This book recounts the story of the thousands of Indians-sailors and working class individuals-who braved British bullets and bayonets on the streets of Bombay and Karachi during the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) Mutiny and the attendant civil rebellions of 1946. The Indian subcontinent had witnessed inflation, food shortages, a crippling famine in Bengal, and a surge of nationalist sentiment during the course of the Second World War. Millions of Indians also became recruits in the Imperial armed forces in the hope of a better future even as the labouring and working classes bore the brunt of the War. The end of the War, however, brought neither prosperity nor peace, and thousands of demobilized servicemen entered the employment market precisely when wage and job-related strikes rocked Indian cities almost every day. This was a time when immense social anxiety about the future gripped the Indian masses and created a collective consciousness of rebellion woven around the slogans and symbols of wartime Indian nationalism. The INA trials and strikes in the Royal Indian Air Force in 1945 paved the way for the political upheavals of February 1946, which is what this book sets out to explore in detail.
This book will interest students of Modern Indian History, Military History, Imperial History, and Indian nationalism. The rebellions of the spring of 1946 have been forgotten in the grand narratives of nationalist politics, and this book will appeal to all those interested in evaluating the intense socioeconomic contestations which characterized the struggle against British rule in the Indian subcontinent.