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Editing out the alternative: the disappearance of the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny from the history of the end of empire

Barry  Pavier

Sumit Sarkar described the Royal Indian Navy (RIN)  mutiny of 18-23 February 1946 as :
‘…one of the most truly heroic, if largely forgotten, episodes of our freedom 
struggle’. (1)

 The heroic aspect encompassed a total strike by the RIN sailors on board ship and shore establishments from the initial flashpoint in Bombay to Karachi and  Calcutta, involving 78 ships, 20 shore establishments and 20,000 sailors.  (2) The immediate issue was conditions  and food, but there were more fundamental matters such as racist behaviour by Royal Navy personnel towards Indiuan sailors, and disciplinary measures being taken against anyone demonstrating pro-nationalist sympathies.  Famously the ships hoisted three flags tied together: the Congress and Muslim League flags, and the Red Flag of the Communist Party of India (CPI). A general strike in support of the mutiny took place in Bombay on 22nd February, while there was widespread rioting in Karachi on both the 22nd and 23rd.

The mutiny was called off following a meeting between the President of the Naval Central Strike Committee (NCSC) , M. S. Khan, and Vallabhai Patel of the Congress, who had been sent to Bombay to settle the crisis. Patel issued a statement calling on the strikers to end their action, which was later echoed by a statement issued in Calcutta by Mohammed Ali Jinnah on behalf of the Muslim League. Under this considerable pressure the strikers gave way. Despite assurances of the goood services of the Congress and the Muslim League widespread arrests were made. These were followed up by courts martial and large scale dismissals from the service. None of those dismissed were reinstated into either of the Indian or Pakistani navies after independence.

What is notable is that the mutiny has more or less disappeared from the nationalist narratives of the end of empire. This is in contrast to the trials of the officers of the Indian National Army (INA), which were under way at the same time. In fact, the INA trials have often been incorporated into the narrative of the final push for independence, most prominently on the Indian side since Jawharlal Nehru appeared as a counsel for the defence. The RIN mutiny , by contrast, has usually vanished from sight. Sumit Sarkar does have a two page section devoted to it in his commanding narrative of the years 1885-1947, but perhaps the most telling comment comes in a book written by authors of a generalleft-wing persuasion, which you might have expected to reflect a sympathetic and positive assessment. However, criticising the view that the mutiny posed a fundamental threat to the British, they say:

‘ In fact the upsurges demonstrated that despite considerable erosion of the morale of the bureaucracy and the steadfastness of the armed forces at the time, the British wherewithal to repress was intact…It was one thing for the British Government to question its own stand of holding the INA  trails when faced with opposition from the army and the people. It was quite another matter when they face challenges to their authority. Challenges to the peace, the British were clear, had to be repress.’ (3).

The mutiny is also seen as a mistake, because it disrupted the strategy of the Congress:

‘ Negotiations were an integral part of the Congress strategy, a possibility which had to be exhausted before a mass movement was launched…the card of negotiation was to be played first, that of mass movement was to be held in reserve.’ (4)

The author then gives a full page of quotations from Gandhi from a statement of 3rd March 1946, criticising the strikers for mutinying without the call of a ‘prepared revolutionary party’ and without the ‘guidance and intervention’ of  ‘political leaders of their choice’. He further criticised the local Congress leader Aruna Asaf Ali, who had stated that she would rather unite Hindus and Muslims on the barricades than on the constitutional front:

‘If the union at the barricade is honest then there must be union also at the constitutional front.’ (5)

The analysis here is interesting, because the logic behind it conceives any mass movement as being no more than a tool of existing political parties. An absolute premium is placed on agreement at the constitutional level, which spontaneous and unregulated upsurges can only disrupt and, at the most extreme, destroy. Now this view is quite consistent with Gandhi’s practice all the way through his career, most obviously in his abandonment of the Non-Co-Operation Movement in 1922 following the attack on the police station at Chauri Chaura. The experience of the Quit India Movement in 1942 was that central control quickly dissolved under the impact of British repression, and localised actions continued well into 1943, with widespread acts of sabotage. Gandhi may well have concluded that the rapid emergence of militant mass demonstrations in support of the sailors promised a repeat performance which had to be nipped in the bud if central control of the campaign to get the British out was to be maintained. Since Muslim League supporters had given a great deal of passive support for Quit India, and since the episode was quite devoid of communal clashes, despite the fact that it was opposed by the then collaborationist Muslim League, Jinnah may well have come to the same conclusion.

