Ratings at HMIS Talwar Went on Hunger Strike on 18 February 1946, the Revolt Spread to Naval Bases Across India, and the Bombay Ratings Surrendered on 23 February on Sardar Patel's Advice

On Monday 18 February 1946, every rating below the rank of petty officer in HMIS Talwar, the Royal Indian Navy’s signal school at Colaba in Bombay, refused duty. A rating is an enlisted sailor, and HMIS stands for His Majesty’s Indian Ship. Five days later the ratings in Bombay surrendered, after a gun battle at Castle Barracks and with a Royal Navy cruiser on its way. The Governor of Bombay, Sir John Colville, counted 228 civilians killed in the rioting that ran alongside.

Counts of ships, dead and dismissed men differ between sources, so each figure below comes with the person who gave it. The sources are Hansard, the Viceroy’s cables and Colville’s reports in the Transfer of Power volumes (the British government’s published papers on the end of the Raj), the Indian Annual Register’s day-by-day record, and the historians who came later.

From 1,475 men to 27,651, then told to go home

The navy that revolted was a wartime creation. The manning table in its official history, by D. J. E. Collins, puts the men on the books at 1,475 when war began on 3 September 1939 and 27,651 on 15 August 1945. Recruitment of men was suspended from September 1945, and demobilisation called for 9,000 ratings to be released by 30 April 1946.

M. R. Masani, a Congress member of the Central Legislative Assembly, said on 23 February that naval headquarters had issued three demobilisation orders since September, cutting the number of men to be kept from 18,500 to 13,000 and then to 11,000. He said complaints about pay, food and unequal terms of release had reached headquarters for months. Prime Minister Clement Attlee had told the Commons the day before that none of the men’s claims had been put forward before the trouble began.

Air force men had moved first, with brief strikes at 12 RAF stations in the East at the end of January 1946. Field Marshal Wavell, the Viceroy, cabled Attlee on 24 February that the Congress and the Muslim League, by their attitude to the Indian National Army trials, had “aroused passions which they are now quite unable to regulate.” The INA officers’ trial at the Red Fort has its own piece here. The strikers’ demands included the release of INA prisoners.

”Quit India” on the saluting base

Talwar trained wireless operators, and its sets would carry the strike to other ports. On 2 February, when the Flag Officer Commanding the Royal Indian Navy visited, someone wrote “Jai Hind” and “Quit India” on the saluting base. The Indian Annual Register of 20 February says a Talwar rating, printed there as P. O. Dutta, was caught at it, arrested, and later released. Elizabeth Libero, who has studied the memoir of Balai Chandra Dutt, says he led that defacing. He published Mutiny of the Innocents in 1971, and the Centre of South Asian Studies at Cambridge holds a 1970 interview with him.

The walkout itself was about food and an officer. Madan Singh, then a petty officer telegraphist, told The Tribune in 2004 that the breakfast on 18 February was unfit to eat and the men answered “No food no work.” Colville’s report says they objected to the alleged behaviour of their Commander, King, and refused food. In the Assembly, Asaf Ali, who moved a censure motion that passed 74 votes to 40, said King had called the ratings names. Philip Mason, the War Secretary, replied that King denied it. Attlee told the Commons the ratings “demanded that a political leader be allowed to address them and shouted political slogans.”

Five days in Bombay

On Tuesday the 19th the strike spread to Castle Barracks and the ships in the harbour, 22 of them by Colville’s count. Ratings ran through the Fort district, some with hockey sticks, and drove round in seized trucks; Colville saw two trucks and wrote that the men in them were laughing and waving. The Register counted about 3,000 strikers at the Flora Fountain junction, where three British servicemen and six police officers were hurt. The Flag Officer, Bombay, received 14 delegates, who handed him the demands Attlee summarised on 22 February: speedy demobilisation by age and service group, action against Talwar’s commanding officer, Indian food, and Royal Navy scales of pay and family allowance.

