Podcast: Women lead the charge in a mysterious photo album of the Civil Disobedience movement

About 20 years ago, someone at Mumbai’s Philips Antiques learned that a unique album of photographs was going up for auction in London. He quickly contacted the theatre director Ebrahim Alkazi, who purchased the album for the Delhi-based Alkazi Collection of Photography. Although small and unassuming, the album, known as the Nursey album, has now helped a group of scholars tell some remarkable new stories about one of modern India’s most decisive turning points: the Civil Disobedience Movement, led by Mahatma Gandhi in 1930-’31.

Along the spine of the album runs a rather vague title, “Collection of Photographs of Old Congress Party – KL Nursey”. While the identity of KL Nursey remains a mystery, the 245 black-and-white photographs inside the album show the city of Bombay convulsed by nationalist protest and the mass manufacture of contraband salt.

Working with the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts and its curator, Rahaab Allana, two historians at Duke University, Avrati Bhatnagar and Sumathi Ramaswamy, have published a book and organised two museum exhibitions on the photographs. They now join Past Imperfect to discuss their work and how photography can reveal very different histories of a well-documented event.

Photographing Civil Disobedience: Bombay 1930-1931 (published by Mapin) features 150 photographs and essays by historians which unpack the stories captured on film nearly a century ago (full disclosure: I am one of the contributors to this volume). Once they first encountered the album, Bhatnagar and Ramaswamy were struck by its historical importance. Photography has a long and storied history in India, but here was something beyond studio portraits and staged pictures. The Nursey album’s pictures were live, raw, and pulsating with activity. Swarms of khadi-clad nationalists take over Bombay’s streets and several of its landmarks. Protesters clash with police officers and react to blows from bamboo lathis.

Above all, the photographs demonstrate how women participated, led, and even dominated street activity during the Civil Disobedience Movement. Historians have long recognised the Civil Disobedience Movement as a watershed moment for female political participation, but the Nursey album reveals, like never before, how women wielded power and stood up to colonial authority.

Who were these women? Some of them are easily recognisable. Sarojini Naidu, raising her fist, addresses a crowd of volunteers in crisp white Gandhi topis. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay poses for the camera while hundreds of protesters are seated behind her.

But the Nursey album reveals thousands of ordinary female volunteers whose identities have been lost to time. Many of these women stare defiantly into the camera, conscious of being photographed and wanting their actions to be documented for posterity. A number of women bring their daughters into the frame, providing their very early induction into nationalist politics.

This mass female participation is all the more notable because, when Gandhi began his Salt March in March 1930, he urged women not to get involved in confrontational protests and salt-making activity. A number of female Indian National Congress leaders, like Chattopadhyay, convinced Gandhi to relax this prohibition. But the women of Bombay went several steps further by directing nationalist activity into new channels, on a hitherto unimaginable scale.

As Bhatnagar and Ramaswamy point out, many of the photographs show female protesters testing the limits of non-violence by defensively reacting to police activity. A group of desh sevikas, members of a Congress-aligned volunteer group, wrestle with a pith-helmeted British police officer who is trying to confiscate their national flag.

Violence, indeed, pulsates through the album’s photographs. Captured in film, perhaps for the first time, was visual evidence of what happened when throngs of urban protesters confronted phalanxes of policemen and soldiers. Bhatnagar and Ramaswamy speak about how this proves that the British Raj was a “lathi raj”, a regime propped up by brutal disciplinary action. Outside of the Bombay High Court, one Indian police officer raises a lathi, about to bring it down on a protester lying on the street. A jackbooted British superior officer stands in front, preventing the protester from moving. These photographs are populated not just by nationalists and colonial forces, but also by medics, ambulance drivers, nurses and thousands of curious onlookers.

Lastly, Bhatnagar and Ramaswamy speak about what the Nursey album tells us about the city of Bombay. In the 1930s, Bombay was very much a masculine space: male residents greatly outnumbered female ones and social conventions relegated most women far away from the public gaze. This male-dominated world came crashing down with the Civil Disobedience Movement. In several pictures, female protesters quite literally push men to the very edges of streets. In others, they commandeer the entrances to prominent landmarks, like the Town Hall and Bombay Municipal Corporation building.

Here is a city witnessing a revolutionary transfer of power. Colonial landmarks like Victoria Terminus and Fitzgerald Fountain are taken over by Congress volunteers, while other protesters block access to tony European department stores such as Whiteaway Laidlaw. Importantly, the loci of political activity shifts north from Fort, embracing places such as Bandra.

Numerous pictures feature nationalists’ “raids” on the salt pans in Wadala, with policemen on horses trailing behind. Salt became a symbol of political power in Bombay. “The resulting salt was not particularly high quality, but it did not matter,” Ramaswamy comments. “It was the fact that the illicit product was proudly made, and that a camera witnesses the act that was important.”

Aside from being republished in Photographing Civil Disobedience, these pictures are now on display at special exhibits in the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in Mumbai and Duke University – exhibits timed with the hundredth birth centenary of the man who rescued them from obscurity, Ebrahim Alkazi. They provide a stirring visual testament to how a handful of contraband salt produced by Gandhi at Dandi Beach triggered incredible change in India’s most cosmopolitan city.

“Disobedient Subjects” runs at the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai through March 31 and at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University through January 19.

Dinyar Patel is an associate professor of history at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai. His award-winning biography of Dadabhai Naoroji, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, was published by Harvard University Press in May 2020.

Past Imperfect is sponsored and produced by the Centre for Wisdom and Leadership at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research.