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

Davies, Andrew

doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.03.013

Cited by 21 publications

(16 citation statements)

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“…Gandhi argues that, rather than trying to give the RIN mutiny a particular normative framework, we must see it as something with its own trajectory. In this, I am in broad agreement with her (Davies 2013a). Going through the material in the National Archives of India in Delhi in 2010, which primarily consists of the official Commission of Inquiry's report from shortly after the mutiny, it becomes clear how difficult it is to assign a particular 'script' to the extremely heterogeneous accounts of the mutiny that the sailors gave to create what David Featherstone (2003) called 'maps of grievance', the ways in which actors make sense of the solidarities and antagonisms that flow through political networks.…”

Section: The Rin Mutiny As a Moment Of Democratic Inconsequencesupporting

confidence: 81%

“…These three interpretations of the RIN mutiny are all useful postcolonial interrogations of the event. In fact, my earlier work on the incident (Davies 2013a(Davies , 2013b(Davies , 2014 was largely an attempt to disrupt some of the dominant discourses in circulation about it. Gandhi's examination of it, however, fundamentally overlooks the maritime aspect of the RIN.…”

Section: The Rin Mutiny As a Moment Of Democratic Inconsequencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…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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Section: The Rin Mutiny As a Moment Of Democratic Inconsequencesupporting

confidence: 81%

Section: The Rin Mutiny As a Moment Of Democratic Inconsequencementioning

confidence: 99%

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

Davies

2019

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“…Whilst such arguments are important, these extreme read ings tend to obscure the subtlety and nuances in how the spaces of the RIN, both before and during the Mutiny, acted to make the men who served within the Navy active political subjects (Davies 2013). What is clear is that the RIN Mutiny is an important, yet relatively underexplored event in the history of the decolonisation of India, but crucially allows an understanding of the complex geographies of discipline and resistance that are at work within military organisations, and in this case, these political subjectivities are shaped by the importance of the sea.…”

Section: Downloaded By [University Of Leeds] At 07:02 26 November 2014mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To cite this article: Andrew Davies (2013) From 'Landsman' to 'Seaman'? Colonial discipline, organisation and resistance in the Royal Indian Navy, 1946, Social & Cultural Geography, 14:8, 868-887, DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2013 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2013.827234…”

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

Davies

2013

Social & Cultural Geography

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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.

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South India and Anticolonialism

2019

Geographies of Anticolonialism

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

Cited by 21 publications

References 21 publications

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

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

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

South India and Anticolonialism

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