‘Germany Has Become Mohammedan’: Insurgency, Long-Distance Travel, and the Singapore Mutiny, 1915

Abstract

The mutiny that took place in Singapore in February 1915 is usually dismissed as a footnote in the history of empire. One reason why it is marginalized is because the mutiny does not conform to a politics that seeks the formation of an independent territorial nation-state as its inevitable conclusion. This article returns to that initial moment of insurgency to argue that the mutiny offers a unique window into the political imaginaries of British Indian soldiers, seen as military migrant workers. A close reading of soldiers’ letters against the Rowlatt Committee's Sedition Report suggests a politics of equality and emancipation uncontaminated by the desire for national liberation. Two kinds of insurgency thus become visible: international space as an unsettled zone of attraction and desire and a nascent political subjectivity that rejects the disciplines of imperial military labor. The primary causes of these transformations, I argue, are the insurgent effects of long-distance travel.

Keywords:

• Singapore Mutiny 1915
• British Indian Army
• soldiers’ letters
• long-distance travel
• international space

Acknowledgements

James Sidaway first alerted me to the Singapore Mutiny. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. My thanks for Mrinalini Sinha for the invitation and to Yeo Siew Han for her help with archival materials.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 My thanks to James Sidaway for this reference and for his help with earlier versions of this article.

2 In November 1914, one-third of British forces on the western front came from India. Of the 90,000 Indians who fought in France and Belgium during World War I, 35,000 were killed in combat (Jack, 2006, p. 329).

3 I retain the description of these soldiers' socio-spatial origins as found in the archival documents. Pathans refers to people from the NWFP; Rajputs are ostensibly from Rajputana, an Indian province. Normally the latter term would refer to dominant caste Hindus but in this case it indexes a conjoint martial race and caste category (Tan, 2005). Almost all soldiers in this regiment were Muslims, either from NWFP or Punjab.

4 National Archives (NA), UK. WO 32/9560, Letter from Secretary of State to War Office, 8 April 1915.

5 Monthly salaries for the lowest rank of soldier were as low as rupees 11. Perhaps this is a misprint.

6 British Prime Minister Lloyd George was even more explicit. Speaking after World War I he would say

It is too often forgotten that we are the greatest Mohammedan power in the world and one fourth of the population of the British Empire is Mohammedan. There have been no more loyal adherents to the throne and no more effective and loyal supporters of the Empire in its hour of trial. (Cited in Devji, 2013, p. 74)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Itty Abraham

Itty Abraham is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. His most recent book is How India became territorial: Foreign policy, diaspora, geopolitics (Stanford University Press, 2014).