The Singapore Mutiny and the Fight against the British Empire

In February 1915, British administrative cadet Frank Kershaw Wilson wrote home from Singapore that he felt “an unpleasant consciousness of being a white man.” The origins of his “unpleasant consciousness,” as he perceived it, was an outbreak of violence—later referred to as the “Singapore Mutiny”—among Indian soldiers. Days earlier, Indian men raided an armory and opened fire on their British officers. Fighting spread across Singapore island but British leaders regained control within days after Russian, French, and Japanese intervention.

Over subsequent months, official British accounts of the rebellion focused on jealousies between Indian soldiers about promotion, infiltration by “outside agitators” (especially Germans and Indian revolutionaries), Indian Muslim soldiers’ supposed “religious” motivations, and inefficiencies among British officers. However, Wilson’s specific anxiety about what it felt like to be a “white man” suggests that these events laid bare the vulnerability of colonial racial hierarchies and the military state meant to support them.

Using memoirs, court records, and oral history interviews, this paper examines how the 1915 rebellion not only revealed the growing anti-colonial sentiment among Indian soldiers but also the tentative inter-ethnic anticolonial alliances formed in response to the rebellion. In the early moments of the mutiny, Indian soldiers found many eager collaborators, or protectors, among Chinese, Malay, and Indian civilians. In response, colonial officials deepened racial hierarchies to facilitate retaliatory violence. In turn, many former allies to British power felt attacked or abandoned, shaking both soldier and civilian confidence in British rule.