A Central Strike Committee now spoke for the ratings. The Register’s report for 20 February names Khan as its president, and Madan Singh told The Tribune he was vice-president. Its revised demands, sent to Vice-Admiral J. H. Godfrey, who commanded the Royal Indian Navy, added the withdrawal of Indian troops from Indonesia. By Wednesday the 20th, Attlee said, 7,000 ratings in Bombay had joined, and that afternoon all were ordered back to barracks by 3.30 pm.

On Thursday the 21st, ratings broke out of the barricaded gates of Castle Barracks at about 9.40 am. The Flag Officer’s communique says the guards were “compelled to open fire,” and the Register records a heavy exchange around noon, with grenades thrown. A signal from HMIS Narbada, Godfrey’s flagship, warned that all ships would fire if shots came from ashore. Godfrey broadcast that continuing was “the height of folly” and spoke of “the destruction of the Navy”; Mason told the Assembly he had meant the collapse of its prestige, not physical destruction. The ships signalled cease fire at 2.35 pm. The committee’s appeal to national leaders that day, as R. C. Majumdar quotes it, spoke of “untold hardships regarding pay and food and the most outrageous racial discrimination.” By 5 pm, Colville wrote, bombers had landed at Santa Cruz, and field guns, two British infantry battalions and an armoured car were due that evening. The cruiser Glasgow was on her way.

On Saturday the 23rd the committee signalled that the ships were ready to surrender, and they gave up one by one “in accordance with the advice tendered to them by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel,” in the Register’s words.

The fighting at Karachi

At Karachi the old sloop HMIS Hindustan lay at the east wharf. On 21 February, the Register says, military police opened fire on strikers of the Hindustan and the ratings answered with two naval guns; one person was killed and nine hurt. On the 22nd a senior naval officer warned that troops would take the ship unless the crew surrendered. The military’s communique says that at 10.35 troops opened rifle fire on men still on deck, that the ship replied with machine guns and then her whole armament, four-inch guns included, and that the army answered with a field gun and mortars. A white flag went up at 10.55. About 300 ratings were under arrest. Karachi observed a hartal, a shutdown of shops and work, on the 22nd.

Three sets of figures for the dead

For the ratings at Karachi, the military’s communique reported four killed and 26 wounded. Mason told the Assembly on 23 February that the latest count for the Hindustan was eight ratings killed and 33 wounded. Of Castle Barracks he said one naval officer had died of wounds and ten other men were wounded, and that he had no reason to believe an agency report of 200 ratings killed. The commission of inquiry’s tally, as Pramod Kapoor prints it, is nine ratings and one officer killed, 34 missing and listed as deserters, and 41 ratings and one officer wounded. A bracketed note in Kapoor’s excerpt calls those data highly understated.

For the city, Attlee told the Commons on 26 February that Bombay had seen 223 deaths and 1,037 injured, Karachi seven deaths and Madras one. Colville’s report of 27 February gave 228 killed and 1,046 injured, with three constables killed and 91 police hurt; Sumit Sarkar uses those figures. Patel told a Chowpatty crowd on 26 February that over 300 had lost their lives. A retired Pakistan Navy rear admiral, Pervaiz Asghar, reviewing Kapoor’s book in Dawn, writes of 400 killed and up to 1,500 wounded in Bombay.

The size of the revolt is counted several ways too. Sarkar gives 78 ships, 20 shore establishments and 20,000 ratings at its height. Asghar’s review of Kapoor gives 78 ships, 21 establishments and over 20,000 ratings, and the Home Ministry’s list of recognised movements says 78 ships and 22 units. Attlee’s own figure was 7,000 ratings in Bombay by the 20th.

What Patel, Jinnah, Gandhi and the Communists said

Patel appealed on the night of the 21st for the ratings to be patient and for the city to avoid a hartal. When ratings’ representatives asked his advice on the 22nd, he told them to lay down arms and “go through the formality of surrender,” and said Congress would do its best to prevent victimisation. Maulana Azad, the Congress president, said he had the commander-in-chief’s authority to promise no victimisation or vindictive action.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s statement on the 23rd said the ratings had “some very just grievances.” He offered his services, asked them to call off the strike, and added: “Particularly, I call upon the Muslims to stop and to create no further trouble.” His wider record is told in a separate piece.

