‘YOU ARE from which country?” I am asked. The answer, Ireland, usually leaves the questioner non-plussed. There’s no follow up, just a blank stare and a desultory “Oh”. Once I got a hopeful, “Holland?”, a clear prompting to expand upon the proud heritage of a great hockey-playing nation. “No, Ireland.” “Oh.”
It's at times like these that the Irish traveller realises how he has grown to depend upon the likes of Bono, Riverdanceor Colin Farrell as ambassadors for our national identity. Normally, you just namedrop one of those and watch the conversation with the taxi driver blossom like the unfolding leaves of a lotus.
But this is India. Bono just doesn’t cut it.
Nor do any of our go-to sporting references. An enumeration of a list of some of our cherished sporting icons – Roy Keane, Brian O’Driscoll, Sonia O’Sullivan, or Katie Taylor – is met with zero recognition. Padraig Harrington gets perhaps a glimmer.
Kevin O’Brien, on the other hand, while hardly a household name in his own country, is unquestionably the most famous Irishman to ever set foot in this country. Bashing out the fastest century in cricket World Cup history en route to beating the “aul enemy” led to front page headlines (“Fireland!”) and had Indians running to their maps.
Cricket, along with domestic politics and Bollywood, is the national obsession. So much so, I was once reduced to describing Samuel Beckett as the only Nobel winner ever to appear in Wisden, the bible of cricket, for playing two first-class games for Dublin University against Northamptonshire in 1925 and 1926. When you resort to these measures for a little recognition, you think you can't go on, but you do.
I rattle through the dusty streets of Delhi in a black and yellow cab, a cacophony of car horns and near misses impinging on my train of thought, and think there must be something in our usual bag of tricks that I can draw on. How about the black stuff, Guinness, heard of that? No, not so popular in the subcontinent? Okay, but surely the world’s largest whiskey consumer has heard of the country that practically invented the stuff? “Really, you have Irish Scotch?”
We’ve defined ourselves often as the guys who aren’t English. This underdog role, along with the prominent position it affords us in that not-so-exclusive club of former British colonies, has generally given us an “in” with the peoples of other nations. In this regard, India is no different, and the history is there to prove it, from Gandhi citing Daniel O’Connell’s political tactics as an influence on his own non-violent resistance, to the Easter Rising-inspired Chittagong uprising of 1930 – a movie on the latter is due for release.
But what happens when you find you have more in common with the coloniser than the colonised? As my car navigates the capital’s hub of Connaught Place, I’m reminded of previous visits to the Connemara tea estate in Kerala, or the Mullingar Bazaar near Dehradun, the legacy of large numbers of Irish who were at the heart of the British Raj. Certainly, across India there is still admiration for the great “British” writers such as George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde – and who can argue with that description, as neither writer dealt with Irish subjects to any great extent?
And so the conversation inevitably leads to the thankless task of differentiating between the British and Irish identity. At this remove, the dissimilarities seem subtle at best and my unsatisfactory attempts to explain the nuanced distinction between the political make-up of the United Kingdom and Great Britain or how Christians on our two islands have conflicting attitudes towards the transubstantiation of the Eucharist does not help matters.
It is hard to get too indignant about a lack of appreciation of our uniqueness when one accepts that, by and large, a regular Tamilian has less in common with a regular Punjabi than one European national would have with another. Consequently, I no longer get too hung up on the British/Irish divide when in India; I’m just happy if people are aware that there is an actual country called Ireland.
Having said that, things are changing, a gradual raising of our profile, for good or ill. The upcoming Irish-produced Masala movie, Ek Tha Tiger,starring Salman Khan and his former girlfriend Katrina Kaif, is likely to be a hit, as his films tend to be, and may consequently garner a bigger audience than any film ever shot in Ireland. However, not all news is good news; recently, an auto-rickshaw driver, on hearing I was Irish, commiserated with me for our financial woes. Pretty damning from a guy making 30 cents a mile.
I’ve tried to do my bit, holding photo exhibitions, video art events, and now a film festival to promote Irish work – and the response has been good. The arts scene, like many areas of Indian life, has been transformed by the economic liberalisation of the 1990s, and has grown exponentially in latter years. The massive attention given to the recent India Art Fair underscores this.
As is the case elsewhere, when suddenly exposed to so much work, a key issue is audience identification. The volume of press devoted to the enormous sums of money demanded by indigenous contemporary artists such as Saatchi darling Subodh Gupta means their work is of great interest. Similarly, Indian modern artists, such as the once exiled MF Husain, are widely exhibited. So too are European brand-name artists such as Picasso or Hirst, which are readily purchased for prestige and investment.
Outside of these monetarily quantifiable categories, it is often difficult to attract an audience to art for art’s sake. This is particularly a problem in a city where every event is heavily sponsored and usually well supplied with booze and snacks – and in India, “snacks” are an art form in themselves.
Another issue to consider is that even in a global city such as Delhi, with all its exposure to international cultural trends, one can forget that many of our fundamental references are different. In the last exhibition I presented here, Reflected Light Exhibit, a video art piece on the theme of Renaissance art left viewers cold. Since Renaissance art relies to a large degree on biblical imagery, the predominantly Hindu and Muslim population could not relate. It wasn’t the art they didn’t get it so much as the cultural context in which the art was produced.
For our upcoming event, The Irish Film Festival of India,we hope to address this problem by going with the theme of Irish literature. In my experience most Indians have read Irish writers but don't necessarily realise they're Irish. Riding on the coat-tails of Joyce, Friel and Beckett just might be the way to introduce the Indian public to our film culture, so we'll be showing films including The Dead, The Butcher Boyand Krapp's Last Tape.
India is now a player on the global stage, concerned with geopolitical arm-wrestling with the likes of China or nuclear deals with the US, but it doesn't hurt to remind them there are other countries too, smaller and less influential ones perhaps but worth investigating nonetheless, countries that hold dear their artistic and cultural endeavour. We chose a musical instrument as our emblem after all. Will this ultimately lead to greater taxi-driver recognition? One never knows but one can dream. And so I picture a day when climbing into the back of a Hindustan Ambassador the man in the front turns and asks; "You are from which country?" I say "Ireland" and his face lights up, "Ah, My Left Foot."
Marc-Ivan O'Gorman is a film-maker and writer living in India. He is the director of the first Irish Film Festival of India, which takes place on Feb 16-26, in Delhi and Mumbai. See IrishfilmfestivalofIndia.com
