Beyond<i>Talwar</i>: A Cultural Reappraisal of the 1946 Royal Indian Navy Mutiny

Spence, Daniel Owen

doi:10.1080/03086534.2015.1026126

Cited by 18 publications

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“…It is thus not surprising that the mutiny, and the RIN's role in developing India's naval forces, has interested a number of scholars (Davies 2013a(Davies , 2014Deshpande 1996Deshpande , 2016Meyer 2017;Spence 2014Spence , 2015a. In a striking piece of scholarship, Leela Gandhi (2014) used the testimonies of RIN sailors to the Commission of Inquiry that took place after the mutiny to argue that the sailors had tried to form what she called a 'revolutionary counterpublic'.…”

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

Davies

2019

Global Networks

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In 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.

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confidence: 99%