27th February, Tuesday 2018, 3 pm
Venue : Room 326, SSS III JNU
Second Irish Studies Lecture by Prof Jane Ohlmeyer (Erasmus Smith's Professor of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin and the Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity’s research institute for advanced study in the Arts and Humanities; she is also CAS Visiting Fellow at CHS, SSS )
‘Ireland and India: a connected history, 1660s-2010s’ by Prof Jane Ohlmeyer
Chair : HE Ambassador Brian McElduff
Lecture abstract India has come to Ireland. In June 2017 Leo Varadker, the son of an Indian born doctor – Ashok Varadker - from Mumbai, became the Prime Minister (or ‘Taoiseach’) of Ireland. This is an important moment for Ireland but also for India. Thanks to the fact that Ireland’s was England’s oldest colony and India’s was its largest, our histories have been connected for nearly 350 years. Bombay’s founding father, Gerald Aungier, takes Irish interaction with India back into the late seventeenth century when Ireland served as a colonial prototype for the early colonization of early India. From this moment the Irish were both servants of the British Empire in India and subversives within it, something that this talk explores.