The 1946 Royal Navy revolt: solidarity amid sharpening polarisation

February 18 marks the 80th anniversary of the Royal Indian Navy’s (RIN) revolt of 1946, a brief armed uprising that began at the naval barracks in Bombay and quickly spread to the streets, gaining popular support.

Eighty years later, one must reassess the significance of this short-lived uprising amid these turbulent years, where South Asia is experiencing a worsening of inter-communal relations.

Mutiny or revolt?

Characterising the revolt as a mere localised breakdown of military discipline and insubordination by naval ratings, which lacked both centralised leadership and coordination, successive colonial officials often described the insurrection as a mutiny. However, a brief account of the events that unfolded between February 18-22 would help one understand the scale of the ‘mutiny’.

The ‘mutiny’ started on February 18, 1946 when hundreds of ratings of the Royal Indian Navy at HMIS Talwar in Bombay went on a hunger strike. These ratings protested against poor food quality, low wages, and racial discrimination by British officers. As news of their strike spread, shore establishments across the castle and fort barracks, along with 22 ships anchored in the Bombay harbour, also refused to work. The naval ratings organised a procession in the city, carrying a portrait of Subhas Chandra Bose, and raised the flags of the Congress, the Muslim League, and the Communist Party on their ships. A naval central strike committee, formed shortly after the hunger strike, combined their grievances with broader national issues, such as the release of Indian national army soldiers.

On February 21, a more or less peaceful hunger strike transformed into a brief armed uprising in the city. It reached its climax when naval ratings inside the barracks waged a pitched battle with firearms against British military forces after they opened fire on the naval ratings. The threat of a full-scale military conflict hung over the city as the rebel ships, in response, manned guns, intending to defend their fellow ratings on shore. Over the next five days, the uprising spread to other naval establishments, ranging from Karachi and Bombay on the western coast to Madras, Cochin, the Andaman Islands, and Vishakhapatnam and Kolkata on the eastern coast. At its height, 78 naval ships from these naval establishments, 20 shore establishments, including one in Delhi, and nearly 20,000 naval ratings participated in this revolt.

Such a momentous event and a flashpoint in India’s decolonisation journey has, however, left so few traces in public memory. It was soon submerged in the abyss of communal polarisation and in the violence of the Partition.

Moment of solidarity

While assessing the importance of the revolt, one often overlooks the broader context of the growing communal discord in the country since the breakdown of the Shimla Conference in September 1945. Bombay was no exception; it experienced communal rioting during this period but also saw an unprecedented, though short-lived, display of communal unity during the RIN revolt in February, 1946. After clashes between the British military and the RIN ratings, Hindu-Muslim protesters jointly took to the streets, urging people to observe a hartal in lieu of the firing on the rebels. That afternoon, the crowd raided post offices, dug up tram tracks, set up obstructions, and lit bonfires on the roads, bringing the city to a standstill. The Muslim neighbourhood of Bhendi Bazar and the mill district became sites of stone-throwing and street fights between workers and police.

On February 22, this popular fraternisation took the shape of a popular uprising against colonial rule. Workers, students, and poorer inhabitants came out on the streets in support of the naval ratings to defy the colonial authority’s power to govern the city. They took out processions, barricaded various localities with boulders and barrels and torched buses and military vehicles to disrupt transport services. Muslim localities, which had been relatively quiet during the previous Congress’s protests, emerged as focal points of this popular uprising. Muslim neighbourhoods were barricaded and patrolled by socially diverse groups. These processions crisscrossed various Hindu-Muslim localities, where citizens moved around carrying the tricolour, the League flag, and the Communist flags.

Bombay’s mill district emerged as the epicentre of this uprising. All the textile mills, along with the railway workshops and other factories, were closed. Schools and colleges followed suit. Workers took control of the mill district, torched police stations, and indulged in pitched street battles with the patrolling police parties and British soldiers, leading to several casualties. To suppress this popular uprising, the British government left no stone unturned, mobilising army battalions and armoured vehicles to restore order.

A fierce battle erupted at Kamatipura and Madanpura, where Hindu and Muslim mill workers erected barricades and hurled stones along with petrol bombs at the advancing British forces. The stone-throwing crowd was then indiscriminately shot at by the British troops armed with machine guns and bayonets. In this intense and unequal street fight, around 200 working poor were killed, and hundreds more were injured. Despite this overwhelming use of brute force and violence, the military was unable to take control of the mill district and the city for a couple of days, even after the naval ratings surrendered on February 23.

Enduring legacy

The remarkable unity this historic event fostered was short-lived, as from August 1946, the failure of the Cabinet Mission and the call for direct action led to widespread communal violence. In retrospect, however, the uprising was part of a broader post-war anti-colonial radicalisation that represented alternative possibilities for popular mobilisation in our nation’s life. While the revolt was undeniably a catalytic moment of insurrection aboard naval warships and in barracks, it was also a moment of popular fraternisation on the streets of Bombay.

Amid the spiralling communal discord, the RIN revolt of 1946 remains a moment of remarkable Hindu-Muslim unity, which the famous progressive poet Sahir Ludhianvi termed as “a flower of hope amidst a garden- scorched and desolate” (Jhulse hue viraan gulshan me, ek aas-umeed ka phool khila). The RIN revolt was part of a series of localised, often militant and united, popular mass actions by soldiers, workers, and peasants in the final years of colonial rule that cut across the hardened boundaries of communal polarisation.

Today, 80 years later, this historic event serves as a reminder that the potentialities of popular solidarities did not entirely diminish under the weight of the spiralling communal frenzy of the postwar era.

Robert Rahman Raman is assistant professor, history, SRM University, AP

Published – February 18, 2026 08:30 am IST