Photographing Civil Disobedience
Bombay 1930–1931Shipping will start on 15 Oct. 2025
- Category: All Books, MAPIN20, Photography, Pre Order
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.
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 |