Really interesting Q from @sudasana at the @UCCDeptReligion book launch this eve - about #decolonial dimensions of Dhammaloka's story.

What do we learn from anti-colonial solidarity thru religion across colonised spaces - & why is an "Irish Buddhist" a challenge to colonialism?

Part of the answer ofc is that "we" is different in different spaces.

If I (Laurence) tell the story to Irish students, the story of an empire linked to official religion and anti-colonial mobilisation through subaltern religion is ... not someone else's story.

Ireland not only shares this history w/ Burma, Sri Lanka, India and many other places - it was understood to do so at the time, by colonial officials and by the "dissident Orientalists" who converted from Xianity to join the other side.

Ppl like Sr Nivedita and Annie Besant converted to Hinduism; Dhammaloka and J Bowles Daly to Buddhism - and all came to play a role in local anti-colonialism thru religion.

But empires only work b/c you can get ppl from one part to oppress ppl from another part. And so Irish colonial officials also play a big role in the British Empire, along w/ some converts whose politics is much more mixed.

Irish anti-colonial converts and colonial officials alike start their encounter w/ the politics of religion in colonial Asia from their own, Irish, colonial experience.

They had v difft starting points and interests - & some learned more than others as they went along!

But here's the thing too: Ireland, like Burma, is now post-colonial.

In Dhammaloka we see a moment of "plebeian cosmopolitanism", and a Buddhist revival whose politics is still contested, not yet dominated by nationalist elites...

But the new nation states are born under the sign of an ethno-religious nationalism (with all due qualifications and complexities).

Decolonial perspectives *in this context* have to be different from what makes sense in the US or UK.

Dhammaloka might well be at home in today's Ireland ... because the overwhelming power of the church has been broken by popular movements.

He wasn't just an atheist - in his life he consistently refused to define himself as part of the settled-white-Irish-Catholic community.

The plastic Paddies in Boston and Chicago who flood our social media with anti-abortion and racist stuff are the descendants of the ppl he refused to associate with - instead becoming accepted by ordinary Buddhists in half a dozen countries.

That "going native" scared the bejaysus out of imperial officials. It crossed the lines of race, religion and respectability that kept a thin colonial elite afloat as separate to the plebeian worlds they ruled over.

But the imperial military was also in large part *Irish*, and Irish nationalism by this point was a major political force in the UK. An Irish Buddhist was a symbolic challenge in so many different ways.

The coming together of that "many-headed hydra" that we see at the time of his trial - Indian and Burmese nationalists, Chinese and Indian bazaar keepers, ordinary Burmese Buddhists, "poor whites" and more - was scary.

This is in a period when Gandhi's wing of Congress has moved to boycott; there are new repressive laws to keep native agitation down; the Irish party is kingmaker in London; feminists are storming Westminster and a battleship sails up the Mersey against strikers.

But how does this fit with decolonial perspectives?

Laurence writing here - @aliciaturnerbur and Brian will have v different perspectives, and rightly so.

Alicia has to grapple w/ the shadow of genocide in Myanmar and racist violence in North America.

Brian helped the study of religions in Ireland free itself from domination by Catholic theology. That was a huge and necessary liberation.

It has enabled scholarship on world religions in Ireland and Irish engagement with other religions abroad, notably in this period.

Empire was a shared and overarching history - but its outcomes and aftermaths are not all the same everywhere.

You can't just put something into a tweet and assume it will mean the same and work the same wherever you are.

ofc ppl in the old imperial countries often act as if you can - as if the US, or England, was the world, and what makes sense where they are is universally true and only needs to be exported elsewhere.

We've heard that before.

The challenge in Ireland, as in that majority of the world's states *which have broken free from empire within living memory*, is to think the postcolonial history, the "what happened next?" What legacies were we left with, and how do we transform them?

That's the work that movements in Ireland have been doing this past half-century.

There are new challenges - uncovering past complicity in empire and slavery; listening to migrant and second-generation voices - and old ones like breaking anti-Traveller racism.

Dhammaloka's history is helpful here because it reminds us that "old Ireland" was not only a Catholic monolith; and that the diaspora was not just an exclusionary bonding exercise.

These things were contested, and not only from the outside.

Here's a working-class hobo and sailor who goes the other way when "the Irish become white", and becomes a terror to missionaries - as well as a challenge to Irish imperial officials.

These kinds of stories remind us that things did not have to go the way they did.

And that of course is true in Burma too.

We can reject empire while also naming the collusions, careers and profit-making that Irish ppl engaged in *and* while refusing the logic of the carceral Catholicism that dominated so much of C20th Ireland.

And we can do these things in dialogue w/ the movements of today, opening up a space of possibility. The past did not have to go the way it did. The present is not as closed as we imagine it. The future is not written in stone. We can change it.

The other place I teach Dhammaloka's story is at @UlexProject, training activists from across Europe to think about what success and failure really means in large-scale movements; the many ways ppl organise; and the many meanings of ideas. We have some fun.

One of the big things I say is that the single biggest change that movements from below brought about in the C20th *was* this independence from empire.

It seemed almost inconceivable a few decades before it happened - and Buddhist revival wasn't the strangest part of it.

But that non-linearity can be helpful to us, trying to imagine *outside the prism of western geo-centrality* how people can fight, and lose the battle, and when they win it is something other than what they meant, and other people have to fight for that under a different name...

To make it thinkable that we actually might be able to defeat the resurgent Right and break the fossil-fuel capitalism that is bringing us all headlong towards destruction ... and that *how* we get there may be less of a linear path than we imagine.

Specifically, less of an inscribing of ourselves, our own preoccupations, our own provincialities onto a world as we imagine it - and more of a listening like Dhammaloka, a trying to make connections with others, understand the complexities of their worlds - to work together.

A bit of a ramble but overcoming empire is never just one "thing", not a slogan or a managerial initiative.

One part of our national museum holds over 7,000 mostly uncatalogued pieces from northern India and the Tibetan cultural region. Some of it bought, some looted by the Younghusband expedition and otherwise.

The museum itself is in an old barracks, beside a much-loved park that was created in part to enable military manoeuvres - and it is right beside the main train station for the W and SW.

In front of it is a mass grave from the 1798 uprising. What do we say to those dead, or about those dead to our students, or today's activists?

What can we say except that their lives were fraught like ours, their movements were complex and contested, they mattered and had effects that echoed on - but not always the effects they dreamed of?

And that that struggle for a better world continues, in new forms?