New book traces links between Irish and Indian languages and traditions

By Navjyoti Dalal

On the geographical coordinates Ireland and India are about 8,000 kilometres apart. The Irish and Indians differ in race, language, culture, lifestyle, economies etc, while an entire book can be dedicated to the difference between the two countries' weather.

Though the two nations extensively use English as an official language, it is mighty hard for an Indian to get the Irish accent, and vice versa.

But, if one were to time travel a few millennia back, one would find a surprisingly high number of commonalities. From language to social structures, traditions, even belief systems, this web of connections is vast, vaster than the 8000kms and deeper than four millennia.

Writer, journalist, author, documentary filmmaker and Ireland’s darling Manchán Magan, explores this resemblance in his latest book Brehons and Brahmins: Resonances Between Irish and Indian Cultures.

The book is fittingly illustrated by Aurélie Beatley, an illustrator and animator from Scotland who specialises in folklore, mythology, and endangered languages. The Mayo Books Press title is priced at €25.

Written in a time when cultures world-over are homogenising at a speed running on aviation fuel, Brehons and Brahmins maps the similarities in a way that honours the individuality of each culture yet discusses the similitude.

Magan began spotting these parallels a long time ago, in the 90s. As a 26-year-old young man, he went travelling to India, but before he left he received direction for his inquisitiveness from his college professor Daithí Ó hÓgáin (folklore department, UCD).

At school, the two would often share observations about languages, words, common roots. Ó hÓgáin gave him a book of Vedic texts and nudged him to note any cultural leitmotifs between Ireland and India.

During the making of a documentary for TG4, which was loosely based on his book Manchán's Travels: A Journey through India, Magan began capturing them.

"In Rajasthan I saw how the old Maharaja (kingly) ways were very similar with some of the king ways in Ireland. Even the words 'raja' (king in Hindi) and Ri (king in Irish) are connected."

He goes on to cite another linguistic twining revealed to him by his late professor, "D’fhéach in Irish, which is the past participle of 'to look', bears similarity to the word 'dekho' which again means look. There's also dekko, the slang word that the English and Irish soldiers had brought back from India."

More linguistic connects between Irish and Sanskrit are evident in words like Aire (which means nobles, the highest caste in Ireland).

In Sanskrit Arya are the noblemen, particularly in North Indian society. Naib, a Sanskrit word for ‘good’ is from the same ancestral root as the Old Irish word noeib, from which the modern Irish word naomh (saint) derives. If 'deaf' is Badhira in Sanskrit, it becomes bodhar in Irish.

If one were to make a Venn diagram, a big list of intersections would emerge between the two cultures. The book highlights factors like the similarity between the social status of the druids and brahmins (as also the etymological Sanskrit root for druid), the worship of rivers, treating cows as sacred, using cattle as a form of money, tales in folklore, the social idea of using hunger strikes to protest against a leader/power, or the social idea of castes/caste system which continued into the Middle Ages in Ireland, and still alive in India.

"There are social and judicial elements of the old Brehon law which is remarkably similar to the Indian brahmin law. So the commonalities are in language, law and lore," says Magan whose primary resource for research was the work of Celtic scholar Myles Dillon, published in Celts and Aryans (1973), and Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales (1961) by Welsh social anthropologist Alwyn D. Rees and his brother Brinley, a classics scholar.

Magan’s book establishes that the overlaps in the cultures can be traced back to common ancestry.

"...We are both descendants of the Indo-European peoples who migrated west to Europe and south-east to India from a central area between Russia, Ukraine, and western Kazakhstan thousands of years ago. ...These early migrants brought their language and beliefs with them, along with their pioneering new methods of farming...," reads an excerpt from the book.

While there are different schools of thoughts about the ancestry (particularly Indian lineage), Magan believes, "They are just current theories which wax and wane over the last few decades. No linguists have argued against the commonality in the Indo-European languages, they have agreed to a shared root. Most of the languages in Europe and Western Asia do seem to have the same root."

From fertility goddesses to pagan faith, use of ritual stones, belief in the otherworld/s and spirits, common imprints between these cultures can be picked like shells on a shore. But Manchán believes there is more to it, a wider ground to cover.

He has already picked some shells off the Australian coast.

"The next two years I will be writing an illustrated book on the connections between Ireland and Aboriginal Australia, and later perhaps explore the connections between Ireland and native America," he says.

There are also delightful references of lore like a Christy Moore song about an unfaithful wife wanting to blind her husband to avoid being caught, and its akinness to a Panchtantra tale; or the tale of Nera carrying a corpse on his back and a stunningly similar tale of Vikram Betaal (the latter being the subject of a television series in the 80s India).

"I was really interested in the connection between a Christy Moore song and a Sanskrit tale recorded in the Panchtantra. The lyrics of the song and the plots within can be found in the Panchatantra.

"He was just singing a traditional song, he would never have guessed that the origin of this song about feeding buttercakes etc to her husband by a wife who is cheating on him originated in a folk culture from 4000 years ago," shares Magan about the song called ‘Tippin’ It up to Nancy’.

Magan's explorations bear an imagery of a constellation surfacing over the globe, with a star pinned over Ireland, another on India, one over Australia, and yet another in South America. It is a dynamic constellation with a possibility of more stars joining in as they are discovered.

If you connect these dots, what you'll get is not a visually enticing shape, at best it looks like a mountain with Ireland at the summit. But the human footprints that have walked this path over the course of many millennia tell a story of lasting impressions.