Brass and ceremonial bands known in India as ‘Band Baja’ occupied an unexpected place in the narrative of anti-colonial resistance. The British Empire used military brass bands as a tool of sovereign display, projecting order and cultural authority across its colonies, India and Ireland among them. Yet in both nations, these same musical forms were turned against their original purpose: revolutionaries and nationalists adapted brass instrumentation, martial rhythm and the public parade into vehicles for mass mobilisation and national sentiment, repurposing an instrument of empire into one of resistance.

By the late 1920s, both Ireland and India continued within the British Empire while straining hard against it. Their independence movements recognised each other, a move formalised in 1932 through the founding of the Indian–Irish Independence League in Dublin—a joint effort by the Indian politician Vithalbhai Javerbhai Patel (V. J. Patel) and Indulal Kanaiyalal Yajnik alongside Irish nationalists Maud Gonne MacBride, Charlotte Despard and Molly Woods. During his time in Dublin, Patel urged Irish audiences to adopt the boycott of British goods, a tactic that had already gained traction in India.

The luminary Annie Besant belongs at the centre of this bridge between the two independence movements. Born in London in 1847 to a family with deep Irish roots—her mother Irish, her father educated in Dublin—she carried that heritage into a political career that helped push Indian nationalism from cautious petitioning towards an open demand for self-rule. In 1916, she launched the All India Home Rule League, modelled directly on the Irish Home Rule movement, and the following year became the first woman to serve as president of the Indian National Congress. Across her writing and speeches, she returned repeatedly to the idea that India’s and Ireland’s struggles against British rule were, at their core, one and the same fight—a conviction that made her, more than almost anyone else of her generation, a living link between the two nations’ causes.

The tapestry also holds two figures at opposite poles of this history. Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, remembered in India as the ‘Butcher of Amritsar’, stands for the height of colonial arrogance, embodied in the humiliating ‘crawling order’ he imposed on Indian residents of Amritsar at Kucha Kaurthianwala, a narrow alley where a British missionary named Marcella Sherwood was assaulted on 10 April 1919. The ‘crawling order’ forced any Indian passing through this specific street to crawl on their hands and knees between 6 am and 8 pm. Dyer stated that he wanted to create a ‘moral effect’ and treat British womanhood as sacred. His actions at Jallianwala Bagh did more than any single event to turn Indian political will away from seeking reform within the empire and towards demanding full independence.

Set against General Dyer is the young, eleven-year-old Bhagat Singh (the future revolutionary), born into an Indian family with ties to the Ghadar movement. According to family accounts, young Bhagat Singh travelled to the site of the massacre shortly afterwards and brought back a small bottle of blood-soaked earth—an object he is said to have kept with him for the rest of his life. His presence in the piece often symbolises a point of comparison within the tapestry of the revolutionary spirit: a movement that grew directly out of, and emerged in direct opposition to, the force of colonial brutality.

Symbols of increasingly active resistance moved alongside these formal alliances. In Ireland, the shamrock had already become, across the nineteenth century, an emblem of cultural pride and nationalist defiance. Worn during the 1798 rebellion and at times suppressed by British authorities who read it as an act of sedition, it endured as a lasting symbol of Irish identity. In India, a comparable role is popularly attributed to the red lotus: according to a widely circulated account, in the months before the 1857 uprising, lotus flowers were passed from hand to hand through military garrisons alongside wheat chapatis, functioning as a covert signal that stirred anti-colonial feeling ahead of revolt.

These parallel movements reveal a shared global undercurrent of anti-colonial defiance, in which marginalised communities relied on covert cultural codes to bypass imperial surveillance. By transforming regional symbols into tools of solidarity and nationalism, both India and Ireland proved that the desire for self-determination could never be fully suppressed by foreign rule.