Hugh Shearman

Life
1915- ; b. Belfast; ed. Belf Acad. Inst., QUB and TCD; works dealing with Irish history and the Six Counties. Novels, The Bishop’s Confession (1943), and A Bomb and a Girl (London: Faber 1944); also many works on N. Ireland. IF2

[ top ]

Quotations

Hugh Shearman, ‘A Comparison of Nationalism in India and Ireland’ [q.d.]

[Bibliographical details: printed newspaper page tipped into Michael Sheehy, Divided we Stand (London: Faber 1955); copy in possession of Bruce Stewart].

The recent visit of Mr. Nehru to Dublin has evoked personal memories and thoughts of possible historical parallels.

1916 Room
When showing visitors round Dublin, there is one sight which it is always well to visit. It is the room in the Museum which used to be known as the 1916 Room. Thought is exhibits have now been extended to include Wolfe Tone and other figures of the physical force movement in Irish politics, it is still dominated by the men of the Easter Week rising of 1916. It is a room with a powerful atmosphere; It throbs with a certain kind of emotion.

Whether visitors like it or dislike it, whether they are excited or repelled by it, it represents a factor which must be understood by anybody seeking to know Ireland.

Some time ago the writer visited this room with an Indian. An active worker in the movement for political self-government for India, he had spent four spells in prison, devoting one of them, through the friendly aid of his prison governor, to the study of Irish history. But, as the case of Mr. Nehru shows, the Indian who has been in prison for political reasons does not necessarily dramatise himself in the way that the Irishman does in similar circumstances. This visitor to the Museum remained tranquil, detached, and expressed no ill-will towards anybody.

Detached
When the hammer strikes upon the anvil, both hammer and anvil are fulfiling what for the time is their function; and it is not the part of either to resent the other. This visitor remained as he had come, a sympathetic but detached spectator. The passionate climate of the cult of 1916 was somehow not his.

That visit to the museum brought to mind a saying of Annie Besant, one of the very few Westerners, though not the only one, who became president of the Indian National Congress. She had said that Ireland is the India of the West.

There is, of course, always a certain resemblance between nationalist movements In various countries. They tend to be conservative, drawing strength from old vested interests.

Just as the nationalist movement it Ireland tended to draw strength from the farming class, the licensed victuallers and the Clergy, so in India the nationalist movement depended much upon the big textile magnates and the Indian equivalent of the Irish “gombeen man.”

Gandhi Paradox
Indeed, that was one of the paradoxes of Gandhi. While he led the common people and was venerated by them he lived comfortably with the multi-millionaire, Ghanshyamdas Biria, whose underpaid cotton workers lived in shocking squalor.

Most nationalist movements also have their Socialist wing. But the Connollys and Larkins or the Nehrus and Narayans have usually either to become outcasts from their nationalist colleagues or to modify their Socialism very much when their nationalist movements achieve their triumph and form governments.

These resemblances do not, however, make Ireland and India of the West in a political sense. To Mrs Besant, Ireland was the India of the West rather in terms of its piety, its mysticism, its respect for religious institution, its many religious orders whose members seem in some respects to the Indian visitor to be the yogis of Ireland.

The great political equation which Mrs. Besant saw was between India and Britain. She believed fervently in the two as loyal partners in the Commonwealth, co-operating in every possible field. It was her perpetual stress upon cooperation as the true solution of all political, economic and social problems which caused her to be ousted from her position of influence in India, at the beginning of the 1920s by Gandhi, with his doctrine of non-cooperation.

Forgotten
Like another Westerner, Alan Octavia Hume, who was the first president of the Indian National Congress, she has been largely, though undeservedly, forgotten by a younger generation of Indians. Politically, the Republic of Ireland seems to be much less the India of the West than the Pakistan of the West. Just as Pakistan was formed by a religious minority in India, so the Republic of Ireland was formed by a religious minority within the United Kingdom. There are, of course, many other factors leading to the separation, but the religious one strikes the visitor rather forcibly in each case. In each case, too, the separation has done deep injury both to the severed part and, to the whole from which the part has been torn.

Although Mahomed Ali Jinnah, the leader who adroitly brought about the separation of Pakistan from India, enjoyed an enormous triumphant popularity with the majority in Pakistan, the terrible weight of the problems which the separation caused broke his spirit

The Irish Republic, more fortunately circumstanced and on much better terms with its larger neighbours, is able to solve some of its problems.by exporting its poverty and unemployment through emigration to the United Kingdom.

Conservatism
In each case, too, the seceding area has sought to protect its conservatism from the influence of the larger body from which it broke away. Moslem religious conservatism in Pakistan retards social reform in certain directions, as a similar conservatism has done in the Irish Republic. Among other things it is particularly the welfare of mother and child that has in each case suffered.

The seeking of parallels must not, however, be pressed too far. Ulster, for example, is not a Kashmir, and the conflict between the United Kingdom and Southern Ireland has hever had the depth and tragedy of the conflict between India and Pakistan.

Relatively, the secession of Eire from the United Kingdom was easily achieved. Certainly there were disturbances and some bloodshed, but not on the ghastly scale of the massacres in India and Pakistan. The ease of Eire’s secession may be seen by comparison with the fate of the southern “Confederate” States of the American Union, who tried to secede in February 1861, and were forced back into the former allegiance by a long and savage war.

Healing?
Whether these various secessions were really necessary will long be a matter of debate, and their healing will always be an object of earnest endeavour.

In the case of the Pakistan of the West, many hope that it may ultimately prove to be a case of “easy go, easy come”, and that after many days the severed 26 Eirean counties of the United Kingdom will be drawn back into friendly unity with the mother country. [End]

Source uncertain - details as above; to view this article in a separate window, click here.

[ top ]

References
Desmond Clarke, Ireland in Fiction: A Guide to Irish Novels, Tales, Romances and Folklore [Pt. 2] (Cork: Royal Carbery 1985), lists The Bishop’s Confession (London: Faber & Faber 1943) [purported memoir of Rev. MacPeake of Church of Ireland, from childhood; late nineteenth and twentieth c.]; A Bomb and a Girl (London: Faber & Faber 1944) [small town Ulster during World War I; injured youthful ego of spoilt child, and reaction thereto].

Belfast Public Library holds Anglo-Irish Relations (1948); Belfast Royal Academy 1785-1935 (1935); A Bomb and a Girl (1944); Ireland Since the Close of the Middle Ages (1955); Modern Ireland (1952); Northern Ireland (n.d.); Not an Inch (1942); Recent Developments in Anglo-Irish Relations (1949); Ulster (1949).

Hyland Books (Cat. 219; 1995) lists Modern Ireland (1st edn. 1952), map.

[ top ]