MAGAN'S WORLD:BIBI BASKIN has been exercising my mind of late: she hovers over our conception of India like the apparition of Woody Allen's mother looming over Manhattan in
New York Stories.
She has taken on the form of an omnipresent divinity reigning over the state of Kerala, such that one can hardly mention this vast swathe of southern India without referring to the former RTÉ light-entertainment host.
I’ve never visited her Raheem Residency, on the southwestern shores of Kerala, though it’s said to be a home away from home for the Irish – not, presumably, in the dirty-pints-of-porter and sausage-sandwich way of places like Feerick’s in Rathowen, where strapping Mayo men find solace on their way back from a defeat in Croke Park.
Before Bibi, Éamon de Valera was the Irish person most associated with India, at least by Indians. I’m always amazed by how familiar they are with him and the respect in which they hold him.
It was in the elite Chanakyapuri district of Delhi that I first encountered this; a society matron in a lurid peacock-print sari gripped my hand when I happened to mention that my family were involved in Ireland’s fight for freedom, eagerly wanting to know whether they knew the great de Valera. “He was our inspiration!” she chimed. “Without him and that cunning fox Collins we would never have got our freedom. Gandhi-ji himself said he owed them the deepest debt.”
I explained that although my family had been close to him, and to Collins, too, things had got so bitter during the Civil War that they hardly spoke again until just a few years before de Valera’s death, when we were invited to a reconciliatory meeting at the Áras. I was considered too young to attend this meeting, but nevertheless Ms Peacock- Print insisted that she would hold a dinner in my honour, with the tricolour as its theme in recognition of the fact that India’s green, white and gold flag is said to be in deference to ours. “The chef will make a special Irish stew curry,” she gushed. “We’ll serve shamrock-shaped chapattis.” Somehow she had convinced herself that merely being related to people who knew
de Valera granted me an aura of ersatz royalty, a touch of Republican aristocracy.
I say all this by way of conveying that India is not as foreign as we sometimes perceive. I’m always surprised by people who’ll travel anywhere except India,
because of “the poverty, the heat, the . . .” They invariably trail off at this point, unable to express the sheer alienation they associate with the place.
In truth we’re not all that different. Dr Malcolm Sen gave a great series of lectures at the Chester Beatty Library, in Dublin, a few years ago, tracing our common links, and recently KS Vijay Elangova wrote articles on the subject for Verbalon.com. He quotes de Valera’s address to the Friends of Freedom for India association in 1920: “We of Ireland and you of India must each of us endeavour . . . to rid ourselves of the vampire that is fattening on our blood, and we must never allow ourselves to forget what weapon it was by which George Washington rid his country of the same vampire. Our cause is a common cause.” Gandhi and Nehru took direct inspiration from him.
But even long before then, as Sen points out, there were links between Celts and Aryans, attested to in our common Indo-European language and in words such as the Irish rí,which is connected to the Sanskrit raja.There is further evidence of connections between the Brahmans and the Druids dating back to the third and fourth centuries, and in this light Baskin's creation of an Irish Ayurvedic resort in Kerala seems a natural continuation of something very old.