the soldiers had indeed developed their own appraisal of the political situation, had high hopes of the meaning of freedom and were passionately nationalistic. In the emboldened words of a Pathan soldier who had fought in North Africa and Italy to Malcolm Darling on his tour in the winter of 1946, ‘We suffered in the war but you didn't … we bore with this that we might be free.’ 5 Disgruntled former soldiers were not going to sit by quietly and wait for concessions from the British: they were armed with a new appreciation of the desperateness, and the injustice, of colonial rule.
The political ‘isms’ of the post-war world – communism, socialism, fascism and nationalism – could no longer be regarded as abstract philosophies but were deeply felt as matters of life and death. Wartime had created new opportunities while exhausting older ways of doing political business, beefing up the economic and social power of India's cities and, even more importantly, changing the ways in which people thought of politics. Conditions had irreversibly changed. As 1945 drew to a close, India was rocked by rebellions and revolts on an unprecedented scale.
The ending of an era
‘I am not very much looking forward to 1946,’ the British Viceroy, Wavell, wrote sombrely in his diary on New Year's Day, ‘and shall be surprised and very pleased if we get through without serious trouble.’ 6 His pessimism proved to be well founded and soon ships in Bombay harbour, where fireworks for New Year's Eve had boomed weeks earlier, turned their guns against British authority, and trained them on those venerable institutions of imperial life: the Taj Hotel, the Yacht Club and the other neo-Gothic buildings that lined the Bombay shore. The naval mutiny was just one of numerous popular rebellions in the early months of 1946. B.C. Dutt, a ringleader of the strike, later remembered the scene on Bombay's shoreline during those tense but festival-like days, when Indian sympathisers fearlessly came to deliver food and water to the mutineers under the full gaze of British officials:
From every walk of life they came and crowded the seafront around the Gateway of India, with packets of food and pails of water. The restaurant keepers were seen requesting people to carry whatever food they could to the beleaguered ratings. Even some street beggars, it was reported in the press, were seen carrying tiny food packets for the ratings. The harbour front presented a strange spectacle. The whole area was patrolled by armed Indian soldiers. British forces were kept ready at a distance. Indian soldiers with rifles slung across their backs helped to load the food packets brought by the public on boats sent from the ships in the harbour. The British officers were helpless spectators. 7
It is difficult to exaggerate the turmoil that India was experiencing at the close of the Second World War and the sense of entitlement and hope that had fired the imagination of the people. This was in stark contrast to the situation the average British colonial official found himself in: disliked, overburdened and heavily constrained by a fiscally cautious regime.
Strikes were incessant and held by everybody from tram drivers and press workers to postmen and industrial workers in cotton mills, potteries and factories. 8 In 1946 there were 1,629 industrial disputes involving almost two million workers and a loss of over twelve million man-days. 9 An All India railway strike, which would, of course, have brought gridlock to the country, was threatened in the summer of 1946 and was only narrowly avoided. In Bihar in March 1946 a very serious police mutiny, during which policemen broke open a central armoury, and rampaged through a handful of major towns, was brought under control by the firing of the military. A copycat incident in Delhi involved the mutiny of over 300 policemen. 10 In addition to nationwide anti-British protest movements in retaliation for the firings on the
The political ‘isms’ of the post-war world – communism, socialism, fascism and nationalism – could no longer be regarded as abstract philosophies but were deeply felt as matters of life and death. Wartime had created new opportunities while exhausting older ways of doing political business, beefing up the economic and social power of India's cities and, even more importantly, changing the ways in which people thought of politics. Conditions had irreversibly changed. As 1945 drew to a close, India was rocked by rebellions and revolts on an unprecedented scale.
The ending of an era
‘I am not very much looking forward to 1946,’ the British Viceroy, Wavell, wrote sombrely in his diary on New Year's Day, ‘and shall be surprised and very pleased if we get through without serious trouble.’ 6 His pessimism proved to be well founded and soon ships in Bombay harbour, where fireworks for New Year's Eve had boomed weeks earlier, turned their guns against British authority, and trained them on those venerable institutions of imperial life: the Taj Hotel, the Yacht Club and the other neo-Gothic buildings that lined the Bombay shore. The naval mutiny was just one of numerous popular rebellions in the early months of 1946. B.C. Dutt, a ringleader of the strike, later remembered the scene on Bombay's shoreline during those tense but festival-like days, when Indian sympathisers fearlessly came to deliver food and water to the mutineers under the full gaze of British officials:
From every walk of life they came and crowded the seafront around the Gateway of India, with packets of food and pails of water. The restaurant keepers were seen requesting people to carry whatever food they could to the beleaguered ratings. Even some street beggars, it was reported in the press, were seen carrying tiny food packets for the ratings. The harbour front presented a strange spectacle. The whole area was patrolled by armed Indian soldiers. British forces were kept ready at a distance. Indian soldiers with rifles slung across their backs helped to load the food packets brought by the public on boats sent from the ships in the harbour. The British officers were helpless spectators. 7
It is difficult to exaggerate the turmoil that India was experiencing at the close of the Second World War and the sense of entitlement and hope that had fired the imagination of the people. This was in stark contrast to the situation the average British colonial official found himself in: disliked, overburdened and heavily constrained by a fiscally cautious regime.
Strikes were incessant and held by everybody from tram drivers and press workers to postmen and industrial workers in cotton mills, potteries and factories. 8 In 1946 there were 1,629 industrial disputes involving almost two million workers and a loss of over twelve million man-days. 9 An All India railway strike, which would, of course, have brought gridlock to the country, was threatened in the summer of 1946 and was only narrowly avoided. In Bihar in March 1946 a very serious police mutiny, during which policemen broke open a central armoury, and rampaged through a handful of major towns, was brought under control by the firing of the military. A copycat incident in Delhi involved the mutiny of over 300 policemen. 10 In addition to nationwide anti-British protest movements in retaliation for the firings on the
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