Embedded Files
The Bombay Chronicle, March 11, 1930.
Courtesy: Asiatic Society of Mumbai
The seaside hamlet of Dandi is indelibly associated in Indian national mythology with Gandhi and his campaign against the colonial monopoly on salt production. It was Bombay, however, which transformed the Mahatma’s singular act into a mass civil disobedience movement. Correspondingly, salt, that most mundane of minerals, catalyzed the transformation of British India’s premier site of colonial commerce and finance into a city of disobedience that nearly brought the mighty global empire to a standstill. Bombay’s campaign—formally launched at dawn on April 7, 1930, the day after Gandhi picked up his lump of salt on the Dandi seashore—drew to the city nationalist leaders of the stature of Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, not to mention the Mahatma himself, to partake of its enthusiasm for breaking the salt laws.
The photographs of the Nursey album, however, track the activities of the ordinary men, women, and children who took to the streets in swelling numbers, and who with great energy made their way to the sea to enact their numerous “salt dramas.” As the zeal for making illicit salt spread in the weeks and months after April 7, numerous neighborhoods, many critical to the exercise of colonial power and life, were transformed into hot spots of disobedient activity, including the seashore at Mahalakshmi and Chowpatty in the city proper, and Juhu and Vile Parle with their prosperous Gujarati and Marwari abodes in the northern suburb.
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