From ‘Landsman’ to ‘Seaman’? Colonial discipline, organisation and resistance in the Royal Indian Navy, 1946

Abstract

In February 1946, 20,000 sailors of the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) mutinied over a number of grievances, from the poor quality of their food to demands for an independent India. Drawing on archival research in the UK and India, this paper uses this event, together with an examination of life in the RIN more generally, to explore how colonial discipline was organised and resisted in specifically maritime ways. By examining the practices and organisational structures of the RIN which attempted to discipline sailors, and in turn how these were resisted and negotiated, it is argued that the spatial politics of life in the Navy created distinctly maritime social and cultural relations. These maritime, naval understandings of space and place add to our understandings of the ways in which colonialism worked in practice. The paper therefore not only adds to work about colonialism's attempts to discipline and order its subjects but also contributes to debates on the geographies of the sea.