Cheryl Morgan has a nice line in the latest Emerald City, that “most American claims to admire Celtic culture are on a similar level to telling someone from India that you really love that wonderfully authentic Indian writer, Mr. Kipling.”

Good line, but not necessarily so, as my wife pointed out to me. Compare the twee Celtic fiction written by the sort of person who takes The Mists of Avalon as a religious text with Kipling’s stories: can no doubt put me right on this (as she has done to others) but I think Kipling wins hands down; he was after all writing about a real, recent or even contemporary India, which he had experienced at first hand (if more briefly than most of his readers realised), rather than inventing a non-existent past of social and sexual harmony and haunting pipe music, with everyone worshipping the Mother Goddess in an archipelago unsullied by the Saxons or Christianity. Actually one of my favourite drawings by the Irish political cartoonist Martyn Turner has a crowd of ancient Celtic warrriors cowering behind the ramparts of their fort as missiles are hurled at them from below. One of them is saying to the others, “I can’t wait until we get Christianity in here and get rid of all this tribalism.”

Of course, I don’t want to give the impression that Kipling’s India is better than that of a writer who is actually Indian. But I do think his India is better as India than the Ireland of a writer who has never lived in Ireland. It’s interesting to note that Kipling’s Kim is actually an Irish boy, Kimball O’Hara; and that the only novel I’ve read about India recently is River of Gods, by Irish writer Ian McDonald. As Niall Ferguson points out, there are a lot of connections between India and Ireland.

I’m thinking about all this largely because it interests me anyway, but also because I’ve proposed to Farah Mendlesohn that I might give a paper at next year’s WorldCon in her track on the Matter of Britain. I must say my initial approach was going to be to take the hig road of slagging off the diaspora for trying to tell me what kind of country I grew up in. But I’m now beginning to reflect -as I found ten years ago for my Ph D thesis – that there may be something to be learned from the comparative experience of other countries as well. Hmm.