Royal Indian Navy Research Articles

The Women’s Royal Indian Naval Service: picturing India’s new woman

ABSTRACT Lack of research on the Women’s Royal Indian Naval Service (W.R.I.N.S.) has led to the misconception that most of the women recruited into the Royal Indian Navy during World War 2 were either British or ‘Anglo-Indian’. In reality, by far the majority of the ‘Wrins’, as they came to be called, were Indian. In this paper I follow two parallel lines of enquiry. The first inspects the material stored in British archives to offer the first comprehensive account of the W.R.I.N.S.’ formation, operation and dismantlement. This provides the context for an examination of the visual material created to promote the service. Comparing the few surviving photographs of Wrins with Lee Miller’s photos of Wrens, I argue that W.R.I.N.S. material mediated a specific and, for the time, new set of discourses about women’s role in a nation-in-making that may still speak to Indian women today.

Transnational connections and anti‐colonial radicalism in the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, 1946

AbstractIn this article, I explore the spatial politics of the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946 and call for a more maritime sense of ‘the political’. The RIN only existed from 1934 to 1950; it became the Indian Navy after independence. Its mutiny in 1946, which was caused by a number of grievances from anticolonial nationalism to more mundane challenges about the standard of food, continues to be the dominant event in this history. Leela Gandhi (2014) used the RIN mutiny to challenge the binary distinction between elite and subaltern in much Indian historiography by depicting it as an ‘anti‐colonial counterpublic’, or space in which discourses other than the dominant nationalist framings of independence were mobilized. She also regards the mutiny as a potential example of inconsequential ethics in which, instead of worrying about its causes, the mutiny can be read as an experimental space in which democratic politics occurred, rather than one in which people were striving for a ‘successful’ outcome. I argue that, while there is much to be admired in Gandhi's reading of these events, she discounts the maritime nature of the RIN mutiny. In other words, she fails to acknowledge that travelling to different international locations allowed the sailors to learn about democracy and other ideas, which in turn influenced their beliefs about what the future of India, and the RIN, should look like. As a result, I argue for the need to explore in greater depth the important connections that exist between anti‐colonialism, democratic politics and the naval/maritime experience.

Meanings of Failed Action: A Reassessment of the 1946 Royal Indian Navy Uprising

The exhibition, Meanings of Failed Action: Insurrection 1946, opened in Mumbai on 17 March 2017, and then in New Delhi on 8 February 2018. The second part of Vivan Sundaram's ‘The History Project’, this new installation was intended to mark seventy years of Indian Independence and Partition by exploring an often forgotten moment of Indian history: the uprising of the Royal Indian Navy's ratings in February 1946, when 10,000 naval ratings took charge of 66 ships across the Indian subcontinent in the name of the ‘Quit India’ movement. The event has since been erased from Indian national history, perhaps because, had the insurrection succeeded, India's struggle for freedom might have taken a different turn. In what follows, I focus on the documents we unearthed while researching for the exhibition—pamphlets, slogans, the ratings’ statements to the police and to the Commission of Enquiry, their memories and prison letters—and examine the motivations and hopes that defined the strikers’ action. What kind of freedom did the ratings stand for?

The Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of 1946: Nationalist Competition and Civil-Military Relations in Postwar India

ABSTRACTThis article argues for the importance of the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946 in two key aspects of the transition towards Indian independence: civilian control over the Indian military, and a competition for power between Congress and communists that undermined Indian workers and their student allies. The article begins with an investigation of the mutiny drawing on three sources: a first-person account from a lead mutineer, a communist history of the mutiny, and the papers published in the Towards Freedom collection. In 1946 a handful of low-ranking sailors sparked a naval mutiny that ultimately involved upwards of 20,000 sailors, and then crashed into the streets of Bombay with revolutionary fervour. The Communist Party in Bombay seized upon the mutiny as an opportunity to rally the working class against the British raj, with the hope of ending British rule through revolution rather than negotiation. Yet the mutiny proved less of a harbinger of what was ending and more of a bellwether for what was to come. Congress, sensing the danger of the moment, snuffed out support for the mutiny, and insisted on a negotiated transfer of power. Congress’s action thereby set a precedent for civilian dominance over the military in post-independence India. At the same time, however, Congress betrayed the effectiveness of some of organised labour’s strongest advocates, namely the Communist Party, Bombay students and Bombay labour, thereby undermining their costly mass protest, and hobbling them in future conflicts against Indian capitalists.