Whatever the lengths of the references to the Naval Mutiny, the central point is the significance that is attached to it. The distinguishing aspect of the critical reference just discussed is that it takes the mutiny seriously as a historical episode. Most references treat it as one event in a series that preceded the end of British rule, 
Either as an example of national feeling or as an occasion when working class militancy and heroism was evident. (6) The standard work, drawing on the experiences of the strikers themselves (7), and reflecting the involvement of the CPI in the mutiny, again portrays the event as a heroic stand against imperialism that was betrayed by the leadership of the national movement. Any wider significance was only alluded to in a cursory manner in the 1954 introduction:

‘Had it not been for this “advice” of the Congress and League leaders
 [to end the mutiny –BP] , the RIN uprising would have developed in a different direction; had it not been for the policy pursued by them in relation to every struggle that broke out in that period, we would have seen something different from the 1947 transfer of power, according to which the iron grip of British rule was allowed to continue.’ (8)

This was then followed by a polemical argument against the Indian and Pakistani ruling classes for their involvement with the Commonwealth, their presumed involved with the South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO), then under discussion, and of the US-Pakistani military agreement which did , in fact, presage Pakistani membership of SEATO.   Here the episode was viewed through the filter of  Cold War politics, and not as a watershed in the anti-imperialist struggle. Yet it seems to me that it was indeed a decisive moment, and that this is reflected in the critical assessment referred to earlier and in Gandhi’s condemnations. He clearly perceived it as a threat to the strategy that he was pursuing at the time, and the despatch of so senior a figure as Patel to Bombay is an indication of the seriousness with which it was viewed. Given Patel’s well known modus operandi, one can surmise that his interview with the leadership of the Naval central Strike Committee was brutal: the account of the mutiny has M. S. Khan speaking in a ‘tired voice’ (9) after his meeting with Patel. The withdrawal of the action had to be imposed on the Committee – initially only a handful of the thirty six delegates were in favour of his proposal. He managed to swing opinion by having got the Talwar , the Signals Training Establishment where the mutiny had begun, to agree to end the action before the meeting of the NCSC began. This move produced a level of demoralisation sufficient for a majority for cessation to be obtained, which was assisted by the timely arrival of the news of Jinnah’s Calcutta statement in the middle of the debate. (10). At the end of the day a minority of six were left still arguing for keeping the action going.

Gandhi and the Congress leadership had been concerned to end the action because it  would compromise their strategy of negotiation for and agreed constitutional settlement – with the British. What did not seem to enter their calculations at the time was that they would fail, in the sense of having to accept  a partition. The fact that they played the end-game very subtly by out-manouvering Jinnah in March 1947 by insisting on the partition of Punjab and Bengal ((thus producing Jinnah’s famous ‘moth-eaten Pakistan’ remark) does not detract from the assessment that their strategy of early 1946 was comprehensively unsound. This in turn brings us back to the issue of the treatment of the mutiny in history writing. Once you move from descriptive narrative to assessment and evaluation of the arguments made and the decisions taken,  then the attitude of the Congress leadership becomes increasingly questionable.

This critical assessment starts from events at the time of the mutiny. It is well established that there was widespread militant support for the mutiny, even given the short period that it occupied. Much though by no means all of this supported was organised by militants of the CPI. This happened not only in Bombay, but also in Karachi (11)  and Calcutta on February 23rd, in Ahmedabad, Madras and Trichinopoly on the 25th, at Kanpur on the 26th, and at Madurai and several places in Assam on the 26th. (12)  In other words, it was possible to produce mass strikes demonstrations and hartals several days after  the mutiny had been called off. The probability that these actions would have been less comprehensive had the mutiny still been in progress has to be slim indeed.

This is of importance because there is a partially-suppressed debate about the significance of the mutiny. It is ‘partially-suppressed’ because it has been mainly conducted on the political left and because the implications are so profound. There is an evaluation of the mutiny which argues that had it continued, and confronted the threat of the RIN commander Admiral Godfrey to destroy the fleet, the British would have been faced by a mass popular movement which could have propelled them from India under very different circumstances than eventually occurred. This derives from the assessment that even had they destroyed the RIN (which they possessed the naval force sufficient to do),,  they would then have been likely to be  unable to control India with the forces at their disposal. The navy itself was marginal in terms of state power; there were already sgns that Indian troops were potentially unreliable in the current situation, and shortly after this mutinies occurred in the Royal Indian Air Force. Moreover, in the post-war conditions of demobilisation, austerity and US hostility to European Asian empires it was unlikely that it would have been feasible for the Attlee government to seek a solution by violence. So a feasible, and indeed likely, alternative outcome would have been a confrontation between the British and a mass movement with which the CPI was heavily involved, in which the British would have to have given way, and which would have been characterised by a significant amount of inter-communal co-operation. In which case, it has to be questioned if it would have been possible for the Muslim League to have launched its Direct Action campaign in August 1946, which was the definitive moment in the progress of communal violence. In fact, you have to question whether any of the subsequent events could have taken place in anything like the manner that they eventually did. What is at stake here is the notion that Partition was inevitable, and this is where the work by Bipan Channdra and his colleagues at the Jawaharlal Nehru University are quite clear, it was:

