Abstract
A
Anirudh Deshpande’s Hope and Despair resuscitates a significant episode in India’s nationalist movement. He revisits the days of February 1946 when the recruits and sailors of the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) went on a massive strike, in the port-cities of Bombay and Karachi. This episode has largely been sidelined in the narrative of India’s anti-colonial struggle for reasons that Deshapande does well to explain. The RIN mutiny, instead of being seen as a brave struggle of men in armed services, became a matter of embarrassment for the major political formations of that time—with the exception of the Communist Party of India (CPI). Both the Congress and the Muslim League were somewhat chary of the anit-British militancy that engulfed the working-class neighbourhoods of Bombay and Karachi, when it was felt that sensitive negotiations were being conducted with the British Government. It was this reluctance to support the struggle that prefigured the ways in which the RIN mutiny came to be remembered, or forgotten.
The mutiny was precipitated by the sailors at Bombay docks, demanding better food on duty as well as the removal of a particularly autocratic and racist superior. Deshpande locates the seemingly spontaneous event within the larger constellations of political and ideological forces. The discriminatory recruitment and promotion policies of the British, the exacting demands of the job (especially during the Second World War), the general economic crisis of the empire and simultaneously, the lionizing of the resistance put up by the Indian National Army (INA) under Subhas Chandra Bose and the general atmosphere of radical politics (abetted, in part, by the rising popularity of the Communist Party of India), all contributed to the making of the RIN Revolt.
In the Preface to the book, Deshpande situates it within the different historiographical traditions of the past few decades. Starting with early Marxist histories that provoked his interest, he outlines the dramatic effect of British Social History, and then its South Asian iteration, ‘Subaltern Studies’ on the way he approached and shaped his project. The signs of these three strands—often at loggerheads with each other—are very clear in Deshpande’s treatment of the subject. Not only does he identify the mutiny as an illustration of a non-elite nationalist upsurge, he also places it in a longer continuum of events and motivations to ensure that the mutiny is not reduced to being a spontaneous, largely ‘apolitical’ act of violence. Instead, in his chapter on the tumultuous days in Bombay, he underlines the fact that the naval ratings made attempts to connect with the larger working class struggle that it ignited while at the same time ensuring the basically secular, nationalist and progressive content of the struggle. The Central Naval Strike Committee was put together to articulate the demands of the rebellious dockmen and sailors and to negotiate for the short duration of the struggle with the British authorities, and liaison with nationalist leaders and journalists. What is most striking is the acute sense of history with which the brave men of RIN acted, as evinced from Deshpande’s narrative. It was only recently that the trials of INA soldiers had been witnessed by the nation. The national sentiment was in favour of the ‘seditious’ soldiers of INA who had, with the help of Axis Powers, dreamt of overthrowing the authority of the British in the Indian subcontinent. RIN’s actions must be seen as a conscious effort to fit within that narrative. Despite the nationalist leaders’ response to them being ambivalent, the strikers took some solace in the fact that their actions had brought, admittedly briefly, the Congress and the Muslim League together, ‘…two parties [that] did not unite even for the defence of the INA personnel’ (p. 62).
The book is divided into three chapters. The first chapter lays out the social history of military services in colonial India and the evolving ways in which the institution sought to discipline and control its men. With the events of 1857 never too far away from British memory, the colonial state organized its army premised on race-based presumptions for exploiting the fault lines within Indian society. The second chapter details the turn of events in Bombay, the sudden, growing militancy that took many within RIN and those among the Communist circles too by surprise. It is for this reason that the bulwark of support came not from the CPI alone but also from the working class neighbourhoods of Bombay. Perhaps, the experience of the Quit India Movement also proved to be a powerful precedent. However, at no point did the strikers or the subsequent rioters lose sight of the fact that theirs was an anti-colonial, nationalist struggle as can be seen from their proclamations, and reliance on accepted nationalist symbols and motifs, including the flags of Congress, Muslim League and CPI. The third chapter looks at the experience in Karachi and how the location of Karachi, its peculiar engagement with the colonial state and the demographics of the city, played a defining role in the way the mutiny unfolded there.
In the orchestrated frenzy that marked the nationalism debate across India in 2016, we often forget that the military–civilian divide is merely an artificial divide. Deshpande’s book does much more than just reminding its readers of the RIN’s heroic struggle in 1946. It is a poignant foray into a historical event whose implications remain with us at institutional and discursive level. But above all, it lifts the veil over men whose sacrifices probably hastened Britain’s departure from India, for which adequate recognition has not been forthcoming.