I am pleased to say that a peer-reviewed article I wrote for the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth Studies has just been published online. The print version should come out in a few months. Until then, here is the publisher's online link at Taylor & Francis. 

Here is the abstract:

"This article argues for the importance of the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946 in two key aspects of the transition towards Indian independence: civilian control over the Indian military, and a competition for power between Congress and communists that undermined Indian workers and their student allies.

​"The article begins with an investigation of the mutiny drawing on three sources: a first-person account from a lead mutineer, a communist history of the mutiny, and the papers published in the Towards Freedom collection.

​"In 1946 a handful of low-ranking sailors sparked a naval mutiny that ultimately involved upwards of 20,000 sailors, and then crashed into the streets of Bombay with revolutionary fervour. The Communist Party in Bombay seized upon the mutiny as an opportunity to rally the working class against the British raj, with the hope of ending British rule through revolution rather than negotiation.

​"Yet the mutiny proved less of a harbinger of what was ending and more of a bellwether for what was to come. Congress, sensing the danger of the moment, snuffed out support for the mutiny, and insisted on a negotiated transfer of power. Congress’s action thereby set a precedent for civilian dominance over the military in postindependence India. At the same time, however, Congress betrayed the effectiveness of some of organised labour’s strongest advocates, namely the Communist Party, Bombay students and Bombay labour, thereby undermining their costly mass protest, and hobbling them in future conflicts against Indian capitalists."

​While my author's agreement does not allow me to place the polished, published version of the article on this website just yet, I am able to provide readers with the rough draft of the article I submitted to the editors. Here is the link to the rough draft:         
http://jmmeyer.weebly.com/royal_indian_navy_mutiny_1946.html

​If you would like to read the published version, simply contact me and I can e-mail it directly to you.

Dutt, B.C. Mutiny of the Innocents. (1971). Bombay: Sindhu Publications.

B.C. Dutt's Mutiny of the Innocents offers a razor sharp first-person account of a forgotten episode in the history of India's long struggle against foreign rule. In the early months of 1946, low-ranking sailors in the Royal Indian Navy began supporting Indian independence, but only after years of loyal service to the wider empire. Their sudden change of heart bewildered both British military leaders like General Claude Auchinleck and Indian politicians like Mahatma Gandhi.

Dutt's story, however, begins with his entrance into the Royal Indian Navy as a teenager. A radio and signal operator, Dutt and his fellow Indian sailors served loyally throughout the war, but lost enthusiasm for their task as profligate racism sets a clear divide between themselves and white service members. Despite the racism, Dutt worked hard, and took pride in his work. He was a cog in a wheel, but thrived in his own way. At the end of the war, Dutt found himself stationed at the HMIS Talwar, the shore establishment where he first learned his trade as a signalman. For Dutt, and his fellow veterans, the future looked bleak. The post-war navy offered few opportunities for advancement; outside the military, jobs were scarce. And many Indians viewed the sailors and soldiers of the Indian military as mercenaries more interested in lining their pockets with British coin than serving their homeland. Dutt's experiences with racism, and his own questions about his role in the British empire, eventually led him to take action in support of Indian independence. Gathering in the canteen of the Talwar, Dutt and a few like-minded conspirators engaged in well-timed acts of minor sabotage. For the most part, they merely distracted sentries and pasted revolutionary slogans on barrack walls. They timed their subversive activities to maximize the embarrassment of their officers.

In February 1946, the authorities caught Dutt. But he refused to cooperate or name his fellow conspirators. Further, he declared himself a political prisoner, rather than an insubordinate sailor. In a political situation already fraught with tension, this caught his superior officers off guard. They tried to respond with restraint in order to keep the situation quiet. But the opposite happened. Dutt's slight success catapulted him into the spotlight. Other naval ratings used a common complaint--the poor quality of navy chow--to rally other sailors to the cause. The ensuing rebellion more resembled a student protest or worker strike rather than a violent insurrection. What began as small demonstrations of discontent expanded into a brief (but bright) flame of outright rebellion, and came to be known as the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny. It ultimately involved upwards of 12,000 ratings (low-ranking sailors). The ratings seized ships and shore establishments throughout Bombay; ratings in Calcutta, Karachi, and elsewhere also gained control of their vessels. The ratings adopted the language of the nationalist leaders, and formed a strike committee to lead the way. The ratings offered to hand over the navy to nationalist leaders in Congress and Muslim League, but received a cold response from everyone except the Communists Party.  

