under the British Empire. To mark the day, we’re reposting our episode about that very topic: ‘Ireland and India: Assassins of Empire’.

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

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