Across the world to Ireland

They started arriving in the 1930s, men from villages where milk came straight from the buffalo, where toothbrushes were twigs from the neem tree, the juices of which helped to keep teeth clean. They were the pioneers, many of them from the Jullunder District of north India, come to settle mainly in Northern Ireland and to make a living travelling the roads with their suitcases full of socks, shirts, curtains and slippers.

Ram Gupta was one of them: "The typical wage for a person in Northern Ireland in 1936 was £1 a week. I had a sales turnover of £25-30 a week, with a profit level of around £3£4. From this amount, I was able to pay for my accommodation and meals . . . Every month, I was still able to send the sum of £8 to my family in India." First, you walked. Then you got the bike, then the van. At some point, you want back to India and returned with a bride. Then you got the house. (It took Ram Gupta three years to raise £10 for a Morris Minor.)

Gupta is just one of many who came to Ireland from India and South Africa from the 1930s onwards, their progress chronicled, their contribution to Irish life celebrated in a book by Narinder Kapur, honorary Professor of Neuropsychology at Southhampton University who, born in New Delhi, was brought to Northern Ireland in 1952.

Entitled The Irish Raj - Illustrated Stories About Irish In India And Indians In Ireland, the book gives us a glimpse of Ireland as seen by young men who had left the family homestead to seek a better life in a foreign country, often arriving with no more than a few pounds in their pocket and the address of someone from their own village who might be able to give them a bed.

If it sounds familiar then perhaps that's because, between any two groups of economic migrants there will always be shared traits - the drive to get up and go and the ability to work hard.

The Irish navvy in England and the Indian salesman in Northern Ireland had both, although there were also historic events linking them which they might not even have been aware of.

Dublin-based Dr Samanth Geawon (his name means "celestial light within you") is a geriatrician working with the Eastern Health Board. Geawon, whose story is told in the book, points out that in South Africa, the Irish diaspora and the British Raj had already coincided. There, after the Famine, the Irish found Indians who had also been sent as indentured labourers: "My family came originally from a village in north India although I was born in Durban," says Dr Geawon. "For a while, I taught in a nearby school in a place called Avoca and my mother came from a place near Ladysmith called Ballygowan." Ireland was not all that far away.

To young Indians, Ireland was a land of opportunity to which they hopefully travelled, setting themselves up as self-employed salesmen, working six days a week, 10 hours a day; cycling the highways and byways no matter what the weather, a parcel of clothes tied on the back of the bike and a case on the handlebars. They took humble lodgings, often with an outside privy. Some had never seen snow before. When it was very cold and the trek down the yard too much, a time-honoured alternative was brought into use: the milk bottle. The hazards, too, were numerous - of which getting lost in Donegal was not the worst. One man recalls crashing into a lowered railway barrier because the attendant had forgotten to hang a red lamp on it. Language too could be a problem. They learned useful phrases such as "Buy something! Me cheap!" and wrote the words phonetically on their hands, ready to read when the housewife opened the door.

And it was the housewives who were most glad to see them. To women isolated in rural homes, with large families draining meagre resources, the Indian salesman with his offer of credit, his door-to-door delivery - and, let's face it, his persuasive manner - was a godsend. And he was known for his generosity. When the small son of one customer was going into hospital, she had to buy him his first pair of pyjamas: night clothes were a luxury then. The salesman, off his own bat, donated a dressing gown and a pair of slippers so the child could enter hospital with dignity. Those were gentler days, of course, when the salesman, arriving to collect his weekly payment, might find the key in the door and the money on the table.

Many Indians came from Lahore: they knew all about partition and wisely kept out of Irish politics, though they still had a lot to put up with. Edging across a bomb-damaged bridge, an Indian businessman met a car coming in the opposite direction and pointed out that he had the right of way. A gun appeared at the car window and he was told: "In this part of the country, this has the right of way." He obligingly backed off.

Another salesman, popular in the locality, was hijacked by paramilitaries and robbed of his takings. Indignant about this, he complained - and the money was returned.

The troubles, of course, took a more serious toll. In 1974, 24-year-old Asha Chopra, pregnant with her third child, was killed in Derry by a stray IRA bullet: her two small children saw her die. Diljit Rana, from Punjab, arriving in Northern Ireland with a university degree, could only get work, initially, as a storeman. Gradually, he opened a number of cafes and subsequently found himself trying to settle not one bomb insurance claim but nine. Eventually, things worked out and he is now the proprietor of two hotels. In 1992, he was elected president of the Belfast Chamber of Commerce.

The Irish/Indian traffic was not all one-way. In fact, the Irish began travelling to India as far back as the 1600s, when Irishmen were employed by the East India Company. The flow of missionaries, both Presbyterian and Catholic, started soon after. Later came the colonial officers and civil servants. The early arrival of Indians in Northern Ireland is explained by the fact that a few places in the Indian Civil Service were always reserved for graduates of Queen's University: Belfast, therefore, was not totally unknown in India.

Some of those Irish men who went to India failed to remain aloof from Indian politics as Indians did here. General Reginald Dyer, born in the Punjab, was the son of an Irish brewer. In 1919, he was involved in a confrontation with a crowd of Indians at Amritsar and ordered his troops to fire: 379 people were killed and 1,200 injured.

Northern Ireland, particularly, has benefited greatly from the Indian community. They have donated sports trophies in Derry, bought equipment for the visually impaired in Antrim and, also in Antrim, a nursing home has been built by local GP, Dr Jayaprakash, in memory of his small daughter who died of a brain tumour. There are Sikh temples in Derry and Dublin and mosques too numerous to count. At the back of Kapur's book, there are photographs of Indians working here in the catering, travel and fashion industries; in education, medicine and engineering. (He forgot to mention banking.) In fact, like the Irish, Indians are everywhere.

The Irish Raj - Illustrated Stories About Irish In India And Indians In Ireland is published by Greystone Press at £12.95. Available from Waterstones in Dublin and by post from 01 492 3825, in Belfast, 01232 838485