Disobedient Subjects: Bombay 1930-31

About This Project

Disobedient Subjects takes you on a visual journey around Bombay, today’s Mumbai, so that you too can bear witness, almost a century later, to the unfolding of the Civil Disobedience Movement against colonial rule in British India’s most important commercial city, and its financial capital. Soon after Mohandas K. Gandhi broke the infamous salt laws on the Dandi seashore in Gujarat at the crack of dawn on 6 April 1930, he called upon his fellow citizens across India to join him to protest the longstanding British monopoly on the production, distribution, and sale of this most essential of life-sustaining commodities. Among the first to heed his call were the “disobedient” men and women (and some children) of Bombay who took to the streets in large numbers in parades, protests, and processions, and of course, to illicit salt-making along the seashore. 

The Alkazi Collection of Photography’s album titled Collections of Photographs of Old Congress Party—K.L. Nursey documents the ebbs and flows of this revolutionary mass action. Its carefully preserved 245 photographs allow us to get a feel for the energy and enthusiasm of disobedience from early April 1930, with the commencement of the so-called Salt Satyagraha in the city, to 29 August 1931, when Gandhi set sail to attend the Second Round Table Conference in London as the sole representative of the Indian National Congress, the party leading the charge against British colonial rule. Powered by the force of the historical photograph, the album’s folios bring alive the power of the dissenting multitude: the anonymous patriotic residents of the city joined in solidarity with Congress Party volunteers and well-known nationalist leaders to ensure Bombay’s remarkable transformation into a city of disobedience. 

“We often ask too much or too little of the image,” declares a leading scholar of photography, Georges Didi-Huberman.  Inspired by this challenge, Disobedient Subjects brings into focus new perspectives on a historic moment and movement from India’s past as it takes you back to the colonial streets of Bombay with the help of the camera and makes you wonder if we ask too much of these photographs, or too little.