 Congress leaders, especially Sadar Vallabhbhai Patel, quickly organized a truce between the mutineers and the British authorities. Very few ratings lost their lives, and only a few ships were damaged. But for enthusiastic participants like B.C. Dutt, the short-lived mutiny taught them an indelible lesson on the limits of India's revolutionary politics. The nationalist leaders had struggled for decades to achieve Indian independence. Now the leaders could already see the finish line, and yearned to reach it. The British were clearly on the way out. The mutiny, rather than helping the nationalist leaders achieve their objective, threatened to disrupt the delicate balance of power of domestic politics. Besides, the nationalist leadership consisted of lawyers and industrialists and cloaked themselves in the mores of non-violence; they distrusted military personnel out of habit, and the young naval ratings now asking for their help were no exception. Thus, the complex realities of nationalist politics quickly eclipsed the RIN mutiny.

A year and a half later, India won its independence from imperial rule, but at the cost of an independent Pakistan. Jinnah, the first leader of Pakistan, kept an earlier promise and allowed Muslim mutineers to apply for positions in the Pakistan navy. In India, however, newly-minted Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (and the rest of the Congress leadership) opted to keep the mutineers out of the service. The Royal Indian Navy discharged D.C. Butt quickly and quietly; he tried to join Nehru's navy, but without success. He eventually made his way back to Bombay and became a reporter with the Free Press Journal, the newspaper that most closely covered the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny.

We do not often think of mutineers as innocents, but B.C. Dutt's book makes a convincing case that these young men truly did not know what they were getting themselves into. The book begins with a forward from S. Natarajan, the editor of the Free Press Journal at the time of the mutiny. He describes his own interest in the mutiny, and his careful decision to chronicle the efforts of the naval ratings when a few members of their party appeared on his doorstep on 18 February 1946. Though the mutiny ended in meekness, it shared dangerous echoes with rebellions that began elsewhere in the world. When the book transitions to Dutt's voice, the account assumes an uncanny charm. He records the events without malice or resentment. He articulates the views of his enemies with remarkable generosity and restraint.

In particular, Dutt chronicles the motivations of the Indian officers that remained loyal to the navy, and the actions of Commander King, a white officer whose racist language helped the mutiny spiral out of control. In other accounts (including Banerjee's The RIN Strike and Sarkar's Towards Freedom series) King stands a mysterious and foolish monster. But in Dutt's account, Commander King emerges as a complicated and surprisingly sympathetic figure that lacked the political wherewithal and leadership skills to contain the misbegotten mutiny. Like Dutt and King, the ratings and officers initially caught in the strike simply lacked the political sophistication to achieve their objectives.

B.C. Dutt published Mutiny of the Innocents in 1971. Reflecting on his actions of twenty-five years prior, Dutt comes across as an astute observer of human nature. He also has the wisdom to reassess his actions in the rearview mirror, and place them in historical perspective. At times, a sense of humor shines through the book's pages, as when after a late-night attempt at revolutionary graffiti, naval sentries catch Dutt with his hands covered in glue.

Dutt's book stands as a riveting account of political failure in waning shadows of the British raj. Dutt managed, for a short time at least, to rally sailors to take a political stand against the British empire; the rebellion's failure, as Dutt states at the close of the book, was probably inevitable. His revolution failed, but his book succeeds. 

Jalal, Ayesha. The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan. CUP, 1985 (1994).  

The founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, perhaps accrues more condemnation than any other leading figure of Indian nationalism. Ayesha Jalal challenges the orthodox British and Indian interpretations of Jinnah with The Sole Spokesman, a book that examines Jinnah within the context of the All-India Muslim League and the Gordian knot of Indian politics. One of the most successful lawyers in the British empire, Jinnah began his political life as an Indian nationalist, not a Pakistani separatist. But Gandhi's religious revivalism offended Jinnah's taste for secular legalism; in response, Jinnah drifted out of the Indian National Congress as Gandhi rose to power in the 1920s. Jinnah began pursuing a policy of protected electoral rights for Muslims. Opponents found Jinnah unwilling to break even after substantial electoral defeats that revealed the tenuous grip he held over typical Muslim interests. Despite the odds, he "stayed in the saddle" and relentlessly pursued his objective of securing Muslim political rights throughout the subcontinent (and not just in the eventual regions of Pakistan). He played a dangerous game, and though he never got what he wanted--constitutional protections in a united India--he did not quite lose. His political positions sometimes appeared foolish (even dangerous), but not from the slim purchase that served as his foothold for power--he created a perceived need for a strong Muslim center.

