The motto of Wadia Movietone was ‘enlightenment through entertainment’. He’s in the Navy is illustrative of the fact that in a war propaganda documentary this can be a difficult ambition to realise.

In the first instance the viewers of He’s in the Navy would not have received full enlightenment. The main objective of the documentary is obvious: the activities of young naval recruits are depicted in order to encourage more Indians to sign up for the war campaign. Nevertheless, the war itself barely impinges on the film. It is not mentioned directly, and instead there is talk of ‘high adventures out at sea’. And the nearest sighting that we get of the ‘enemy’ is the dummy soldiers that are used for bayonet practice. Although this reflects the relative lack of engagement that the Indian navy encountered during World War II, the method could be argued to be somewhat duplicitous.

Rather than addressing the seriousness of war, the film instead adopts a light-hearted tone. This comedic emphasis of He’s in the Navy serves distinct purposes. On the one hand the film aims to enlist new recruits by depicting the navy as fun. On the other hand, and perhaps undercutting this recruitment drive, the film delivers its entertainment quota by using the naval recruits as the butt of its jokes. This is done partly through the choice of material. Although the film depicts the recruits developing from a disorganised rabble into an efficient fighting unit, it never allows them their full dignity. Instead, their training is played for laughs. We get to witness their first clumsy attempts at drill; we are meant to laugh at them as they eat voraciously in the canteen; and we watch them belly-flop into a swimming pool.

Underpinning the humour of these situations is the commentary. The narrative in the English-language version of He’s in the Navy is written and supplied by the film’s director, G. Radcliffe Genge. He regularly adopts a mocking tone. When witnessing the recruits let loose with bayonets he exclaims ‘Great guns!’ with pretended alarm. He dismisses their sporting recreation as a willingness to ‘sock each other on the jaw’ or to ‘bang shuttlecocks’. He is at his most mirthful during the training on board HMS Dalhousie, ‘where first we learn swinging the lead, and I don’t mean it your way either’. Here he yells ‘Man overboard!’ and ‘Man the boats!’. These dramatic cries set up a comic denouement in which the recruits save a life buoy rather than a human being. Srirupa Roy has argued that ‘the particular filmic form favoured by FAB officials was one that underscored a vertical or hierarchical relation of authority between film-maker and film-viewer, and by implication, between state and society’ (Roy, 2002, 240). What is perhaps most troubling about the English-language version of He’s in the Navy is that it features a mature British narrator (representing the film-maker) laughing at Indian boys (with whom the original film-viewer was supposed to identify).

Elsewhere the film demonstrates the dominance and self-assurance of British rule. The instruction received at the naval base is depicted as superior to that found in the daily life of the sub-continent. More subtly, in a scene that shows the swearing-in of the naval recruits it can be seen that the largest book to hand is a bible. The film endorses, and is endorsed by, authority. An early title card proudly informs us that the documentary was ‘made with the co-operation of Vice-Admiral Herbert Fitzherbert’. The Vice-Admiral also makes an appearance in the film, concluding a sequence that offers the most blatant display of hierarchical power. In ascending order the naval recruits are shown the various badges of rank, as well as those who wear them . Each of the senior officers that we see is British.

J.B.H. Wadia’s documentaries received greater acknowledgement from British authorities than they did from Indian Nationalists. In 1942 the British government awarded him the MBE. However, despite his long commitment to the film industry, Wadia received no formal honours from the Indian government.

Richard Osborne (September 2009)