In the history of the Indian Independence movement, the word ‘mutiny’ is most often associated with the Revolt of 1857. However, an often-overlooked mutiny that triggered British withdrawal was that by the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) in 1946. However, this mutiny, as many scholars have alluded to it as, is absent from our collective consciousness largely due to a lack of primary sources surrounding the episode.
While promoting his book, 1946 Royal Indian Navy Mutiny (2022), author Pramod Kapoor stated that when he first started researching the mutiny, he found scant information from Indian sources, including from news archives, and in institutions such as the Nehru Memorial Library. Eventually, he went to Greenwich, a borough in London, where he found a litany of accounts at the National Maritime Museum. Kapoor’s explanation for this discrepancy was intriguing.
He believed that leaders of the two main political parties of the time, the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Muslim League, tampered with the documentation in order to conceal something. As to what that something is, we can only speculate, but what is known is that both parties were notably and publicly opposed to the uprising.
The 1946 Naval Mutiny
When the naval ratings or juniormost sailors first planned the mutiny, they referred to it as a strike. By their understanding, they were simply refusing to work as would striking workers at an industrial plant or in transit services. However, military law is far less forgiving of insubordination than civilian law. Under military law, mutiny occurs when any grievance is represented by more than one member of the armed services.
According to Janhavi Lokegaonkar, a senior researcher at the Maritime History Society (MHS) who spoke to indianexpress.com, between March 1942 and April 1945, there were nine mutinies in the Royal Indian Navy. However, the largest by far was the one that happened just a year before Independence in Bombay, the heart of Indian naval operations.
On February 8, the spark for mutiny was struck when a number of ratings were court-martialled for insubordination, after they were found to have glued independence slogans to the walls of their on-shore naval base, HMIS Talwar. On the same day, their commanding officer Frederick King further infuriated the ratings by referring to them as “sons of coolies” and “junglies”. Many of the ratings filed complaints, while others refused to eat until they were heard. Ten days later, the ratings at HMIS Talwar went on strike.
HMIS Hindustan, one of the ships that mutinied (Wikimedia Commons)
Kapoor provides an interesting anecdote here, stating that on the night before the ratings’ strike, its leaders put stones in the communal daal, hoping to further rile them against the British. The next morning, in 60 RIN ships harboured in Bombay and on 11 on-shore establishments, the Union Jack was replaced with flags representing the INC, Muslim League and the Communist Party. In Bombay, 3 lakh people – mostly middle- and lower-class workers – spilled onto the streets, protesting against poor working conditions and British Imperial rule.
Morse code messages were soon sent to naval establishments across the country and by the fifth day, Kapoor wrote, “the mutiny was no longer confined to Bombay, nor was it purely a naval affair.” Protests erupted across naval bases in Calcutta, Karachi, Madras, Cochin and most significantly, Karachi, a city of paramount importance to the Navy. In total, the movement spread to 78 ships and 21 naval establishments, and included nearly 20,000 ratings.
News coverage of the mutiny
The mutiny also managed to cross communal lines, drawing support from Hindus, Muslims and Parsis of all ages and economic backgrounds. As researcher Dennard D’Souza wrote in Uprising in the Wake of a Religiously Surcharged Environment, “religious harmony was also at play and very palpable on the streets of Bombay.” Perhaps, most importantly, it was also the first time civilians had banded together with the armed forces. Describing its significance, historian Sekhar Bandyopadhyay wrote for the Economic and Political Weekly saying that “what was really remarkable was the extent of the fraternisation between the navy ratings and the common people.”
However, conspicuously absent from the calls to arms were the INC and the Muslim League. On February 23, with 400 people killed and up to 1,500 wounded by British forces, the mutiny was finally called off after Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel prevailed on the ratings to surrender. Although he promised the mutineers that they would not be held responsible if they surrendered, ultimately, 523 were given dishonourable discharge, and barred from re-joining the armed forces.
There are many plausible theories as to why Patel and his fellow nationalist party leaders rejected the strike, including the reasons that drove the mutiny to life in the first place.
What sparked the mutiny
As World War II loomed on the horizon, British leaders understood that they could no longer dedicate Royal Naval resources towards India, and therefore would need to rapidly expand the nascent RIN. From the late 1930s to the end of the War, RIN forces expanded to 15 times its original size, from nearly 2,000 personnel to more than 30,000.