            The British empire, throughout the early twentieth century, enhanced the power and status of India's provincial governments in order to undermine the drive for nationalist politics under the banner of Indian National Congress or the Muslim League. Strong provincial politics, the British thought, could prevent a national revolution. But in response, the Muslim League began to whisper communalist fears into the ear of Muslim majority provinces such as Punjab and Bengal; the Muslim League hinted that only a strong nationalist Muslim movement at the center could protect Muslim interests in the periphery. The Muslim League consolidated their gains during the Second World War, when the Congress National Party rallied behind Gandhi's 'Quit India' movement, which quickly led the British to arrest all the major figures of Congress. The League, on the other hand, offered wider support for the war effort. As the war concluded in Allied victory, the raj freed the leaders of Congress and pursued further negotiations for a transfer of power, thus ending the Muslim League's brief dominance in the politics of domestic India.

            At the close of the war, the Muslim League's siren call of 'Hindu India' exacerbated communal tensions (and led to real bloodshed), but gave Jinnah an increasingly powerful stake in the politics of self-rule vis a vis the British raj and Congress. Interestingly, Jinnah did not speak the same language as the Muslims in Punjab and Bengal--the very Muslims he tried to cater to ensure they supported his drive for a strong center. Ensuring the capitulation of Punjab and Bengal into the house of the Muslim League required some manipulation on the part of Jinnah, for he gambled with their money. "The Punjab and Bengal would never vote to partition their provinces," Jalal writes, "and if they realised that a vote for Pakistan was a vote for partition, they would reject Pakistan." Thanks to Jinnah's party operatives, voters on the periphery never quite gathered that this would be the eventual outcome of a Pakistan's independence. Indeed, Jinnah did not want such an outcome, but he came to accept it when Mountbatten and Nehru rushed the process along in the spring and summer of 1947.

            As the hour sounded on Indian independence, Jinnah found himself at the head of a Pakistan that poorly suited the interests of most Muslims--a 'mutilated and moth-eaten Pakistan' that perpetuated communal and inter-state violence well into the twenty-first century. Jinnah fought for Muslim rights in India, but instead he received Pakistan. Viceroy Mountbatten, the last leader of the British raj, receives a poor score from Jalal for failing to understand Jinnah's complex political position, and instead ripping apart Pujab and Bengal in the drive towards Indian independence. The penultimate viceroy, Archibald Wavell, receives a compassionate and high score for his astute understanding of Jinnah's political position as well as the federalist structure required to ensure maximum Muslim League cooperation. In Jalal's argument, the partition of India was a horrible mistake, not a political necessity.

            The book's arguments require its author to justify Jinnah's action ex post facto; Jalal's detective work makes use of her sources to paint an overwhelmingly vivid portrait of Muslim politics (though Jinnah himself could use a little more color). In Jalal's book, Jinnah stands as a preference-reading politician facing exceptional circumstances--a depiction that stands somewhat odds with more compassionate sketches of him, such as found in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. At her best, Jalal reveals the political limitations of Jinnah, and the personal limitations of figures like Gandhi, Nehru, and Mountbatten when confronting Jinnah's complex legal mind. The book represents an important corrective to the popular depictions of Jinnah as an uncompromising man hell-bent on creating 'Pakistan' in a search for political power. Jinnah, rather, attempted a practical and legal approach to Indian independence, but found that Hindu and Muslim revivalism created a slick slope that he could not easily slalom. Many thousands perished upon the birth of an independent India and Pakistan, but Jinnah--the 'sole spokesman'--cannot bear the sole blame for the complex realities of the region's post-colonial politics. From village, to province, to nation, and from Congress, to Raj, to League, Ayesha Jalal's study traces a witheringly difficult path through India's colonial history.

Gopal, Sarvepalli. Jawaharlal Nehru: a biography, Vol. 1.  HUP (1976).     
 
