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.