Gandhi wrote from Poona on the 23rd that the mutiny was “not, in any sense of the term, non-violent, action.” On the 26th he wrote that ratings who mutinied for India’s freedom “were doubly wrong,” because they had no “call from a prepared revolutionary party.” Aruna Asaf Ali, who backed the strikers, had said she would rather unite Hindus and Muslims at the barricade than on the constitutional front. Gandhi replied that honest union at the barricade needed union at the constitutional front too. Power passed on 15 August 1947, with the country divided.

The Communist Party in Bombay called a general strike for the 22nd. Sarkar says Congress Socialists Aruna Asaf Ali and Achyut Patwardhan supported it and that 300,000 downed tools; Colville wrote that almost all the mills closed and looting spread. Attlee told the Commons that the Communist Party issued a manifesto thanking the public for its support. Wavell told Attlee he was pretty sure the top Congress leaders had nothing to do with inciting the mutiny, but thought “smaller Congress fry” and probably Communist agitators had. In December 1946, Colville noted, Patel still regarded it as mainly the work of the Communists.

After the surrender

Auchinleck, the commander-in-chief, broadcast on 25 February: “The correct word is Mutiny.” There would be no collective punishment, he said, but he would never promise that ringleaders found guilty would escape it. Colville recorded that Patel hoped, through S. K. Patil, for no victimisation, and hinted the main penalty should be immediate discharge. Sarkar cites a letter Patel wrote on 1 March 1946 that says discipline in the army could not be tampered with, and adds: “We will want Army even in free India.”

Madan Singh told The Tribune that hundreds were dismissed and many detained, and that he spent three and a half months in solitary. Asghar’s review of Kapoor’s book gives 523 mutineers dishonourably discharged.

The commission of inquiry was chaired by Sir Sayyid Fazl Ali, Chief Justice of the Patna High Court. By Kapoor’s excerpt it examined 229 witnesses and concluded that the mutiny was not organised by an outside agency, was not pre-planned, and never took the shape of a political revolt. Wavell had told Attlee that there may have been service grievances but he did not think they were serious. On 20 January 1947 the Government of India said, in the Register’s words, that it would “take every step to put right the grievances revealed by the report.”

On 25 March 1992 the Minister of State for Home Affairs told the Rajya Sabha that the RIN Mutineers’ Association wanted discharged men treated as participants and given freedom fighters’ pensions, and that the government had yet to decide. The Home Ministry’s list of movements recognised for the Swatantrata Sainik Samman pension includes the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of 1946, and gives the surrender as 24 February.

What the papers and the historians make of it

The Cabinet Mission was announced in Parliament on 19 February, the day after Talwar stopped work. R. C. Majumdar wrote that it was difficult to say whether the revolt hastened the decision. The Transfer of Power papers show it came earlier: on 22 January 1946 the Cabinet, with Attlee in the chair, agreed in principle to send three ministers, to arrive around mid-March, with the announcement planned for February. The same minute records the view that if negotiations failed, the Indian Army, “while not likely to mutiny, might be unwilling to intervene to maintain order.”

Historians split on the revolt’s weight. Libero reports that Subrata Banerjee’s 1954 book The R.I.N. Strike called it probably the greatest single factor in hastening freedom, while Majumdar and V. P. S. Raghuvanshi gave it a few sentences. Sarkar calls it “the greatest threat of all” in the unrest of that winter, and notes that the ratings, unlike the men of the Azad Hind Fauj, have never been given the status of national heroes. Asghar reads Kapoor as arguing that the revolt hastened Britain’s departure. The wider argument over force and non-violence is set out in another piece.

Wavell’s own view on 24 February was that the events showed no inherent rottenness in the navy, and that the RAF, which had “got away with” what was really a mutiny, bore some blame. On 5 April 1946 Sir John Thorne, the Home Member, wrote an appreciation, asked for by the visiting Cabinet ministers, of what would follow if their mission failed. He expected “a lot of disaffection, and downright mutiny” among the air force, the navy and the signals units. Wavell minuted on 7 April that the appreciation was “probably correct.”