A visual history of the people of Mumbai in the Civil Disobedience Movement

How and when you came across the collection of documentary photographs, and what was it about it that piqued your interest?

This book is very much a collaborative effort between two scholars who also happen to be mentor-mentee! The album first came to the attention of Sumathi Ramaswamy when she was in the middle of a major project on Gandhi and visual culture, specifically exploring the manner in which the artists of India helped to create the iconic image we now have of him as the Mahatma. In the course of the project, she became interested in the place of the camera and photography in the visual regime around Gandhi. The album piqued her interest because although it includes photographs of Gandhi—in fact, the album is bookended by these—the bulk of the 245 images do not show much of his presence.

We associate the Civil Disobedience Movement quintessentially with him, but the album appears to be making a different argument: that the people of Bombay made the movement that in turn made Gandhi globally famous. In fact, it exemplifies what one of the contributors to our edited collection, Dinyar Patel, calls “people power," and what we might also call “people presence"... . We see the album, therefore, as “interrupting" the vast mythology that has sprung up around Gandhi as the man who led India to freedom, opening up the opportunity for us to explore all the other players, men and women, who too played their part.

How did the collaboration come about?

On Sumathi’s recommendation, Avrati Bhatnagar visited the Alkazi Foundation’s office in New Delhi to look at this collection of photographs. She was struck by how the Nursey album put on display such rare visuals of a much-known historical event such as the Civil Disobedience Movement, bringing into view details she had not seen in the existing scholarship. This fascinating paradox stayed with her for a few years till the opportunity to engage and unravel its offerings presented itself in the form of a critical turn of events.

We started working on the album jointly in the summer of 2020 at the height of the covid-19 pandemic. While we could not travel to physical archives anywhere, especially in India, and were confined to our homes and desks in the United States, we found in the digitized version of this album a means to keep our spirits alive—scholarly and otherwise—in the face of global upheaval and ensuing uncertainties. Our project was first conceived as a digital exhibit, which over time has materialized into the exhibit that will be launched at the CSMVS with the scholarly volume to accompany it. An abbreviated version of the show—for a US audience, especially an American campus audience—is scheduled to open at our university (Duke) at the end of the month.

There are many strands in the book, which allow a reader to juxtapose its events against contemporary times. Take, for instance, the role of the everyday person on the street in raising a voice; while also breaking free of the centrality of political and social leaders in a protest…

Yes, you are right. As we note above, this is one of the key reasons we got interested in this album: it makes such a strong visual case for taking stock of the power of people, especially the people of Bombay, to bring about change and speak up to perceived injustices. In fact, it would not be incorrect to say that “the crowd" and “the populace" are the protagonists of the album to whom the camera is drawn. Not everyone in the crowd of course is protesting or engaging in activities connected with the Movement—we also get fascinating glimpses of bystanders on the street gawking at women marching, flag or placard in hand; if you look closely at the balconies or street windows, you see faces peering out. You get a real feel from the album for the energy and flows of urban life even as the city is caught up in the throes of the movement. That the photographer is able to capture such details also suggests a certain degree of familiarity with the city and knowledge of its streets and scenes of actions.

At the same time, the album does include photos of the famous men and women who we associate with the Congress Party at the national level—Gandhi, of course, but also the Nehrus (father and son), Subhas Chandra Bose, etc—and also at the level of the city—for eg., K.F. Nariman, and Lilavati Munshi. There is also a luminous photo of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, with which our own edited volume comes to a close.

What was the role of women in the Civil Disobedience Movement?

The Movement marks a historical moment when women stepped out of their households in unprecedented numbers to participate in a mass nationalist movement. This was a major turning point in the women’s history of India and the Nursey album is a unique visual testament to this development. A large number of photographs within this rare collection make the women of Bombay—some famous, but many unknown—so visible in leading protests, marching on the streets while promoting the message to boycott British goods and foreign cloth, and of course, making illicit salt.

For Avrati, her longstanding interest in the gender history of colonial India, especially in the decades leading up to independence, was piqued when she saw these photographs and found repeated mentions of the Desh Sevika Sangh, also referred to as the DSS, in the album. It was indeed a revelation to see how this little known organization appeared as one of the central protagonists in this visual narrative! The first look at the album thus posed a key question to her—who were these sevikas? This prompted the following question—how did the members of this organization come to visibly take over the streets of Mumbai during the Civil Disobedience Movement, and to what consequences for the political history, and importantly, women’s history of the city?

Historians have long credited Gandhi for mobilizing the women of India to join the anticolonial struggle in the 1920s and the 1930s, and the DSS, as it turned out, was organized in response to this call. The album of course enables us to visualize this argument. At the same time, the images highlight how these so-called followers of the Mahatma often acted of their own accord as agents of historical change and as “disobedient" subjects in their own right, an entire research topic in itself which Avrati is exploring in her ongoing book project titled, “Disobedient Women in a Consumer City".

What does this archive also tell us about the style of documentary photography at the time?

What’s fascinating about this archive is how it reveals a moment when documentary photography in India was still finding its visual language. Photographers carried the formal, carefully composed style of the studio into the public sphere, into streets, markets, and political gatherings, so even images meant to record “facts" were aesthetically shaped and intentional. While photography was a medium that was quick to gain popularity in the region since its invention—partly because of monumental ways in which it was mobilized by the colonial state machinery, but also because of the affinity towards the visual form that had long informed the culture/s in the South Asian subcontinent—documentary and street photography was a newly emergent genre that coincided with the spread of mass nationalist movements in India. So, when the camera became lighter, cheaper and more mobile, and photographers left their studio and went into the streets, they found an equally compelling subject in the anticolonial rallies, public demonstrations, and the ensuing police oppression of said rallies and demonstrations.

Could you elaborate on this through the image-making process?

The photographs of the Nursey album document this tension on the streets with an aesthetic precision, engendering a visual lexicon and framing techniques that are both new but also reminiscent of studio practices. The photographs are often organized along diagonal lines, where a clear visual argument is being made by placing khadi-clad individuals representing the nationalist cause and those in police uniforms embodying colonial authority on opposite sides. There is also the question of infrastructure that made documentary photography possible at the time: makeshift bamboo stands, for instance, that allowed the photographer—camera in hand—to gain height and loom over crowds gathered at sites like Chowpatty or the Azad Maidan. Equally important was the photographer’s access to information and mobility: being in the right place at the right time often depended on informal networks of communication, from tips picked up in local newspapers to contacts within the Congress party or even the police. Together, these formal and improvised infrastructures may have played a critical role in shaping what could be documented and how.

The show is on view at the CSMVS, Mumbai, till 31 March 2016, 10.15 am to 6 pm daily. The book is available on Mapin website and leading bookstores.