Royal Indian Navy mutiny
The Royal Indian Navy mutiny or revolt, also called the 1946 Naval Uprising,[1] was a failed insurrection of Indian naval ratings, soldiers, police personnel and civilians against the British government in India. From the initial flashpoint in Bombay (now Mumbai), the revolt spread and found support throughout British India, from Karachi to Calcutta (now Kolkata), and ultimately came to involve over 10,000 sailors in 56 ships and shore establishments. The mutiny failed to turn into a revolution because sailors were asked to surrender after the British authorities had assembled superior forces to suppress the mutiny.[2]
The mutiny ended with the surrender of revolting RIN sailors to British authorities. The Indian National Congress and the Muslim League convinced Indian sailors to surrender and condemned the mutiny, realising the political and military risks of unrest of this nature on the eve of independence. The leaders of the Congress were of the view that their idea of a peaceful culmination to a freedom struggle and smooth transfer of power would have been lost if an armed revolt succeeded with undesirable consequences.[3] The Communist Party of India was the only nation–wide political organisation that supported the rebellion. The British authorities had later branded the Naval Mutiny as a "larger communist conspiracy raging from the Middle East to the Far East against the British crown".
The RIN Revolt started as a strike by ratings of the Royal Indian Navy on 18 February in protest against general conditions. The immediate issues of the revolt were living conditions and food. By dusk on 19 February, a Naval Central Strike committee was elected. The strike found some support amongst the Indian population, though not their political leadership who saw the dangers of mutiny on the eve of Independence. The actions of the mutineers were supported by demonstrations which included a one–day general strike in Bombay. The strike spread to other cities, and was joined by elements of the Royal Indian Air Force and local police forces.
Indian Naval personnel began calling themselves the "Indian National Navy" and offered left–handed salutes to British officers. At some places, NCOs in the British Indian Army ignored and defied orders from British superiors. In Madras and Poona (now Pune), the British garrisons had to face some unrest within the ranks of the Indian Army. Widespread rioting took place from Karachi to Calcutta. Notably, the revolting ships hoisted three flags tied together – those of the Congress, Muslim League, and the Red Flag of the Communist Party of India (CPI), signifying the unity and downplaying of communal issues among the mutineers.
The revolt was called off following a meeting between the President of the Naval Central Strike Committee (NCSC), M. S. Khan, and Vallab Bhai Patel of the Congress with a guarantee that none would be persecuted.[4] Contingents of the naval ratings were arrested and imprisoned in camps with distressing conditions over the following months,[5] and the condition of surrender which shielded them from persecution. Patel, who had been sent to Bombay to settle the crisis, issued a statement calling on the strikers to end their action, which was later echoed by a statement issued in Calcutta by Muhammad Ali Jinnah on behalf of the Muslim League. Under these considerable pressures, the strikers gave way. Arrests were then made, followed by courts martial and the dismissal of 476 sailors from the Royal Indian Navy. None of those dismissed were reinstated into either the Indian or Pakistani navies after independence.
HMIS Talwar[edit]
HMIS Talwar was a shore establishment,[18] with a signals school at Colaba, Bombay.[19] Following the end of the war, the establishment was among the locations in Bombay where a large number of ratings were deployed.[6] Around 1,000 communications operators were residing at the establishment,[20] most of the whom consisted of lower–middle class and middle–class people with matriculation or college education as opposed to general seamen who were primarily from the peasantry.[21] In late 1945, upon reassignment, around 20 operators along with a dozen sympathisers frustrated with racial discrimination faced by them during their period of service, formed a secretive group under the self designation of Azad Hind (transl. Free Indians) and began hatching conspiracies to undermine their senior officers.[22]
The first incident occurred on 1 December 1945, when RIN Commanders had intended to open up the establishment to the public; in the morning the group vandalised the premises by littering the parade ground with burnt flags and bunting, prominently displaying brooms and buckets at the tower and painting slogans such as "Quit India, Down with British Raj", and "Victory to Gandhi and Nehru", across various walls of the establishment.[23] The senior officers cleaned up the premises before the public arrived without further action. The weak response emboldened the conspirators who continued on with similar activities over the course of the following months.[22]
The response was a result of correspondences issued by the Commander–in–Chief Sir Claude Auchinleck informing officers to maintain a degree of tolerance for a smooth transition in case of Indian Independence such that British interests are secured by maintaining good relations. Unable to catch the conspirators and restricted from taking strict action against their underlings, the command at HMIS Talwar resorted to increasing the pace of demobilization in the hopes that the troublemakers would be pushed out of the force during the process. As a result, the group shrunk in size but the remaining ones remained enthused for more nationalistic activities.[24]
