Photographing Civil Disobedience Mapin Publishing
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Photographing Civil Disobedience

Bombay 1930–1931
Edited by Avrati Bhatnagar and Sumathi Ramaswamy
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.

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Photographing Civil Disobedience: Bombay, 1930–31 brings together an interdisciplinary conversation around a rare collection of documentary photographs compiled in a historical album titled Collections of Photographs of Old Congress Party—K.L. Nursey, 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 anticolonial protests, processions, and propaganda. The essays in the volume engage with this remarkable visual archive to analyze and make visible the varied historical processes that animated and informed disobedient action and nationalist politics in colonial Bombay in the 1930s—from the leading role played by the desh sevikas, members of a nationalist women’s organization, to the violent crackdown of police lathis on non-violent demonstrators.

Photographing Civil Disobedience shows that anticolonial action in the city was deeply embedded in its urbanized social, cultural, and economic milieu, and dictated by the politics of gender. Moving the lens of analysis away from prominent leaders of the movement, the essays focus on the sea of ordinary people participating in public events and turning the streets of Bombay into sites of anticolonial and nationalist assertion as captured on camera. This remarkable visual history of radical collective disobedience, resistance and revolution centered on the power of the photograph 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.

Published in association with The Alkazi Collection of Photography, New Delhi

Exhibition: ‘Disobedient Subjects: 
Bombay, 1930-1931’
at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj
Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai,
from 12 Oct. 2025 to 14 Apr. 2026

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 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 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. Kama Maclean holds the Chair of History in the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.

Acknowledgements and Dedication

Preface
Rahaab Allana

Introduction: Words of Light in Disobedient Bombay Avrati Bhatnagar and Sumathi Ramaswamy

The Stages of a Disobedient Bombay
Preeti Chopra

Visualizing the Urban Crowd: Political Spectatorship in the Age of Cinema
Debashree Mukherjee

From Profits and Patriotism to Gandhian Austerity: Transformations in Bombay’s Swadeshi Landscape
Dinyar Patel

Salt of the City
Sumathi Ramaswamy

The Suburban Congresswoman
Murali Ranganathan

Boycotting Women: The Street Politics of Consumer Activism in Bombay, 1930–1931
Abigail McGowan

Patrolling the Streets of Disobedience in Bombay
Avrati Bhatnagar

“Noisy” Photographs: Listening to Images from the Civil Disobedience Movement in Bombay
Kama Maclean

For Further Reading
ISBN 9789394501959
Pages 264
Number of illustrations 150
Size 8.2 x 10.5” (208 x 267 mm)
Date of Publishing 15/10/2025
Language(s) English
Co-publisher(s) Mapin Publishing
Rights Available World rights

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