‘inevitable because of the long-term failure of the Congress to draw  the Muslim masses into the national movement and stem the surging waves of Muslim communalism, which, especially since 1937, had been beating with increasing fury… Though the war with Jinnah was lost by early 1946, defeat was conceded only after the final battle was mercilessly waged in the streets of Calcutta and Rawalpindi and in the village lanes of Noakhali and Bihar.’ (13)

Thus the analysis is clear: the fight was lost long before February 1946, and it was lost because of a faulty strategy pursued by the Congress. In other words, the author agrees with Gandhi – mass popular movements cannot affect the outcome of events unless they act on the initiatives of their recognised leaders. So any  challenge to this analysis is disturbing, because what is then being argued is that Partition need not have occurred, in any form whatsoever. In other words, what we would have been living with since 1947 would not have been Pakistan or India/Bharat (or indeed Bangladesh), but most likely some form of  non-communal republic of Hindustan, itself a postumous vindication of Subhas Chandra Bose. The implications of this for the legitimacy of both states, of the political strategies adopted by most parties in these states, and most importantly for contemporary politics are so profound that most historical traditions are more comfortable in burying the issue. The fact that historians from a left wing tradition felt the need to address the issue directly probably arose from the fact that they felt the implied criticism of their analysis ( which derived from the Indian communist tradition) very keenly. For it has long been a critique of the strategy of the CPI that the embracing of the Popular Front strategy (which is still adopted in various guises by all the successor organisations to the CPI), led to it, and its mass support, becoming an increasingly ineffectual ‘tail’ to the ‘dogs’ of the Congress and the Muslim League, and so to their being marginalised in the crisis of 1947. For their tradition, therefore, the muntiny has a very ambivalent nature.

For the ‘official’ narratives of the states of the Partition, it is easier to see why it should be marginalised. For mainstream Indian nationalism, it was at best another anti-imperialist event and at worst a diversion from the main objective of the struggle. For those   adopting  any form of the Pakistani grand narrative, an episode marked out by Hindus and Muslims fighting together to confront the British so close to Partition was always going to be something of an embarrassment, given the absolute pre-condition of the rationale of |Pakistan that it is impossible for Hindus and Muslims to live peaceably side by side. Thus it is easier to edit the event from the narrative altogether.

Yet the significance of the debate lied in its contemporary impact. If Partiton was inevitable, then we are faced with the states of Partition for evermore. If it ewasn’t, then we may not be – and that is an explosive prospect even to admit the possibility of. Working in a British city with over 20% of the population from South Asian migrant communities, the consequences of Partition are part of every-day life, and frequently have an impact on issues of controversy. Teaching history in this environment swiftly makes you aware of the extent to which competing grand narratives really do affect the manner in which people view who they are and who others are. It also swiftly makes you aware of how these narratives edit the process and also, and perhaps more importantly, edit the nature of debates. It would appear to me that the proper function of historians in such a civil society is to restore debates that have been edited out of the record, so that everyone can conduct their own discussions in the awareness of all the alternatives and assessments that are on offer.

References

1.	Sumit Sarkar, ‘Modern India’ 1885-1947 (Cambridge, CUP, 1989), p. 423.

2.	ibid., p 424.

 3.    Bipan Chandra and others, ‘Indian Struggle for Independence’ (New Delhi, 
        Penguin, 1988), p. 482. The chapter from which this quotation is taken, No 36 
       ‘Post-War National Upsurge’, was written by Sucheta Mahajan.

4	 ibid., p. 485.

5.	ibid., p. 486.

 6.    See, for instance, Sukomal Sen, ‘Working Class of India’, 2nd ed, (Calcutta,
        KP Bagchi, 1997) p. 351, for a single page view from the Communist Party
        (Marxist).

7.	  Subrata Banerjee, ‘The RIN Strike’ (New Delhi, People’s Publishing House,
  1954).

8.	   ibid., p. xvii, introduction by E. M. S. Namboodiripad.

9.	    ibid., p. 68.

10.	 ibid. , pp 71-72.

11.      Anirudh Despande, ‘Sailors and the crowd, popular protest in Karachi, 1946’,
           in Indian Economic and Social History Review, 26, 1 (1989).

12.	     Sen, op. Cit., pp133-134.

13.	     Bipan Chandra, op. cit., p. 500. This chapter, No 37 ‘Freedom and Partition’,   
           Was also written by Sucheta mahajan.