A Remembrance Sunday event in Bellaghy will hear the story of a forgotten Irish woman who is revered in India as a patriot and a saint.
Belfast Telegraph columnist Malachi O’Doherty will deliver a lecture at the Seamus Heaney Home Place about Margaret Noble, also known as Sister Nivedita.
This is the name the Methodist woman from Dungannon took when she became a Hindu nun.
Noble travelled to India in 1898 as the disciple of a famous guru, Swami Vivekananda. He urged her to set up educational programmes for Indian women and she also took part in plague relief work in Bengal.
After the Swami died in 1902, she became a political activist.
She argued that India, to be free of Britain, had to revive and reframe its ancient culture, much as Irish nationalists at the time were arguing that Ireland had to be Catholic and Gaelic to distinguish itself from Britain.
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Mr O’Doherty said: “In Kolkata, her former home is a museum in her honour. There is a bridge across the Hooghly River named after her, also a university and at least 16 schools.
“There are statues of her in public places, yet few here know anything about her. She was at least some kind of spiritual mentor to people we would now call terrorists, but that has earned her respect in modern India as a patriot.
“She was making the same kinds of arguments for Indian independence that Patrick Pearse was making for Ireland.”
Noble was at the heart of a cultural revival in Bengal at that time and admired by some of the greatest thinkers of her time, including philosopher William James and the Nobel prize winning poet Rabindranath Tagore.
On a 2020 visit to India, when Donald Trump paid tribute to her guru, Vivekananda, the whole stadium cheered, recognising the name even though he’d mispronounced it.
Mr O’Doherty added: “But the adulation for her is excessive. Read her letters and you get a much more realistic impression of a woman who struggled to recover her autonomy while enthralled to a guru who was manipulative and at times bullying her.
“I don’t think we should adopt her as heroic, but I think we should know about her and that writers and students should use the mass of material we now have from her to explore her story from different angles.”
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