During the war, the Indian sailors performed admirably, fighting across the shores of Africa and the Pacific, and playing an essential role in recapturing Rangoon from Japanese forces. However, despite their various naval victories, according to Lokegaonkar, India’s contribution to the Allied efforts during the war remains unsung.
Facing drained coffers after the war ended, Britain had to rapidly demobilise the RIN, with figures from 1945 indicating that 940 officers and 9,000 ratings had to be transitioned into civilian life. The transition would prove to be catastrophic, with ratings handed only two shirts, a mug, and a one-way ticket back home. As Commander Kalesh Mohanan remarked at an MHS conference, “the key to understanding the morphology of the naval mutinies lies in the British naval policy of expansion, consolidation and racial contraction, followed by demobilisation.”
Hindustan Standard coverage of the Mutiny (Hindustan Standard archives)
For those who were retained, the circumstances were scarcely better. Ratings were forced to live in cramped dormitories and were made to sweep floors, clean toilets, and serve tea to British officers. Racial abuse and discrimination ran rampant. Lokegaonkar states that “in the RIN there was a clear hierarchy, and the British were very much at the top.”
Failing to adequately comprehend religious sentiments, the officers also forced ratings to eat food that defied their customs. Muslims were made to eat pork, and Hindus were told that if they did not want meat in their curry, they could just pick the pieces out. Even when the food was kosher, it was often unpalatable. “It wouldn’t be an overstatement,” D’Souza wrote, “to say that the mutiny of 1946 brewed over food or the lack thereof.”
Compounding the officers’ ignorance of India was their utter inexperience in naval matters. Quoting a source known only as Captain R, in A Study of Cohesion and Disintegration in Colonial Armed Forces, military historian Ronald Spector wrote, “I doubt if many of these European officers would have been officer material in their own countries.”
In his morale report of December 1945, Lieutenant Colonel M Haq Nawaz mentioned that “practically all Indian officers who talked to me complained that there is a marked discrimination on the part of the senior British officers against the Indian officers in regard to promotions and appointments. An inefficient and inexperienced British officer is often preferred to an Indian officer who is fully qualified to do the job.”
In addition to grievances about working conditions, leaders of the strike such as B C Dutt claimed that the aim of the mutiny was to end British rule in India. Later on in his book, Mutiny of Innocents (1971), he wrote that “we no longer considered ourselves as mere ratings of the RIN. We considered ourselves fighters for the country’s freedom.” Contemporary observers agreed with that assessment. In debates in the Central Assembly, Dr DV Deshmuck, a member of the Bombay Legislative Council, called the mutiny a signal to the British that “the old order had changed and the men of the RIN had demonstrated their adherence to a higher loyalty.”
However, Indian Independence had long been assured by that point, notably after the Labour Government came to power in the 1945 British elections. Therein lay the problem for the INC and Muslim League. To them, the mutineers were not agents for Indian independence but instead insubordinate ratings who were concerned only with their own priorities.
How did Congress and League respond?
In the words of S Natarajan, editor of the Free Press Journal, “the Naval upsurge died for want of leadership. The Congress as a whole was singularly uninterested in the rising.” Indeed, reports from the time indicate that both Congress and League leaders were either unsupportive or opposed to the mutiny. Patel even wrote to the Governor of Bombay during the strike, affirming that the Congress would do its part to curb violence and end the demonstrations. On February 26, Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru addressed a gathering in Bombay decrying the violence, while praising the patriotic spirit of the ratings.
Mahatma Gandhi, unlike Patel and Nehru, was unwilling to stand on the fence. In no uncertain terms, he declared, “If they mutinied for the freedom of India, they were doubly wrong. They could not do so without a call from a prepared revolutionary party. They were thoughtless and ignorant, if they believed that by their might they would deliver India from foreign domination.”
Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League was similarly dismissive, calling on the ratings to end the strike. However, while the Congress and the League withheld support, the Indian Communist Party wholeheartedly backed the mutineers. For the Communists, as with the other parties, part of their stance was purely political. The mutiny had mobilised the masses in Bombay, and the party felt as though championing the strike would draw support away from the Congress.
As Dr Mukund Ramrao Jayakar, a member of the Constituent Assembly, wrote in a letter to the defence lawyer Tej Bahadur Sapru, “there is a secret rivalry between the Communists and Congressmen, each trying to put the other in the wrong… Vallabhbhai almost said, without using so many words, that the trouble was due to the Communists trying to rival the Congress in the manner of leadership.”
