The Women’s Royal Indian Naval Service: Picturing India’s New Woman

Lack of research on the Women’s Royal Indian Naval Service (W.R.I.N.S.) has led to the misconception that most of the women recruited into the Royal Indian Navy during World War 2 were either British or ‘Anglo-Indian’. In reality, by far the majority of the ‘Wrins’, as they came to be called, were Indian. In this paper I follow two parallel lines of enquiry. The first inspects the material stored in British archives - official navy documents, illustrated promotional pamphlets, photographs, memoirs, oral history and letters - to offer the first comprehensive account of the W.R.I.N.S.’ formation, operation and dismantlement. This provides the context for an examination of the visual material created to promote the service. More specifically, comparing the few surviving photographs of Wrins with Lee Miller’s photos of Wrens, I argue that W.R.I.N.S. material mediated a specific and, for the time, new set of discourses about Indian women, ideas about women’s role in a nation-in-making that may still speak to Indian women today.