In the final years of the British raj, Jawaharlal Nehru emerged as India's preeminent statesman and as a model of pragmatic leadership. The journey to that position led Nehru though the lecture halls of Harrow and Cambridge, but also a discipleship under Mahatma Gandhi, and nearly ten years imprisonment in British gaols. He emerged, in the end, as India's first prime minister and one of the longest tenured statesmen of the last century. 

The first volume of Sarvepalli Gopal's three volume biography emphasizes Nehru's steadfast development from a romantic nationalist into a courageous pragmatist. In the process, Nehru navigated four tense decades as a leading member of the Indian National Congress, the nationalist organization which used the tools of non-violence and non-cooperation to pry India away from an exhausted British empire. 

The independence of India was not an historical inevitability. Nationalist aspirations lacked shape and spirit prior to Mahatma Gandhi's entrance on the scene in 1915. In the shadow of Gandhi's lean, ascetic frame and his unyielding emphasis on social reform, Nehru and Congress overcame their association with British privilege and gave Indian nationalism a distinct, powerful, and popular voice. Their campaigns of non-cooperation and non-violence ebbed and flowed the like a tide throughout the interwar years. They rallied the uneducated masses, and rattled the nerves of the British raj. 

After years of struggle, the world-wide political conflicts surrounding the Second World War served as a catalyst to the fall of the British raj. The war opened the final chapter in Nehru's struggle for independence. The United Kingdom relied upon India as the second pillar of its military efforts; Britain brought India--a fifth of the world's population--into the war unasked. The war also depleted the resources of the Indian civil service, and required the British to hand increasing portions of power to domestic Indian interests and domestic Indian bureaucrats. Winston Churchill, Britain's war-time leader, nevertheless attempted to hold on to India with the mass arrest of Congress leaders and offers of post-dated settlements for independence. But the war strained the British to the breaking point and made a rapid compromise towards independence the only honorable political recourse. 

Nehru's Congress led the negotiations. Against Gandhi's wishes, Nehru accepted Muhammad Ali Jinnah's demands for a separate Pakistan. In the face of rising communal violence, Nehru firmly held the reins of Congress, and prevented the emergence of a strong ethnic Hindu party. Nehru merged social reform into Indian independence, and thus paved the way for a more liberal, democratic India even as Congress rejected further British intervention. He channeled the forces of nationalism, revivalism, and modernization as he and his allies established one of the largest countries on Earth. Gopal's first volume concludes at the dawn of an independent India on 14 August 1947; Nehru served India as prime minister until 1964. His premiership eventually wrestled with the creation of Pakistan, violent tensions with communist China, and all the challenges of the Cold War.

Gopal's biography expertly evokes the political environment surrounding Nehru's development, but the author also soberly demonstrates how personal attachment moderated Jawaharlal Nehru's political life. With touching devotion, Nehru's father and mother abandoned bourgeois comforts to follow their son into the dangerous politics of swaraj. Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal's father, emerges as a moderate and patient hero in the first half of the book; he openly acknowledges his relentless pride in his son's efforts, yet helps to curb Jawaharlal's radical, youthful tendencies. With the backing of his parents, Jawaharlal devoted himself to the cause of an independent India, and began disciplining his political ideas with a cautious ear towards Gandhi's sympathy for the Indian poor. Gopal also rises to the occasion when depicting the troubled but deeply felt marriage between Jawaharlal and Kamala Nehru. Nehru's personal relationships with his father, mother, wife and mentors conditioned his political involvement with touches of humanity and sudden bursts of patient compromise. 

Gopal is somewhat less successful in explaining Nehru's early rise to power in the United Provinces. Nehru's appeal as a well-travelled, well-educated, mid-career nationalist emerges clearly, but why did Gandhi and Annie Besant devote so much attention to the young man as early as 1914?  These connections remain somewhat mysterious in Gopal's present volume. Ostensibly, Motilal's connections as a powerful and wealthy lawyer played a decisive role helping his son meet these individuals, but the nature of the connections stands uncertain to a reader (such as myself) less familiar with the early years of the Indian nationalist movement.

Despite that one difficulty, Gopal presents the story of Nehru's development with candor and confidence. 

Many statesmen marshaled nationalist sentiment in the twentieth century: Churchill, Hitler, and Roosevelt; Stalin, Mussolini and Mao. Among them all, Gopal's Nehru emerges as the most effectively peaceful and virtuous in his rise to power, and the most magnanimous in his use of authority.