According to John Meyer, University of Austin professor and author of Nationalist Competition and Civil-Military Relations in Post-war India, the Congress was weary of isolating the strikers, but at the same time, were unwilling to tip the post-war power balance. He argues that in 1946, the Congress party could not afford a military-led insurrection that would compromise its place at the negotiating table with the British.
The Times of India was especially critical of the protesters (Times of India Archives)
At the time, with Britain poised to leave the subcontinent, and talks over Pakistani separation well underway, Congress leaders knew they were next in line to rule India, and League leaders, Pakistan. As Kapoor wrote, “Sadly, the Indian political leadership, namely the Congress and League were hobbled by their own personal aspirations and egos and opted out to negotiate a peaceful transfer of power rather than backing the mutineers.”
It is worth noting that while the Congress did have vested interests, it had also widely promoted non-violence and in certain cases, spoken against disruptive economic practices. According to Lokegaonkar, since ahimsa was the dominant political ideology of the day, the Congress might have withheld support given that both sides gave in to violence during the uprising.
Adding to their political convictions, Meyer argued that the Congress also held a distaste for the armed forces, as the ratings, however low-ranking they might be, were an “integral part of the war machine” that kept Nehru, Gandhi and Patel in prison for much of the war. In his view, the Congress knew that they had to establish civilian control over the armed forces, and any uprising would not be conducive to a centralised military-political axis. As historian Srinath Raghavan added in India’s War (2016,) “now that independence and power were in sight, they were eager not to encourage indiscipline in the armed forces.”
Legacy of the mutiny
Vice Admiral A R Karve remarked at a conference held by the MHS in 2021 that the mutiny of 1946 was pivotal in spearheading the British exit from India, as it reminded them that they were rapidly losing their grip over the country. Writing about the event in a journal article for the MHS, historian Dipak Kumar Das, stated that with the mutiny, “the British faced a legitimacy crisis on a scale and frequency as never before.” Lokegaonkar agrees with that assessment, stating that the British knew losing one of their sword arms could be potentially very dangerous.
Although some argue that the mutiny was unrelated to the Independence struggle, and that the British had one foot out of the country already by then, others credit the mutiny for hastening the process, with historian Ramesh Chandra Majumdar pointing out in History and Culture of the Indian People (1977) that the decision to send a Cabinet Mission to India was announced one day after the mutiny started.
Naval Uprising Memorial in Colaba, Mumbai (Wikimedia Commons)
According to the letters of PV Chakraborty, former Chief Justice of the Kolkata High Court, the profound impact of the mutiny was confirmed to him by British Prime Minister Clement Attlee himself. He claimed that in 1956, upon receiving the visiting Attlee, he asked: “The Quit India Movement of Gandhi practically died out long before 1947 and there was nothing in the Indian situation at that time which made it necessary for the British to leave India in a hurry. Why then did they do so?”
Chakraborty wrote that Attlee gave him two reasons. One was that the Indian National Army under Subhas Chandra Bose had severely weakened the British army, and the other was the RIN mutiny. When asked about the impact of the Quit India Movement, Attlee spelled out the word ‘minimal’.
In the immediate aftermath of Independence, however, the mutiny was largely ignored and it was only in 1973 that the Government of India agreed to accord the ratings who participated in the mutiny the status of freedom fighters, approving freedom fighters’ pension for those who had been dismissed from service for their participation.
According to Lokegaonkar, the legacy of the mutiny can be ascertained not only by its impact on the Independence struggle, but also by its role in shaping the relationship between civilians and soldiers. As the ratings mutineers wrote in their surrender statement, “for the first time, the blood of the men in the services and the people flowed together in a common cause. We in the services will never forget this. We also know that you, our brothers and sisters, will not forget. Jai Hind.”
Further Reading
1946 Royal Indian Navy Mutiny, 2021, Pramod Kapoor, Roli publishers
A Study of Cohesion and Disintegration in Colonial Armed Forces, Ronald Spector, Sage Journals
Mutiny of Innocents, 1971, B.C Dutt, Sindhu Publications
Nationalist Competition and Civil-Military Relations in Post-war India, JM Meyer, Taylor and Francis Online
India’s War, 2016, Srinath Raghavan, Penguin Allen Publishers
History and Culture of the Indian People, R.C Majumdar, Public Domain