Manchán Magan: India and Ireland share many features that show remarkable commonality. What’s going on here?

Whenever a teacher was late to class in my Dublin school, a watchman would be appointed to keep “dekko” for their arrival. The word is slang for “to look” and derives from the Sanskrit/Hindi “dekho”, having been brought back from India by British and Irish soldiers in the 19th century. Prof Daithí Ó hÓgáin of the folklore department of UCD told me he suspected it might have the same linguistic root as the past tense of the verb “to look” in Irish, “d’fhéach”. Our conversation was back in 1996 as I was about to embark on my first journey through India. He handed me a book of Vedic texts and told me to keep an eye and ear out for any cultural similarities between Ireland and India that I might encounter on my travels. His challenge opened a world of intrigue that has remained with me ever since.
Ireland and India may seem far apart, with apparently little in common in terms of culture, language and tradition. Yet appearances can be deceiving: there are, in fact, remarkable similarities between the cultures that, once noticed, are impossible to ignore. They point to a shared kinship thousands of years ago that upends the concept of separation between eastern and western cultures.
When Christy Moore sings the classic Irish folk song Tippin’ It Up to Nancy he may not be aware that it derives from an ancient Indian collection of interrelated animal fables known as the Panchatantra (Five Treatises), and yet it appears to. Moore’s version, which he learned from the Co Roscommon Traveller singer John Reilly, tells of an unfaithful wife who asks the chemist how to make her husband blind so that he won’t know about her infidelity. The chemist says: “Give him eggs and marrowbones and make him suck them all. Before he has the last one sucked, he won’t see you at all.” Sure enough, the husband goes blind and says he’ll drown himself in the river. His wife offers to show him the way, but he pushes her in instead.
In the Sanskrit version, which dates from more than 2,000 years ago, an account is given of an unfaithful wife who asks the statue of a goddess at a river how to blind her husband. By way of reply she hears the words, “If you never stop giving him such food as butter and butter-cakes, then he will presently go blind.” She does as advised, and her husband appears to go blind, but he tricks her and instead kills her lover and cuts off her nose.
Similarly, during the first great Tuatha Dé Danann battle in Ireland, their king, Nuada, lost his arm and, being maimed, risked no longer being eligible for kingship. His physician, Dian Céacht, created a prosthetic arm out of silver, but the physician’s son, Miach, claimed he could better his father by reattaching the king’s own hand, flesh to flesh. He took the severed limb and uttered a charm that included the words “Joint to joint of it and sinew to sinew”. Within nine days and nights the joint had healed. The story survives in a manuscript from the 16th century, but it dates from at least the ninth century. It chimes with an account from the same period in which Odin, a god in Germanic mythology, uttered a similar charm while curing a horse: “Bone to bone, blood to blood, limb to limb, as if they were glued.”
Both these accounts link back to an Indian charm preserved in ancient Vedic texts citing a cure for fractures: “Thy marrow shall unite with marrow, and thy joint with joint … and thy bone shall grow together again.”
Most remarkable of all is that this charm was still being used in Ireland into the mid-20th century. The Schools Collection of folklore from the late 1930s has numerous accounts of a cure for the sprain in animals that involved saying a version of the words “Blood to blood and bone to bone and every sinew in its own place.”
I could list numerous other examples of shared Irish and Indian cultural connections. What’s going on here? Scholars believe that the answer lies in the fact that we are both descendants of the Indo-European peoples who migrated west to Europe and southeast to India from a central area between Russia, Ukraine and western Kazakhstan thousands of years ago. (Some argue that it was from Asia Minor, now Turkey, that they spread, or Armenia, or maybe even India itself.) These early migrants brought their language and beliefs with them, along with their pioneering new methods of farming.
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Being on the far western margins, Ireland was able to preserve a surprising amount of its early Indo-European culture, and India was able to do likewise on the eastern margins. In Ireland we avoided dilution of the customs, beliefs, and language that had taken root here, and so retained aspects of the culture that we had once shared with people on the Indian subcontinent. Think of it as a pebble dropped into a pool that caused circular ripples to radiate out: Ireland and India are like different points on the same ripple.
Irish and Sanskrit (and the modern Indian languages that stem from Sanskrit, such as Hindi) have retained a remarkable number of similar words and grammatical constructions, such as the Irish word aire (which refers to “nobles”, the highest caste in Ireland) and the Sanskrit word aryas (“noblemen” in north Indian society), and naib, a Sanskrit word for “good”, which is from the same ancestral root as the Old Irish word noeib, from which the modern Irish word naomh (“saint”) derives.
Other parallel words include the Sanskrit badhira (“deaf”), which is bodhar in Irish, and the Sanskrit udaka (“water”), which is uisce in Irish. The Sanskrit trasa (“to cross”) is trasna in Irish. Āhāra (“to eat”) is itheadh in Irish.
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There are many other features that show remarkable commonality, such as aspiration, in which consonants are occasionally pronounced with an accompanying forceful expulsion of air, and nasalisation, whereby a sound is pronounced by allowing air to escape through the nose at the same time as it flows through the mouth. These linguistic connections are not clear-cut, but they do serve to remind us of the intricate web of human interaction and exchange.
One of my favourite cultural echoes that still sound out through the mythology is the story of Nera, who was challenged by King Ailill and Queen Maeve to tie a wicker band round the ankle of a body of a hanged person who was swinging on gallows outside the great ceremonial fort at Cruachan at the feast of Samhain. He did as instructed, and was shocked when the corpse began to speak, asking him for water to quench its thirst. Nera, feeling compassion, took the corpse on to his back and carried it off to fetch a drink for the parched ghost. This gesture of kindness proved foolhardy, as everywhere they went the corpse unleashed a tumult of destruction and death. When he returned to the fort he witnessed the foretelling of a massacre that would occur there at the following Samhain feast, if the Otherworldly army had not been defeated by then.
The story is reminiscent of a far older Indian tale about a king who is asked by a sorcerer, disguised as a beggar, to dare to visit an execution site on the night of a new moon. While there he encounters the body of a hanged man and cuts him down. He carries him on his back through the cremation ground while a ghost inside the corpse tells him stories to shorten the way. When the ghost has shared 25 tales with the king, he warns him that the sorcerer plans to kill him to increase his power. He then tells the king how he can outwit this malevolent wizard and obtain his powers for himself. In this way, the king’s kindness in caring for the corpse saves his life, just as Nera’s life was spared by carrying the corpse outside Cruachan to a source of water. The two stories are different, but they have some alluring parallels.
There are many other connections pertaining to sacred rivers, the use of hunger strikes against unjust leaders, the centrality of cattle in cultural life and folklore, and the similarity in the roles of druids and brahmins. The Welsh social anthropologist Alwyn D Rees and his brother Brinley, a classics scholar, gathered many of these in the 1950s, and the Celtic scholar Myles Dillon amassed more in the 1960s.
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We should acknowledge and celebrate Ireland’s surprising, but genuine, links to the lore and language of the Indian subcontinent in an honourable and honest way.
At this time, when populations are once again moving in search of new opportunities and when wars and climate change are sparking mass migration, it is especially important to acknowledge that we in Ireland, too, were once migrants: we came here from somewhere else and our culture is intertwined with those of people who live on the far side of the world. We literally are all one people – different expressions of a common root culture.
Brehons and Brahmins: Resonances between Irish and Indian Cultures by Manchán Magan is published by mayobooks.ie