Beyond Talwar: A Cultural Reappraisal of the 1946 Royal Indian Navy Mutiny

On 18 February 1946 a mutiny broke out in HMIS Talwar, a Royal Indian Navy signals school in Bombay. Over the following days the disturbance spread to over 10,000 men, 66 ships and shore establishments, while there was civilian rioting in several major cities. The causes of the mutiny have traditionally been attributed to discontent over service conditions, racial abuse and the influence of Indian nationalism, firmly framing the ‘strike’ as part of India's anti-colonial struggle. Such explanations have been applied uniformly across the force, regardless of the wide-scale nature of the disturbances, and with little focus on those who remained loyal. By examining the experiences of units other than Talwar, this article challenges the predominant nationalist narrative of the mutiny, questioning the notion that overarching causes existed across the navy, and demonstrating how motives and reactions were more fractured and complex. It will also reconsider the connection between the mutiny and civilian rioting in Bombay, introducing organised crime as a notable influence, and examine the role of the preceding RAF ‘strikes’ and political discourses in framing the actions of the naval ratings.

The Long Goodbye: British Agency in the Creation of Navies for India and Pakistan

The armed forces of India and Pakistan draw legacies from a common British imperial past. British influence persisted in the navies that emerged from independence and partition on the South Asia subcontinent. Complaints over treatment and other grievances in the colonial Royal Indian Navy underscored a major mutiny in February 1946, prior to division of warships, shore-based establishments and personnel between the two countries. The transformation into truly national navies was long and involved, buttressed by continued reliance on British professional expertise and arms transfers. While the Admiralty offered warships on the basis of association with the commonwealth and defence cooperation in the Indian Ocean, navies in India and Pakistan led by senior British officers pursued distinct agendas and force structures that more and more looked towards potential war against each other. Louis Mountbatten, the last British viceroy, intervened often in naval matters before and after partition, encouraging Indians and Pakistanis to build up naval forces suited to national needs as well as serving British interests and imperial defence commitments during the early Cold War. Continued British presence impaired full nationalisation and the assumption of higher leadership roles by qualified indigenous naval officers in the newly independent commonwealth nations.

Learning ‘Large Ideas’ Overseas: Discipline, (im)mobility and Political Lives in the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny

In February 1946, the 20,000 sailors of the Royal Indian Navy, the colonial navy of the Government of India, mutinied. Having a number of grievances, from colonial rule of India, inefficient demobilisation procedures and ill treatment from superior officers, sailors on ships and shore establishments across the Indian Ocean took part in the mutiny, which represented the largest time a military force had disobeyed British Rule since the Mutiny of 1857. This paper examines the ways in which the geographies and mobilities of naval service shaped the political lives of the sailors in the RIN. On the one hand, both military (naval) and colonial forms of discipline worked through the spaces of the ship to attempt to control and order sailors’ lives. On the other, the mobile nature of life at sea, travelling from place to place and encountering colonial difference within the RIN, opened the door to different political ideas to influencing the sailors. At the same time, far from being a disconnected space, separate from the land, the naval ship combined with sailors’ land-based connections allowed them to contest and rework ‘landed’ political activity from the sea.

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

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.

Identity and the assemblages of protest: The spatial politics of the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny, 1946

This paper develops geographical understandings of political action by examining the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of 1946 using assemblage theory. This Mutiny of colonial armed forces has generally been characterised in one of three ways: as part of a post-World War Two nationalist ‘upsurge’ in India; as a sign of poor military organisation, and; as a potentially revolutionary moment against a dominant bourgeoisie. It is argued that each of these perspectives is incomplete. Rather, by examining the ways in which naval service shaped the lives of the sailors and their political outlook, the paper argues that the hybrid and contested political identities produced are best understood through utilising assemblage theory. Assemblage theory stresses the nature of society as a series of always emergent processes, with different components interacting and potentially producing new societal forms. Therefore, the sailors involved in the RIN Mutiny emerged as political actors through their engagement with multiple aspects of life as they experienced it as individuals. This has important implications for understanding the geographies of political protest more generally by showing how individuals are able to reformulate their political identities as part of wider assemblages.

The Royal Indian Navy Strike of 1946

The Royal Indian Navy Strike of 1946

Moving the stones to Stonehenge

Mr Garfitt is a Consultant Forester. He has been forestry adviser to large landed estates all over England and Wales from 1946 when he left the Royal Indian Navy. Before that he followed a degree in Forestry at Oxford by six years in the Colonial Forest Service (Malaya). Mr Garfitt says that his work involves intensive inspection of woodland and provides opportunities for the discovery of earthworks and artifacts. He is interested primarily in the prehistoric periods because of the opportunities they provide for imaginative reconstruction, as those who read on will discover. Mr Garfitt lives at The Swedish House, Spring Hill, Nailsworth, Stroud, Glos. GL6 0LX.

The Royal Indian Navy

The Royal Indian Navy

The Royal Indian Navy

The Royal Indian Navy