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

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.