Photographing Civil Disobedience

Drawn from a rare and historical album, this volume takes readers on a visual journey of the unfolding of the Civil Disobedience Movement in and around Bombay (today’s Mumbai).

Photographing Civil Disobedience: Bombay 1930–31 brings together an interdisciplinary conversation around a rare collection of documentary photographs compiled in a historical album held in the Alkazi Collection of Photography, New Delhi. The album features 245 black-and-white images that capture the extraordinary history of the Civil Disobedience Movement in Bombay (now Mumbai), when the city’s cosmopolitan streets came alive with anti-colonial protests, processions, and propaganda—from the leading role played by the desh sevikas (members of a nationalist women’s organization) to the violent crackdown of police lathis (bamboo or wooden sticks) on non-violent demonstrators.

Focusing on the sea of ordinary people participating in public events, the essays in the volume engage with this remarkable visual archive that captures on camera the streets of Bombay turning into sites of anti-colonial and nationalist assertion. This book will be of interest to scholars of gender and women’s studies, urban studies, screen and visual studies, consumer history, as well as the material history of colonial India.

Avrati Bhatnagar is historian of modern India and the British Empire with a Ph.D. in History from Duke University. Sumathi Ramaswamy is James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of History at Duke University. Preeti Chopra is Professor of Modern Architecture, Urban History and Visual Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Debashree Mukherjee is Associate Professor, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) and co-director of the Center for Comparative Media at Columbia University. Dinyar Patel is Associate Professor of History at the S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR) in Mumbai. Murali Ranganathan is an unaffiliated scholar who researches 19th-century South Asia, with a special focus on Mumbai and western India. Abigail McGowan is Professor of History at the University of Vermont, USA, where she teaches about South Asia with a particular focus on visual and material culture. Kama Maclean holds the Chair of History in the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and is Honorary Visiting Professor in the Department of Humanities and Languages at UNSW, Sydney.