On 2 February 1946, Auchinleck himself was supposed to attend the establishment and the officers aware of the potential for vandalism had employed guards to prevent any large–scale action beforehand. Despite this, the group was able to add stickers and paint the walls of the podium from where the C–in–C was to receive the establishment's salute, featuring slogans such as "Quit India" and "Jai Hind". The vandalism was spotted before sunrise and Balai Chandra Dutt, a five–year veteran of the war, was caught while escaping the scene with stickers and glue in his hand.[25] Subsequently, his lockers were searched and communist and nationalist literature were found among its contents.[26][27] The material was considered to be seditious; Dutt was interrogated by five senior officers in quick succession including a rear-admiral, he claimed responsibility for all acts of vandalism and announced his status as a political prisoner.[28] He was imprisoned in solitary confinement for seventeen days,[9] while the acts themselves continued unabated following his imprisonment.[28]
On 8 February 1946, a number of naval ratings (enlisted personnel) were court martialed for insubordination,[16] and the commanding officer Frederick King reportedly indulged in racialist polemic along with the use of epithets such as "sons of bitches", "sons of coolies" and "junglies" to describe his Indian underlings.[18][27] Some of the naval ratings filed a formal complaints against the leadership style of the commanding officer.[10] On 17 February, a large number of ratings began refusing food and orders for military parades,[16] King had reportedly used the term "black bastards" to describe a group of sailors during the morning briefing.[10] By 18 February, the ratings at HMIS Sutlej, HMIS Jumna, and those at Castle and Fort Barracks in the Bombay Harbour followed suit and began refusing orders, in solidarity with the operators at HMIS Talwar.[29]
At 12:30, 18 February 1946, it was reported that all naval ratings below the rank of petty officer at HMIS Talwar were refusing commands from the CO.[30] Eventually, the ratings rebelled, seizing control of the shore establishment and expelling the officers. Over the course of the day, the ratings moved across the Bombay Harbour from ship to ship in an attempt to convince other ratings to join them in the mutiny.[31][32] In the meantime, B. C. Dutt had spent several days in solitary confinement and was allowed to return at the Talwar barracks before his expected dismissal from the force.[17] He would later come to be known one of the primary instigators of the mutiny.[27] Within a day, the mutiny had spread to 22 ships in the harbour and 12 other shore establishments in Bombay.[31][32] On the same day, the mutiny was also joined in by RIN operated wireless stations including those as distant as Aden and Bahrain; the mutineers at HMIS Talwar had used available wireless devices at the signals school to establish direct communications with them.[10]
Impact[edit]
Indian historians have looked at the mutiny as a protest against racial discrimination and supply of bad food by the British officials.[97] British scholars note that there was no comparable unrest in the Army, and have concluded that internal conditions in the Navy were central to the mutiny. There was poor leadership and a failure to instill any belief in the legitimacy of their service. Furthermore, there was tension between officers (mostly British), petty officers (largely Punjabi Muslims), and junior ratings (mostly Hindu), as well as anger at the very slow rate of release from wartime service.
The grievances focused on the slow pace of demobilisation. British units were near mutiny and it was feared that Indian units might follow suit. The weekly intelligence summary issued on 25 March 1946 admitted that the Indian Army, Navy and Air Force units were no longer trustworthy, and, for the Army, "only day to day estimates of steadiness could be made". The situation has thus been deemed the "Point of No Return."
The British authorities in 1948 branded the 1946 Indian Naval Mutiny as a "larger communist conspiracy raging from the Middle East to the Far East against the British crown".
However, probably just as important remains the question as to what the implications would have been for India's internal politics had the revolt continued. The Indian nationalist leaders, most notably Gandhi and the Congress leadership, had apparently been concerned that the revolt would compromise the strategy of a negotiated and constitutional settlement, but they sought to negotiate with the British and not within the two prominent symbols of respective nationalism—–the Congress and the Muslim League.
In 1967 during a seminar discussion marking the 20th anniversary of Independence; it was revealed by the British High Commissioner of the time John Freeman, that the mutiny of 1946 had raised the fear of another large–scale mutiny along the lines of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, from the 2.5 million Indian soldiers who had participated in the Second World War.[98]
Legacy[edit]
The rising was championed by Marxist cultural activists from Bengal. Salil Chaudhury wrote a revolutionary song in 1946 on behalf of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). Later, Hemanga Biswas, another veteran of the IPTA, penned a commemorative tribute. A Bengali play based on the incident, Kallol (Sound of the Wave), by radical playwright Utpal Dutt, became an important anti–establishment statement, when it was first performed in 1965 in Calcutta. It drew large crowds to the Minerva Theatre where it was being performed; soon it was banned by the Congress government of West Bengal and its writer imprisoned for several months.
The revolt is part of the background to John Masters' Bhowani Junction whose plot is set at this time. Several Indian and British characters in the book discuss and debate the revolt and its implications.
The 2014 Malayalam movie Iyobinte Pusthakam directed by Amal Neerad features the protagonist Aloshy (Fahadh Faasil) as a Royal Indian Navy mutineer returning home along with fellow mutineer and National Award–winning stage and film actor P. J. Antony (played by director Aashiq Abu)