Learning ‘Large Ideas’ Overseas: Discipline, (im)mobility and Political Lives in the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny

Davies, Andrew

doi:10.1080/17450101.2014.946769

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…The social resources, including friendships and close family relations, that stimulate civil society activity are not bound by locale, but extend beyond the boundaries of the nation-state to friends and family living overseas, with the geographies of these relations shaping how civil society action plays out in place. Personal mobility is also an important aspect of civil society work, a way of developing social and human capital and it plays a role in shaping political subjectivities and building civil society activity (Baillie Smith and Jenkins 2011Davies 2014;Nagal and Staeheli 2016;Staeheli et al 2016). Sheller and Urry (2006) argue that mobility plays a key role in many aspects of our lives and that our world can be interpreted as one of objects in motion and of flows of knowledge and ideas.…”

Section: Personal Mobilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Transnational social capital: the socio‐spatialities of civil society

Peck

2019

Global Networks

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Civil society remains a contested concept, but one that is widely embedded in global development processes. Transnationalism within civil society scholarship is often described dichotomously, either through hierarchical dependency relations or as a more amorphous networked global civil society. These two contrasting spatial imaginaries produce very particular ideas about how transnational relations contribute to civil society. Drawing on empirical material from research with civil society organizations in Barbados and Grenada, in this article I contend that civil society groups use forms of transnational social capital in their work. This does not, however, resonate with the horizontal relations associated with grassroots globalization or vertical chains of dependence. These social relations are imbued with power and agency and are entangled in situated historical, geographical and personal contexts. I conclude that the diverse transnational social relations that are part of civil society activity offer hope and possibilities for continued civil society action in these unexpected spatial arrangements.

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Section: Personal Mobilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Transnational social capital: the socio‐spatialities of civil society

Peck

2019

Global Networks

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“…These three interpretations of the RIN mutiny are all useful postcolonial interrogations of the event. In fact, my earlier work on the incident (Davies 2013a(Davies , 2013b(Davies , 2014 was largely an attempt to disrupt some of the dominant discourses in circulation about it. Gandhi's examination of it, however, fundamentally overlooks the maritime aspect of the RIN.…”

Section: The Rin Mutiny As a Moment Of Democratic Inconsequencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is an example of what Abraham (2015) described as the emergence of international identities. As I have argued elsewhere (Davies 2013b(Davies , 2014, the space of the ship was crucial in that it allowed the men to mobilize and discuss important issues, such as the freedom of India from colonial rule, in the relatively safe spaces of the lower decks of RIN vessels. Telegraphist Ahmed of HMIS Talwar said that access to illicit materials was widespread throughout the RIN.…”

Section: The Importance Of the Transnational Maritime Factormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is thus not surprising that the mutiny, and the RIN's role in developing India's naval forces, has interested a number of scholars (Davies 2013a(Davies , 2014Deshpande 1996Deshpande , 2016Meyer 2017;Spence 2014Spence , 2015a. In a striking piece of scholarship, Leela Gandhi (2014) used the testimonies of RIN sailors to the Commission of Inquiry that took place after the mutiny to argue that the sailors had tried to form what she called a 'revolutionary counterpublic'.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Transnational connections and anti‐colonial radicalism in the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, 1946

Davies

2019

Global Networks

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In this article, I explore the spatial politics of the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946 and call for a more maritime sense of ‘the political’. The RIN only existed from 1934 to 1950; it became the Indian Navy after independence. Its mutiny in 1946, which was caused by a number of grievances from anticolonial nationalism to more mundane challenges about the standard of food, continues to be the dominant event in this history. Leela Gandhi (2014) used the RIN mutiny to challenge the binary distinction between elite and subaltern in much Indian historiography by depicting it as an ‘anti‐colonial counterpublic’, or space in which discourses other than the dominant nationalist framings of independence were mobilized. She also regards the mutiny as a potential example of inconsequential ethics in which, instead of worrying about its causes, the mutiny can be read as an experimental space in which democratic politics occurred, rather than one in which people were striving for a ‘successful’ outcome. I argue that, while there is much to be admired in Gandhi's reading of these events, she discounts the maritime nature of the RIN mutiny. In other words, she fails to acknowledge that travelling to different international locations allowed the sailors to learn about democracy and other ideas, which in turn influenced their beliefs about what the future of India, and the RIN, should look like. As a result, I argue for the need to explore in greater depth the important connections that exist between anti‐colonialism, democratic politics and the naval/maritime experience.

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“…This relationality often starts with the discussion of ships advanced by Latour () and Law (). These theorists of Actor‐Network Theory (ANT) conceptualised ships as immutable mobiles, “a distinct spatial technology that, through its movement, can make and maintain networks between other places” (Davies, , p. 387).…”

Section: Geographies Of Shipsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“You'll go home with bruises”: Affect, embodiment and heritage on board HMS Belfast

Dittmer

Waterton

2018

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What happens when a naval vessel (in this case, HMS Belfast) is converted into a floating museum? This paper approaches this question with the concepts of assemblage and more‐than‐representational thought, in which the materialisation of the past is generative of a range of potentials that can shape encounters in the present. HMS Belfast is dedicated to conveying the specific history of the ship, as well as to providing a sense of what life on board was like for sailors. Long‐term (auto)ethnography of the ship was conducted in 2016–2017. Drawing from the mobilities paradigm and a nascent literature on the geography of ships, we focus on the spatial affects of orientation and disorientation that result from the interactions between the ship's materiality and the bodies of its visitors. The latter is part of the curators’ desired experience, along with the re‐training of visitors’ bodies to negotiate the material infrastructure of the ship, as many sailors reported disorientation on board. The former is deployed to heighten visitors’ experience of the ship's extremes, such as depths of the boiler room. Our findings extend the cultural geographic literature on embodied experience of heritage and also provide an innovative case study of mobility on board an immobilised ship.

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Learning ‘Large Ideas’ Overseas: Discipline, (im)mobility and Political Lives in the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny

Cited by 9 publications

References 24 publications

Transnational social capital: the socio‐spatialities of civil society

Transnational social capital: the socio‐spatialities of civil society

Transnational connections and anti‐colonial radicalism in the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, 1946

“You'll go home with bruises”: Affect, embodiment and heritage on board HMS Belfast

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