Portraits of Disobedience

A vast majority of the photographs in the Nursey album focus on the milling crowds on the disobedient streets of Bombay, the camera’s distance obscuring faces and even bodies, although it is hard to miss the fact that many are clad in white, the color of Gandhian nationalism.  Yet the album also includes images of prominent nationalist leaders—men and women—who look directly at the camera, their eyes engaging with its eye. The result is a series of remarkable portraits of the Who’s Who of the Indian national movement, their presence in these photographs reminding us of the importance of this city in the patriotic circuit of the period.  An over-riding sense from these photographs is that these big men and women did not hesitate to mingle with the common people as they took to the streets, greeted their followers, and spoke to vast audiences gathered on Azad Maidan and elsewhere. 

Of course, the most famous of the visitors to the city in this heady period was the Man of the Hour, Mohandas K. Gandhi, who arrived late but made quite an impression on the unknown photographer(s) who have captured several images of the Mahatma at work.  Gandhi was unable to visit the city before January 1931 on account of being jailed six months earlier on 5 May 1930, on the charge of “disturbing the peace.” On the very night of his release on 26 January 1931 from Yeravda Central Prison in Poona (now Pune), he headed for Bombay. Over the course of the next six months, he was in and out of the city, addressing mammoth crowds, speaking to smaller groups of volunteers, and at long last, disembarking on the evening of 29 August for London on the S.S. Rajputana, the camera recording his frail body standing amidst a throng of his followers on the ship.  Even when he himself was not physically present, his portrait was carried on Bombay’s streets by the marchers, as photographs in the album testify.  Not least, as we know from contemporary records—but which the camera of course cannot capture—his presence was also sonically manifest in the pervasive cry of “Mahatma Gandhi ki Jai,” “Long Live Mahatma Gandhi,” a rallying slogan of disobedience.