Imageine: Portraits of defiance

From the leading role played by the desh sevikas — members of a nationalist women’s organisation — to the violent crackdown of police lathis on non-violent demonstrators, a remarkable visual archive shines a spotlight on the extraordinary history of the Civil Disobedience Movement in Bombay.

Housed at the Alkazi Archives, 245 of these black-and-white images from the vintage album ‘Collections of Photographs of Old Congress Party (1930-31)’, have now been compiled in a book, ‘Photographing Civil Disobedience: Bombay 1930-1931’. Edited by Avrati Bhatnagar and Sumathi Ramaswamy, the volume, accompanied by a host of enlightening essays, portrays the city’s cosmopolitan streets coming alive with anti-colonial protests, processions and propaganda.

The images reveal that anti-colonial action in the city was deeply embedded in its urban social, cultural and economic milieu, and was shaped by the politics of gender, with women leaders at the forefront and ordinary women attending meetings and picketing to protest the government’s repressive policies.

Interestingly, the archive is informally known as the ‘Nursey album’, deriving from the name KL Nursey stamped on the spine of the album. As Rahaab Allana, curator at the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, notes in the preface, little is known about Nursey or what drove him to photograph or collect this remarkable visual history of radical collective disobedience, resistance and revolution centred on the power of the image.

The book has been published by Mapin in association with The Alkazi Collection of Photography, New Delhi. It complements the exhibition ‘Disobedient Subjects: Bombay, 1930-1931’, which is on view at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai, until April 14.