”Cultural Renaissance and Anti Colonialism in India and Ireland”

Talk By Dr Jyoti Atwal Moore Visiting Fellow 2019

Atwal suggests that India and Ireland were both trying to identify symbols to create a national ideal in late nineteenth century. Theatre and music provided a fertile ground for this purpose. Through the Dublin life of James Cousins, W.B Yeats, Lady Gregory and Synge; and through exploration of early years of Abbey Theatre and Irish National Theatre Society, she plans to capture this synergy. The leaders of the Abbey Theatre also embodied vegetarianism and occult. There were regular readings of the Hindu text ‘Bhagawat Gita’ in Dublin circles and promotion of vegetarian restaurants. There has been no study to look at these interactions as potential arenas of forging nationalisms through esoteric universalism and anti-colonial politics.
She shall be focusing on the poet and play writerJames Cousins, who was married to Margaret Elizabeth Cousins (co-founder of the Irish Women’s Franchise League). They both moved to India in 1915 at the invitation of the Theosophist or a humanitarian worker or an anti coloniafl activist in India. Both were fiercelycommitted to voting rights campaign for women and other forms of public service; and most significantly they joined in the Gandhian challenge to colonialism after 1920s. The couple stayed in Dublin from 1902 till 1915 and actively participated in several sessions of occult and planchette writing with Yeats and his group. The politics of women’s voting rights (intertwined with British suffragettes) and anti-colonialism were the two main political agendas of the couple.